The sky at night

March 9, 2012

TURN right off the main north road just out of El Rocio and you’re on a camino agricolo, driving through acres of strawberry plants in polytunnels, interspersed with orange groves.

More right turns at Pilas and Aznalcazar, and it’s a different world. You’re into 11km of lovely wooded countryside, the road lined with tall stone pines, with plenty of shady picnic spots, opening up into an area of sandy heathland that reminded me of the New Forest, only without the animals.

The only drawback was the presence of rumble strips and speed bumps every few hundred yards, which slowed our progress towards the Isla Mayor marshes so much that we ran short of time there with the evening closing in.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s been a very dry winter here, and it’s going to cause problems for wildlife – as our Donana tour driver put it, only the strongest will survive.

There was precious little water in the marshes, and the rice paddies at this time of year are just vast tracts of parched, cracked earth. We did, however, manage to see a great white egret and – a life tick for a very happy David – a night heron, as well as spoonbill and hen harrier.

We drove back marvelling at one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. The whole horizon was awash with deep reds, pinks, golds and yellows. My camera couldn’t do it justice.

We stopped to photograph a line of trees silhouetted against this amazing sky and found ourselves alongside a field of goats, munching peacefully, with no other sound to be heard but the bells tinkling round their necks and the screech of an owl.

As we arrived back at the camp site a full moon like a Seville orange was rising.

My hero

March 8, 2012

NOT even my best friends would call me tidy. Living in one 20ft by 7ft6in space for six weeks requires a formidable degree of organisation, which I’m struggling to acquire despite David having carefully created storage spaces for everything.

Jars, utensils, clothing, books – all must be returned to their allotted place after use EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Otherwise the process of making a simple meal can leave the whole place in chaos. There just aren’t enough surfaces to leave things lying around. And I’m constantly losing stuff – though that may have more to do with my short-term memory, which is sadly lacking.

Yesterday we actually washed our very dusty vehicle, tidied up, cleaned the bathroom etc and hung the dog’s bedding out to air. Within hours Glen, still damp from a walk on the beach, had sprinkled a layer of sand on the floor and his blanket, the bathroom was jammed with carrier bags full of groceries from a trip to the big Carrefour in Huelva, and the long bench seat was occupied by an assortment of books, binoculars, a backpack, my handbag, a beanbag and a pile of clean washing.

The poor dog is constantly being ordered between ‘bed’, ‘front’ – meaning the floor alongside the driver’s seat – and ‘chair’ as we try to work round him. We left him outside off his tether briefly yesterday and he shot off across the site in pursuit of a cat, so we won’t make that mistake again.

First thing this morning saw me buried under a pile of bedclothes while David was rolling about on the mattress clutching a can of WD40 and a bag of clothes pegs. You may well ask … but nothing exciting, I’m afraid.

I was finding it impossible to lift the bed back up to the ceiling in the mornings. David’s investigations - which involved pegging back the surrounding curtain - revealed that the mechanism needed oiling, so while he sorted that out I did some more laundry.  Now it works like a dream, and David has been renamed Bricoman, after the French DIY chain.

Miracles are everywhere

March 6, 2012 

BOUNCING across the dunes in a great big Mercedes Unimog 4x4 bus has to be one of the most fun things we’ve done on this trip.

We’d booked a tour of the Coto Donana national park - the only way visitors are allowed to see most of it. Because the marismas are unseasonably dry this year – with water levels closer to the norm for July or August - we didn’t see as many birds as we’d hoped, but it was a fascinating four hours.

Highlights included: a pair of Spanish imperial eagles sitting in a tree; several wild boar, including babies; fallow and red deer, one with highly impressive antlers; a couple of Audouin’s gulls and Kentish plover on the beach; and lots of very busy little sanderling running about on the shoreline as we drove 30km back along the sand into the sunset.

We were the only Brits on board, but our lovely Spanish driver, a highly knowledgeable birdwatcher, translated everything for us in excellent English and told us all about the involvement of British naturalists in the creation of the national park and how it was linked to the founding of the World Wildlife Fund.

We’re still staying at El Rocio, and on the way back from the lakeside bird observatory this morning I popped in to the church to see the statue of the Virgin, which is reputed to work miracle cures and is paraded through the streets in front of a million-strong crowd of pilgrims at Pentecost.

What a place of contrasts this is – teeming at the weekend for a mini-fiesta, now with barely a soul in sight. In the small supermarket, I am very definitely the only foreigner and I’m painfully aware of the poverty of my Spanish vocabulary.

As we plod back to our campsite, hot, dusty and laden with groceries, a lone rider is practising exquisite dressage moves on the rough ground where the pilgrims camp. It’s littered with plastic and broken glass. I worry about the dog’s paws as he scampers after a stick. How much more would I worry if I owned a magnificent horse like that?

Alarms and excursions

March 5, 2012

THE fire alarm in the Hymer is becoming a real pest. The damn thing is so super-efficient that it goes off every time we cook, or boil a kettle, so we have to keep disconnecting it.

Yesterday evening I opened the door in a fury to David, who was barbecuing outside in the dark, and hissed: “If that f***ing alarm goes off one more time I’m going to throw it out.” Only to discover that a neighbouring camper – a new acquaintance – was standing there, having dropped by to arrange some mutual dog-sitting.

The alarm got its own back by going off in the early hours for no reason at all and waking us both up in a fright.

Motorhoming is a world where you make fleeting friendships and instant judgements about who you can trust. We’ve agreed to leave Glen with the neighbours tomorrow while we take a guided 4x4 tour of the Donana national park – a birdwatcher’s heaven - and to look after their two dogs this afternoon while they do the same.

We’re at El Rocio – a town like the set of a cowboy film, with streets of sand and hitching rails for horses outside every house - right down in southern Spain now. We’re staying on quite a busy site, and we’ve met a lot more Brits. Some spend most of the year in their vans, ‘wild camping’ wherever the fancy takes them, with just the odd overnight stop in a site to catch up on laundry. One lovely couple we chatted to don’t even have a home in England any more, but stay with their grown-up children when they go back.

It’s a different world, co-existing with our everyday one. And the local Spaniards, who’ve been busy enjoying themselves with a religious festival involving sporadic gunfire, are in another world again. We’d have liked to go and join the watching crowds, but the noise terrified Glen and we could neither take him nor leave him.

However, when things quietened down, we did drive down to the lagoon alongside the village, where we parked our folding chairs and sat in the late afternoon sunshine watching hundreds of birds, including flamingos, glossy ibis, spoonbills, avocet and a young Spanish imperial eagle. Lovely.