We parked the car outside of town (the photo with the paved street), figuring one "streets so narrow we crashed our car into the house" story was enough for today. We then ducked through the arch at the end of the road, and climbed up a series of stairs and steep narrow alleys.

67. Arcos de la Frontera

We then drove for many hours, missing several of my intended destinations until we drove into the unmissable Arcos de la Frontera. This sizeable town is built on a huge rocky outcrop disrupting the monotony of flat farmland surrounding it. Its defensive positioning atop a rock explains both the fact that it has survived through centuries of war, and that we managed to find it despite our poor navigation.

66. Ronda la Vieja

Our next visit, to the original Ronda, is a good lesson in civic planning. If you locate your town on a nice rolling plain instead of a giant rock, it ends up in little piles of rubble. Actually this is all that's left of the Roman settlement 2,000 years ago. It's mostly a large empty field, filled with cow shit and the occasional pile of rubble, with a couple of vicious dogs wandering about. But at the end of the field, there is a fairly well-preserved amphitheatre. Not worth making a detour for, but if you're driving by and your car breaks down in front of it, it's not a bad place to wait until the tow truck arrives.

Of course, not all the residents are cavedwellers, and the town has lined the mountain with typical whitewashed houses. I may be reading too much into this, but they don't seem particularly religious, since they located their church in about as remote a place as possible. After walking around the town for a bit, we got back in our slightly damaged car and motored to our next destination.

The two sides of town are connected by the Puente Nuevo, which as Mom knows is the New Bridge. It's called the New Bridge because the first bridge to cross this gorge collapsed the day it was finished. The bridge empties into the more modern town square, pictured here. Below the bridge, dangling from the cliff face, is a very nice restaurant where we had a three hour lunch.

64. Ronda

On Tuesday, we took a group trip to Ronda, the only White Town that qualifies as a city. The trip was a very scenic, but very slow, meandering through the mountains, made even slower because we had to keep stopping for Tracey's bathroom breaks. As you can see, it is indeed white, and basically looks like Mijas. It even has a grown up version of Mijas' bullring. But as you'll see, it's spectacular setting makes it worth the long trip.

As I said earlier, the town is swamped with daytrippers, but when the tour buses leave, it's like a quaint Spanish town. But with one important distinction, which is that 90% of the people living here are English. On our first day we went to a local "tapas" bar, and we were so excited about our first Spanish meal. But the tapas were things like baked potato wedges and fish fingers, with roast beef and spaghetti as more substantial choices. The English owners were nice and chatty, and when we were leaving, Somchai told them that they spoke English very well, surprising the rest of us that Somchai could have mistaken this thoroughly English pub for a local Spanish restaurant.

As you can see, it makes a pretty dramatic visual statement in white, just like a Cubist painting. One weird thing about staying in Mijas is that Spain was the first European country I had visited, with my high school Spanish class. We went for a week, and visited Madrid, Granada and...Mijas! We really just went to Mijas because we had a half day to kill along the way, and the train stopped close to the town. But it seems weird that of the thousands of towns to see in Spain, I'd be in Mijas twice.

The Costa del Sol is an unremarkable stretch of the Mediterannean marred by an uninterrupted series of cement tower blocks, and bears no connection with the rest of Spain. Just behind the coast, the mountains are dotted with the famous Pueblos Blancos, or White Towns, as Sra. Renaud knows. (My mom is studying Spanish! Ay caramba!) As per the last post, Mijas is the town closest to the coast and hence the one inundated with tourists, but it's still a very pretty place. Weirdly as you've no doubt noticed, Somchai took this one opportunity to explore his artistic side with a sepia toned film. I'm all for the arts, but it seems counterintuitive that in a town famed for its whiteness you'd beige the whole place up, but here you are, Mijas the Pueblo Marron. Mom?

We unpacked and got drunk by the pool, which was our daily routine during the week. The pool was freezing, though, as were the showers. We figured out about halfway into the trip that we had to turn on the hot water system first, and afterwards showering and swimming were much more pleasant. We then went for a walk around our little town. Mijas is smack dab in the middle of the Costa del Sol, which has a justifiably nasty reputation. But Mijas is up in the mountains as opposed to on the massively overdeveloped coast. During the day, as you can see, it's totally swamped by daytrippers from the coastal horror, as it's the most accessible town away from the coast. So everyone comes to see the real Andalucia, but of course in doing so it just becomes an extension of where they're escaping from. But outside of the peak hours it's actually a cute town, so let's explore.

62. Mijas

In the event, the logistics went pretty well. Somchai and I landed at the Malaga airport, which is surprisingly hellish. I had forgotten that Malaga is the gateway to the Costa del Sol cheap package tours from England, so the airport was heaving with tourists and pretty chaotic. The only real hitch was that we were supposed to meet our friends at the car rental place, but it turned out our car rental firm didn't have an airport office so we had no meeting place. But fortunately after wandering around the place for an hour we gave up and went to the bar, where of course our friends had done the same thing, so we eventually met up, got the car and drove to Mijas without a hitch. How we managed to get five people and all our luggage into a tiny lime green Fiat Hatchback is beyond me, though. The villa was nice, a modern house in the outskirts of town, with a nice pool and views out to the surrounding mountains. Could have used a bit more investment in the furnishings but overall a nice place to hang out for the week.

Andalucia, Spain May '01

We spent a week with some good friends at a rented villa in Mijas, in the Costa del Sol in southernmost Spain. I started my journal entries pessimistically because the trip started off with some complicated logistics. I was in London on business for a week, and flew to Paris on Friday night, staying at the airport Hyatt, which was surprisingly nice for an airport hotel. The plan was that I would meet Somchai in the Paris airport Saturday morning, then we'd both fly down to the Malaga airport, where supposedly Joe and Amy would meet us and we'd all drive to the house in Mijas, hopefully armed with some good directions. Catherine, Trish and Tracey would then find their own way to the house later that day.