Spanish interludes

In addition to a month in Ugijar, as a student I made two other visits to southern Spain. These three trips abroad were my first contact with the Mediterranean world and I was enchanted. I was enchanted despite some of the things that happened on these trips, for memory tends to be selective. It filters out suffering, and it puts other experiences into different categories--the romantic, the absurd, the tedious--so that they can be remembered in a manner that is a good deal more tidy than the ways in which they happened.
We set off from Gatwick Airport, London a week before Christmas, the nadir of the year for the package holiday firms, which is why our trip to Malaga was cheap enough for students to be able to afford it. Right from the airport to the hotel the Costa del Sol had a gimcrack, unfinished air to it. Buildings had been flung up, hastily plastered over, and a coat of whitewash slapped on. And Spanish plaster smelt of marzipan--I wonder why? It did not seem to augur well for structural integrity. Everything felt so different to the classic idea of the Mediterranean as a place of age-old charm, where things survived virtually unchanged for millennia. But the sun was shining, and the low, watery skies of London were far away. The balcony of my hotel room gave a panoramic view of a long strip of sea, an intense aquamarine blue, its very horizontality emphasised by the jagged profile of the concrete jungle that had sprouted up along the shore--hotels, residences, bars, viaducts.
Having inhaled a lung-full of salty ozone and traffic fumes, I went back into my room to have a shower. For some reason I left the towels in the bedroom. Once I had finished showering I blundering out of the bathroom with soap in my eyes and water dripping from my naked, 20-year-old body, and my outstretched hands encountered flesh--it was the maid, who had come in to make the bed. She was a plump, rosy-cheeked maiden of about sixteen years. She took one look, went a darn sight more rosy in the cheeks, muttered something quite Baroque in Spanish about the Madonna and a variety of Saints, and fled. I took it in my stride (as it were), reflecting that after all I hadn't invited her in or known of her presence.
Travel is as much about personalities as it is about places. In some accounts it is one's own personality that has to be dealt with, on others it is that of the people one travels with or meets. We were 30 students and we had two professors with us. John Thornes was a taciturn Yorkshireman, with a spitting, biting turn of phrase and a brilliant scientific mind. Nevertheless, he had something of the baby about him: in fact, his wife had sewn his mittens to a long piece of tape that she passed through the arms of his jacket so that when he took them off he would not lose them. Denis Brunsden, who later became the President of the World Association of Geomorphologists, was a flamboyant son of Devonshire, with the accent to match. He was decidedly vain and cultivated an academic demeanour that was entirely fake and was larded with earnest mock-sincerity. It was, however, amusing, especially at dinner table when he started reminiscing--providing one didn't take him too seriously.
Our first encounter with these two senior academics occurred when we attended an introductory field course in the Surrey hills, and they pushed us into a river "to find out what it was made of". The things that one could do with students in those days! Well, this time they took us to the coast at a place called Rincon de la Victoria. The beach was covered in a mysterious white deposit. Denis lined us up in front of him facing the distant mountains of the Alpujarras, while he stood gazing thoughtfully out to sea and lectured us on the origin of this deposit. Was it a sign of climatic change? What had made it so white? Could there have been chemical reactions associated with the post-Pleistocene cooling and warming phases? What he failed to notice was that behind his shoulders there was a very large cement works, which was belching out white fumes. In fact, everything was covered with a white deposit, and if we had stood there much longer we would have turned white as well. The coach-driver strolled over, pointed at the ground and said "cemento!" with a broad grin.
On our first day of seeing the geological sights we stopped for lunch at a roadside cantina. We were young, wet behind the ears and we had never been in a situation in which for an absurdly small sum of money one could buy a litre of rough, red peasant wine. So we all did, and we all drank it. Rather than making us drunk, it made us extremely tired. Spontaneously, the whole party fell asleep. Eventually, we awoke from this post-prandial nap and dragged ourselves back to the coach with throbbing temples and dry mouths. John Thornes had something of the Puritan in him, and as we were driving across the playa he decided to wake us up and suddenly shouted out, in a special voice that he reserved for such occasions "I hope you're all looking at that Miocene stratigraphic in-fill over there!" Unfortunately, the effect of this stern reproof was immediately ruined. His wife had forced him to bring his small son along with him, and Christopher immediately piped up "I can see it Daddy!", which made everyone else laugh.
We were taken to El Torcal, a spectacular massif of eroded limestone, wreathed in mist and haunted by flocks of crows. On the way we again stopped at a roadside cantina, but this time to buy chocolate. This was a heaven-sent occasion for the proprietors of this establishment. They sold about 30 chocolate bars at wildly inflated prices, but it was not until we were back on the coach and far down the road that we realised that they were extremely ancient confections, riddled with maggots and hardened to marble by extremes of heat and cold.
Our final lunch-stop was interrupted by one of those thunderstorms that make the Mediterranean landscape so wild and mobile. Within minutes we found ourselves up to our knees in water laced with a rich helping of terrarossa, that cascaded and bubbled around our legs and turned the landscape into a frothing russet-coloured morass. Local orange groves were devastated by the violence of nature, with broken branches and masses of colourful fruit strewn across the muddy ground. There was nothing left to do but wade back to the hotel and enjoy a glass of sangria on the terrace, looking at the watery sky and the grey mass of the sea.
Despite the difficulties there were many things to remember about these visits to Spain: in particular, the Roman aqueduct at Nerja, three arrays of arches spanning a breathtaking V-shaped ravine with the azure line of the sea as a backdrop; women singing ancient melodies as they did the housework in the small Andalusian towns with their cobbled streets and whitewashed walls, evenings of dancing to flamenco music and drinking sangria and Fundador brandy.
On the way back after the first trip the pilot of our charter flight announced that we would be diverted because of fog. He said we might end up in Scotland if we had enough fuel to get there. In all my years of flying I have never met a pilot who was so pessimistic about his chances of getting home. It left quite an impression on me.