Sitting in front of palm trees, sunset over the beach, moon. Canadian guy playing his guitar. Other Canadian guy who helped get me back to normal life, talking last night about the ravages of our respective travels.

It was a shock to enter civilisation, especially the Costa del Sol. I read long ago that it is not as desireable a place to go as it used to be, due to massive construction of big and tacky houses all over the coast. It is quite ugly between Estepona and Malaga. English, Germans, and a mix of Europeans from everywhere else have invaded this area.

But Malaga city center and beach is heaven, at least in the winter. 23 degrees at 1 pm today.

Last night I collapsed into a wicker easy chair on the patio of the Melting Pot hostel. I couldn't handle talking to Peter, the Swede, and took only one look at Franco, the Torontonian and said Hola, and judged him to be a safe enough person to sit in the vicinity of without being bothered. To be quite honest, what I have just been through has been somewhat traumatising, for several reasons: Homayoun's character and criticism, the harshness of life there (made more difficult by his attitude of challenge to those who come "let's see if you have it in you, tonto city person!") and the remoteness.

I am somewhat turned off rural life, though this was an extreme. The other problem is that I continue thinking, possibly stronger than before, that it is ethically, as well as strategically one of very few wise choices as to how to live these days.

Be that as it may, I feel in the lap of luxury in this 10 bed mixed dorm, with clean sheets and some manner of blanket not mired in dust and sweat, soap in the washroom.

More news for today because I have to come down to the mill (which reeks of alcohol freshly distilled), and coger my portatil, which I left on in here. It's 8:00 but as usual seems like some late hour. We just got rescued by Rainier and his Spanish girlfriend Victoria. Ranier is a long time friend of Homayoun, tambien German, who has also lived here 20 some years. He visited today with Victoria, her brother Adolfo and a friend of Adolfo's, Mirian, who got lost with us.

We have been encerrada in this place far from everything for three weeks, we have not even salida de la propiedad, really. Delia was desperate to go to Genalguacil, and I wanted to get out today, being Saturday. So after a late lunch of expensive (if you had to buy them) wild mushrooms, wild boar again, potatoes and salad better than any 5 star restaurant guaranteed, no joking or exaggerating, we decided to walk to the pueblo. I told Delia that 10 km would take longer than 1.5 hours, and that starting at 4 pm we should take a linterna. She pooh-poohed my suggestion and so the three of us started off, luckily with Mirian's cellphone, as Delia's and mine have both broken (yes, we are both incommunicado with the outside world, rather much). We got lost on the way, as the road has a lot of turn offs (gravel and dirt road - not much of a road really) and had to turn back after stopping a guy to ask. A family of mother, son, and grandparents squeezed us in and took us all the way to the pueblo, upon which we all realised we could not have arrived before dark, and didn't know what we would do to get back. But we looked around anyways, and then started back on the road. The only thing I was really afraid of was the cold. Though Delia and Mirian were not very comfortable with walking in the middle of nowhere in the night. It is also a new moon. Luckily, though Mirian had no coverage (yes we really are in the middle of nowhere) she managed to get coverage for other parts and we could contact them here. Two men going out of the pueblo gave us a lift to one particular cross in the road where we started going down to the river, and took wrong turn, ended up having to climb all the way back up and so on it went.
The funniest was the two men telling us we would get lost for sure (which was totally obvious thinking about how many possible wrong turns were on the way (all dirt and gravel roads with few differences), and then asking us where exactly we were going. We had already told them "Alharia, Homayoun's place" because other people in the pueblo know him. These men didn't, and the only other way we had of describing it was, "over there in the mountains," with Delia waving her hand in the approximate direction. We hadn't even a clue as to how to describe which exact road.

Anyways, suffice it to say I have found a relatively wild part of Spain... (I suppose it goes without saying that there are no taxis or busses around here).

I don't know if I said, but Delia and me saw patches where wild boar dug. The group that came last night saw a big one.

Change of plans, going to Estepona with them tomorrow and going to take a bus to Malaga. A ver what happens next. I don't know. Going to meet Sachiko at least sometime early December.

Today collected a huge bucket full of Feijoyas. No se como deletrearlo. Some kind of fruit from South America supposedly.

We had a few rainy days on the weekend and Monday. We got on rain clothes (knocked the dirt and spiders out of old rubber boots) and crossed the valley to pick apples. Delia picked more higo chumbo (which Bijoyini says is prickly pear) and Siri (from Sweden) and her made mermelada out of it.

The boys are gone. It was us three girls until Wednesday and then Siri went too. There was a cold day, where I wore tights under my work pants and a skirt on top, lots of layers. But yesterday and today have been back to long sleeve shirt while working. We've picked more olives, picked madroñas (red fruit that sometimes ferments on the tree), sewed cushions covered in old Afghan woven cloth. Today we spent the first half of the morning hauling what looked like runny pig feed down to the mill where we put it into an alambique (still). A beautiful, huge old clay pot, inside the cauldron holder, fire underneath. Put a copper thingy on top with two spouts. We had to connect it up to some copper tubes going through a wall into an arched pool area. Connections were sealed with bread dough and an old rubber tired was put around the top for insulation. Hours later distilled alcohol is running out the tube that goes through the pool, into a pail below.

Pretty much every kind of fruit or jam that went bad has been put into two blue 45 gallon drums in his crazy scientist room behind the kitchen at the back of the courtyard. That's where we sacar-ed the mushy fermented stuff, into mas o menos clean pails and hauled them down here. Everything in this place is like something out of an ancient story. Homayoun himself, his way of doing things, the stuff he does, and the equipment he uses. He mentions sterilising things, but then on the outside of his bottle that's bubbling away with fermenting madronas by the fire, it is so covered with dust and grime that he can't see what level the ferment is at inside. Our jam that we made goes bad because we didn't put enough sugar in it and left it out on the table in bowls covered with plates. He tells us we are irresponsible, but pretty much everything around here is done in a kind of half-assed way, as far as cleanliness is concerned. People eat right out of the serving dish if it's something that is like a bowl of pomegranate seeds being passed around. Probably lick the jam spoon. Everybody talks about natural dirt not being dirty but then things go bad... hmm...

We still eat lunch outside. It's really quite warm here. Not warm enough to wash your hands under cold tap water in the morning and evening. I have chilblains. I am leaving tomorrow. Going to stay in a hostel in Ronda, and just put it on my credit card. Not sure where to go next. Am a bit exhausted from everything. I think of home lately, but am not sure whether that is the right decision for me.

Yesterday Diego was here with his mules. He brought us a mo-ca de caballo (horse fly - but not the same kind of horse flies we have), to prove what he'd told us: that they can take out slivers. You grab the horse fly by the body and put it over the sliver. It grabs out the sliver with its legs. I didn't have any slivers (amazingly) at that point, so the fly actually pulled out some hairs on my hand! He told us he once use a fly to get a sliver out from the inside of his lip. The slivers you get here are not nice ones like from wood or something. They are tiny, nearly invisible, break easily and cannot be dug out easily with a needle - I dug twice and ended up with only infection for a week. It is not nice working heavily with that. You end up getting slivers from all over the place.

Work has not been so hard the last few days. That is why I find myself with enough energy to go on the internet in the afternoon. Yesterday we cleaned up a gross outdoor kitchen area (Delia and me), and then did some planting of onions. This morning we prepared soil and then planted more onions, and then we whacked the seeds out of pomegranates. There is a very specific method for opening a pomegranate and getting the seeds out. By the way, you probably have never had a pomegranate this good unless you've had it somewhere other than Canada! We sat on a dirt path looking out over the valley doing this.

Last night Merlin made a bath in a bathtub outdoors, raised up on blocks on each end, with a fire underneath. After he finished, the two other guys took turns (in the same water). Homayoun encouraged us to all use it. I didn't think I would but each of the guys in turn raved about how amazing it was so I went for it, laying in a bathtub full of water, dirty in the first place, and after having three grubby guys already in it. It was amazing. Pitch dark, under a sky loaded with stars. So as not to burn your bum, there is a piece of cork you sit on. But when you lay your head back on the edge, the cork makes you float right up. Talk about amazing experience.

Things are not all paradise here. Hygiene is one of the biggest annoyances. I think I've done incredibly well, learning to wipe myself after doing number one, with my left hand, pour water over it (if there is any in the pitcher beside the dirty squat toilet) and then running to the washroom, a ways away to wash my left hand off with the grubby bar of soap floating in dirty water. For number two, Delia and me have so far refused to try the hand-water method, and have rationed our kleenexes to one a day until Delia stole a roll of toilet paper from the boys, who have been more bold about whining a bit until Homayoun relented and gave them some. I have also done very well using an oily, grimy sponge to wipe my dishes under cold water, and have tolerated grabbing a "clean" plate with beads of oil around the rim or greasy fingerprints at every meal. Sometimes I give up and just eat off it if it isn't that bad, other times I quickly wipe it a bit more vigorously with the oily sponge and then dry it on the grimy towel. When I first arrived, I did not think I should wipe oily hands on the dishtowels bit quickly noticed that they were filthy anyways, so now at least I wipe the oil off my hands after doing my dishes. Anyways, I've gotten mostly used to this procedure, and I think that is quite admirable and a very good concession to this lovely, "natural" way of life.

I also have tolerated very well not showering even after days of hard and sometimes dirty work, going for up to 3 days without washing my hair at times.

Homayoun eats the peels or rinds of practically everything. He gives people lectures about it if they are peeling something that need not, in his opinion, be peeled. This would include avocados, apparently. As much as I would love to gorge myself on them, for that reason I am somewhat happy they are not yet ripe.

Basically, Homayoun and the other boys and to some extent, Delia tambien, espouse the philosophy that if it is natural, you don't need to worry. In other words, if the dirt is soil, bugs, mold that comes from this natural place we are in, why bother worrying about it? If it is natural your body's immune system will deal with it. I have to say that while a small bit of this philosophy is a welcome relief to the dorkiness of some North American wrapped-in-plastic, antibacterial stupidity, it is a bit extreme for me. I have often made jam from strawberries that were starting to go soft or a bit bad, like my grandmother did. I get annoyed with people back home on facebook that feel the need to tell me that if the sausage is pork I have to put it in the fridge. Um... duh! Well first of all I am in Spain and it is cured, and Spanish people are not in the dark ages. And anyone outside the darkest part of Central Asia knows that raw pork needs to be in the fridge, for heaven's sake!

I have coexisted quite well with a shower full of dirt on the floor always, that doesn't drain that well, with dust covering the floor of my bedroom, with bed-"sheets" that are totally raunchy with dirt and probably sweat and body grime of previous users, because I have not yet been able/permitted by weather to launder them.

So it kind of gets my goat that people here see me as too clean. I know of people who refuse to pee in the bushes, or sleep in a tent. Who can't handle being without makeup or high heels.

Taking the seeds out of pomegranates this afternoon I felt that it was necessary to try to save parts that were contaminated by rotten stuff. Homayoun is not someone you take the initiative to do things your own way with. But at this point I am guessing as to the standard for things, because so many of his ideas of what is edible, or rather, clean enough to be edible is to put it politely, quite "new" to me. From my knowledge, eating mold is not very good for you and sometimes is the cause of serious illness, depending on the variety - peanuts, for example. Parasites are not all that desireable to ingest. From what I've read, they are even suspected by some as being at least partially responsible for cancer.

He harvests incredible mushrooms, the likes of which I've never seen. All his food is delicious - I can't complain. But I screamed once when he gave me a mushroom to cut up that had a maggot in it. I got a bit of a lecture about nature, so yesterday when he brought in several incredible mushrooms of a size and weight never witnessed by me before, and which appeared like storybook mushrooms with polkadots in them, I obediently cut them in appropriate slices, although they were swarming (literally) with tiny spiders, ants and one other kind of bug. No joking. There were three types of tiny bigs. The polka-dots were big spots that were either bug eaten or slightly bad. But they had dried and weren't all that rotten or whatever. So I sliced these without too much disgust, or maybe ignoring the disgust. But one mushroom was a bit slimy on top and going kind of bad. It wasn't bad enough for Homayoun to get rid of it. All of these went onto drying racks and were put atop the wood stove to dry them. He said if the drying didn't stop the rotting then they would be thrown away after. The dirt on some of the mushrooms is minerals - why brush it off.

When we cleaned the pool/jacuzzi without jets the other day, nobody wanted to bother with the huge and disgusting cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. I insisted. How can you put your arms on the side of the pool, lay back and enjoy looking through the skylights, with huge cobwebs hanging down over you. I was also not to touch the dead plants that hung off the rock walls...

Nobody has a problem eating off the same spoon or cup as the others, and for the most part I don't either but it isn't something I really do totally readily...

Anyways, I just needed to get this all off my back!!!! It is still incredible here and the people are awesome in every other way. Homayoun is mostly awesome but I believe I will have to leave soon because he struggles with a bit of a temper and impatience which I am not dealing well with. We'll see...

I am sitting here in the pitch black again in the olive mill. This time on a log end on the floor by the cauldron that still has some heat in it from the fire we built today under the bucket full of mushed olives. We have the rest of the afternoon off since the olive oil extraction was a completely engrossing job that lasted past our normal break time. For the first time since being here, the sky was dark this morning and during the milling a storm broke out. Water was coming through the roof in some spots as the mill is really old. We cleaned up the channel around the millstones the others did some cleaning of the press, and readying of the cauldron. Then Homayoun started up the motor which turns two giant cone shaped pieces of granite, that revolve on a bed of rock, with a channel around the outside and brushes to sweep out the crushed ones. The motor is an old motorcycle, with an adapted front wheel that rides around on a belt to turn everything. Merlin loaded the sacks of olives in through the top and they fell down in the center of the two cones, which gradually crushed and due to the shape of the surface, pushed the crushed olives out to the edge to fall into the channel. Probably every city person would be surprised at the hygiene (or lack of it) involved in an operation like this. Homayoun has a different attitude towards dirt. In other words he co-exists with it nicely, as long as it is natural - out here in the middle of nowhere. Delia did sweep up the dust and leaves on the rough concrete floor while I scrubbed the channel with an old brush. Tom stood at the spout where the crushed stuff was coming out and helped pull it down the funnel to fill buckets, which were then passed off to Delia, me and Iacopo. We delivered them to Falker (or Vulcan, because some of us can't pronounce his name properly), who was up on top of the cauldron, stirring the bucket of crushed olives with his whole arm. This is necessary because you need to keep the olives on the edge and bottom from burning but impossible to tell what the temperature is all the time with an implement. These olives will still be cold-pressed. The optimum temperature at which to get the oil out is 30 degrees or something like that. (Non cold pressed means they heat it up way more). When this vat was full we filled another one, and started spreading small bucketfulls onto round hemp mats that Merlin and Tom brushed clean of the dried remains of previous crushings. Homayoun and Delia attempted to spread layer on layer of crushed warmed olives onto these mats, piling them up under a press (of 1910 vintage). After a bunch of layers, the juice started running out under pressure of the mats above, into a channel in bare, rough and not incredibly clean looking concrete, and out into a 45 gallon drum with a sieve on top. I think it is supposed to take 70 layers. I don't know how many we did. We added more cold crushed olives into the cauldron to keep it from overheating, as this process went along. When all the crushed ones were in, we all concentrated on layering the mats and by this time were hungry, so stuck some potatoes directly onto the coals below the cauldron. Homayoun went out for a bit and we dipped the roasted potatoes into the fresh oil. The oil separated out with water running off into another bucket.

As the storm went on, our light went off and on. There was enough natural light but it wasn't bright in here. Quite a few times I looked around at what seemed like a black and white image from a previous time in the past. The light was dim and everyone was dirty and working away with ancient looking equipment in an even more ancient building.

Anyways, I went and made pesto out of lemongrass, tarragon and basil, with oil made on the premises (not today's yet), and we ate it over steamed chestnuts.

I have never used a pressure cooker and am trying currently to get over Homayoun being impatient with me for not operating it properly. Hopefully I will be able to deal with him or recognise when I should leave here... I really want to get off the internet and go hang out with everyone playing music in the house.

Today I feel the need to communicate with the outside world. It is 9:15 pm and it feels very late, as it always does here. Tonight it is just Tom, Iacopo, Merlin, Delia and I. The guys are improv-ing as they prepare their next joint. I really like these guys they are very sweet. They have a fresh lemon and sugar habit, using Homayoun's bread that is ever present at the end of the table. Merlin just went out with a flashlight to pick about 5 fresh lemons.

Now we are all making animal noises of all types as Tom plays some chords.

My work often involves being a monkey. I do acrobatics in trees.

There are several methods we use for harvesting the olives. Only one of them actually involves “picking”. The traditional way is to hit the tree with a pole, and collect the olives from a tarp below. We have done this only a little. Nowadays in commercial operations they don't use poles, they use mechanical shakers. The pole method can be rough on the olives and make them start letting out juice/oil before you are ready to press them. Generally harvests have to be stored for a few days at least (we've been laying them out in the upper floor of the house for a week) before you start up the mill (which we will be doing tomorrow). During this time, the oil can start oxidizing if they are already crushed.

We go to a tree and take anything good off the ground before starting. A lot of pruning has to be done, so we take the olives off the pruned branches, which of course is the easiest. Then we go and pick directly off the tree, which I believe is very rare. Normal olive groves are planted in rows and have nothing growing on the ground underneath – it is plowed with machinery. Very easy to harvest. We live in a wild spot. There are pines and oaks between the olives, and I don't know if there is any order to their planting. There is all manner of brush growing below them, including several varieties of terrible prickly things, thistles, wild lavender, mint. (All on steep hillsides).

I enjoy the tree climbing much more than the burning. We have done that several days now in the morning. It is hard work. Dragging cut branches or brush down and sometimes up steep hillsides to a bonfire. Sometimes we have to hack stuff up with these curved devil looking tools, like a mini-sicle. I have fortunately left that mostly for the others. The tools are also useful for dragging large piles of stuff, or getting it to roll down the hill, hopefully not on top of you, especially if it is full of prickles. I have been exhausted by the end of every morning and evening. I started learning to pace myself this morning. I can't throw large branches around, even though I may have been able to once. I nearly hurt my wrist and ended up wanting to cry. Homayoun is a totally awesome guy, but he can be quite strict. In other words he may be a hippy that smokes a lot of weed, but he believes in working hard, and doesn't appreciate people sitting around. I don't think he is going to be displeased with me but I tend to be sensitive to these things. Besides, my body doesn't wake up very fast in the morning, and after several days of hard work, even less. I enjoy this work more than the gardening at the other farm. That was worse, because it involved nearly all bending down and was fatal for the lower back. Also, a normal garden in a flat spot is just less interesting. If we take time to look up, we are looking across a valley at spectacular mountains. This morning after being slightly traumatised by nearly wrenching my wrist, I was happy to hear Tom singing away while he hacked at the trunks of olive trees in the distance.

Uli left this morning, and for her despedida Homayoun made deep fried mushoom caps, at 7:30 am. Picked by him the night before. They were truly amazing. There are quite a variety of wild mushrooms. We have them in stews for lunch sometimes. He cooks excellent food. The first spicy food I've had in Spain. Salads are like nothing I've ever had. All manner of strange greens picked on the premises. With a dressing of fig vinegar made also on the premise, from figs from the numerous enormous and twisted fig trees which you can walk under or could maybe live under, and oil, squeezed on the premises, garlic and tomatoes also of course grown here.

During the afternoon, I've been laying on the grass soaking up the sun. During the day it is like Vancouver in June or September – long sleeved t-shirt and light pants weather.

Tonight my job was cleaning the pool in the large sauna area, along with Merlin and Tom. I insisted on cleaning enormous and numerous cobwebs from the ceiling first, and then convinced the guys to do a decent job. The cobwebs were not simple ones – they were full of dust or rather, dirt, and loaded with dead bichos of all sorts. Cleaning the pool was not very straightforward, as there was a large and heavy bunch of boards with metal set on the bottom, which had to be moved around to get at the filth which was still an inch deep with water, and no hole to drain anything. The guys normally dive into another (filthy) pool out in the front of the house, after working. Nobody worries much about showering except me. I've gone 2 and 3 days without, but the last few days I've been showering. Except that I haven't used conditioner or even shampoo – just regular soap. Add that together with having to push your head under or through tree branches often, and you end up with some raunchy hair. Anyways, despite the guys saying that they didn't think it was really dirty and that the dirt in the countryside isn't really dirty, or "bad" dirt like in the city because it's all natural, we ended up doing a pretty decent job.

I have managed to at least clean the pillow case and my weekend job is to clean the blanket I am using for a bottom sheet. Hopefully Homayoun will not mind me using the washing machine – it is a large blanket. He is very into minimal energy usage and not wasting anything. Moreso than most other people I know. This is understandable considering that he is partly self-sufficient and off the grid.

Now it is the next day - I saved this in Open-Office last night and am posting it now. We work only part of the day Saturday and have Sundays off. I have little motivation to do anything. 

So far along with the work I have described, we have also harvested Carob (aggaroba) which is in big pods fallen to the ground, planted beans, collected walnuts, and this morning almonds, as well as undoing a fence and turning over the soil in one of the many beds in the terraced hillside. We have eaten fresh pomegranates, persimmons, and a small persimmon they call a kaki, which looks exactly the same. They have no resemblance at all to any persimmon I've tried out of a supermarket at home. The granadas (pomegranates) don't either, very much. Which is to say these fruits actually taste good here. Homayoun has given us fermented pomegranate juice. He has a still here as well, and saves scraps of fruit to throw into it. The buildings and rooms in the buildings are quite numerous. I am still finding new ones - some of which he has to show us, like the still, because it is normally closed. The still, semi-open kitchen for making vinegar or preserving olives, in the courtyard, the olive oil mill, and other parts of the house are ancient looking, with ancient looking equipment and tools. 

Also there are madroñas, a small fruit with spiky things that are soft. There is the odd tabacco plant, auto-seeded. Homayoun explained today at lunch that tobacco seeds are very small, and get caught in drops of water in clouds. These get turned into ice even. They get carried far away and deposited. We have not seen Diego for a few days, but he also imparted to us some pretty fantastic countryside knowledge. If you have a sliver from a chestnut or some such thing, you grab a horsefly by the hind legs and put it over the sliver and it will grab the sliver out. We weren't sure whether to believe him, but he seemed quite insistent.

I have adjusted so far quite well to the lack of cleanliness. I have said in the past that if I am pressed, I could live fine as long as there is hot water and a way of making hot drinks like tea. Mostly this has shown itself to be true. I use the squat toilet because everything is dirty anyways, and I am used to is from China. Here in this place it is cleaner than the other one. There is hot water for showers. I have gotten used to grotty dishes, and a filthy tea towel on which I wipe the odd grotty spoon before eating off it. I attempted to tell the boys not to leave their lemons and sugar all over the bread board. They made a valiant effort for a bit, but I don't think it's going to work.

The only thing I lack is time alone. That is actually a good thing because I prefer having enough people and needing to escape for peace and quiet than being lonely.

There is really no sense in getting on the internet after a day of work outside in a setting like this. Not much reason and not much motivation to do it. I couldn't care less what my friends on facebook are talking about; sorry guys, what I'm doing is more than enough to take my full attention every moment of the day. But I do want to write a quick note to say what I did today and Dehlia and me wanted to look up a recipe for soap (seeing as there are only a few tiny pieces to be found around this house full of people), and recipes for higochumbo, the fruit of a huge cactus that we harvested a bunch of today, after our morning olive picking.
Homayoun said that a lo mejor, the higochumbo aren't any good but we can make stuff out of them if we want.

Last night I managed to attach my castanets onto the hands of a rather large German dude, danced bulerias for them, and sang too.

Today we "milked" the olives off the branches - in Spanish they use the same word as for milking a cow. I tried to stay out of the way of Homayoun as he waved around a chainsaw on the end of a long stick, to prune several trees. We picked fallen ones off the ground, stripped the olives off the pruned branches and then climbed up to pick them off the tree. All of this happens on a steep slope, with stunning views, if you take time to look up for a moment. Diego, a visiting farmer from down the road who stayed over last night and got drunk along with some of the German guys, helped make a fire to burn the unwanted branches. Homayoun told us we'd be doing a lot of burning. The boys got to take a break from picking to just burn stuff this morning.

I can't believe our good luck to end up in this place. What happened was at the other farm when we got the very clear signal that we were not wanted around there any more (they were weird - we aren't sure what was wrong but there were several obvious possibilities), we sat upstairs on a rainy day with their pitifully slow internet and started making calls to different farms of interest that we found on the list. When we couldn't get ahold of any of interest or they didn't want workers at this time of year, we just started checking any in a warm part of Spain that would take 3 workers at once. This was the only one that had work and told us to come. The atmosphere in Pepi and Manolo's house was such that none of us felt we could stand to stay there another day.

This afternoon we were on another slope, below a tree loaded with granadas (pomegranates). We are doing it much more by hand than normally is done these days. People in Sevilla (besides telling me that picking olives was incredibly hard work and that I should by no means attempt to do it), told me that they shake the tree with a machine to make the olives fall, nowadays. They used to use a pole, but you have to do it carefully enough not to make the olives burst and start echar-ing their oil, and wreck the tree. Diego did a little bit of that with a pole in the morning. I don't think he was totally expert at it though. He is a mulero (a mule driver). While we were working this morning he heard his team coming somewhere in the distance - they come to find him even if he goes into town and doesn't leave them tied up, I guess. He also traps wild boar and has sheep and goats.

I ended up picking all the olives off one particularly loaded branch, which took some acrobatic work. Some was looking into the lowering sun, and the whole time was balancing on the end of a cut branch and hanging by my left hand, while stripping olives off with my right.

Anyways, Dehli has quit cracking walnuts and we are going to look at recipes. Bye for now.

Serrania de Ronda

I am in the oil mill. A brisk wind is blowing. This morning I've planted rows of beans and attempted a bit of cleaning. I am far away from everything.

My two hardy amigas have come here to the Serrania de Ronda with me from the Sierra de Aracena. So far we have survived slivers from chestnut shells, heavy weeding of completely overgrown onion and leek patches, lectures on "el Universo" and the Cosmos and directions on how to live our lives, according to our hostess in Cortegana, in the Sierra de Aracena. We have dealt with lost parakeets on the Triana bridge in Sevilla and failed attempts to find friends with whom to stay in the city after our hosts strong hints that we look for other WWOOFing (basically kicked us out).

Now we are high in the mountains near Ronda, with semi-tropical things growing around us despite the cold. I am in danger of losing myself to a different life, here. It is dirty, but most of that is tolerable.

Dehlia, me and her guitar shared the backseat with a sack of flour, potatoes, various large sausages that kept sliding behind my neck, jars of beans, 2 flats of beer, and other supplies that have to be stocked up on due to the remoteness.
It isn't the first time I've travelled on winding mountain roads with a driver holding an open can of beer in one hand (in the pouring rain this time, hoping the car could pass some muddy spots, and one spot where the river was nearly flowing over the "bridge"). The old white Mercedes didn't have much suspension left, and in the last few of the 50 km from Ronda, we lost the exhaust system completely; it was lying on the road behind us.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Homayoun has lived in various other countries including Afghanistan for several years, where he did medical work and converted from Catholicism to Islam. When he picked us up he was wearing his skullcap. Long hair (and more than a few wrinkles after all this time) belies his hippy years in the 70s as a tour bus operator. There was one bus that he filled with people and drove from Amsterdam to New Delhi. He is a German citizen, but has lived in Spain already for 30 years, if I remember correctly.

Homayoun told me the house was 1000 years old. I have my doubts that the actual house is, but apparently this property had Arab owners back in the days when they were still in Andalucia, which is more than 600 years ago. Probably some part of it is, and there have been very old tools found here. On the property there are peacocks, pomegranates, avocadoes, persimmons, mandarin and regular oranges, and a large crop of olives which we will be picking, and other fantastic things that I have forgotten or haven't gotten to explaining yet. He has had a grant from the government to replant trees on the property after a fire 15 years ago. He survives on very little, and uses everything carefully, though his huge table is stocked with various bowls of fruit, fresh baked bread, walnuts (from the tree, that we help crack), jars of preserves, chilli peppers in his own vinegar, all to be self-served at any time.

We don't use electricity if we can distinguish a black from a white thread. That also indicates what time we should get up in the morning. After dark there is a fire in the main house and a lantern attached to the bottle of butane. There is nothing else to do in the dark in the middle of nowhere, and when you have a mixture of guys from Germany, Italy and Scotland, with a guitar and flute and drums, what you do is hang out for hours around the table, grab a fork and tap on the various ash trays, the plates, knock walnuts together, grab a grubby salt shaker, and join in. Homayoun grows "Maria" (marijuana) which is available in what seems like unlimited supply to his very happy workers. The guys sing a lot of reggae with their own words - whatever happens to pop into their minds, it seems. Sadie joins in with background vocals. Dehlia and me do rhythm with every possible thing available.

Also here is a German woman with her baby of 9 months. She worked on the property years ago and has remained a friend of Homayoun, and has now come for a break from the rest of her family.

This morning Homayoun and Uli made bread in the wood burning oven in one of the several outbuildings. The oven fit more than 10 loaves, and was sealed with freshly mixed mud from a bucket, to keep the heat in. Dehlia helped removed the bread, spraying it with water as it came out.

The washroom is an out building which does contain toilets, of both the western and eastern kind. They flush only with a bucket of water poured down. There are some ornate metal Middle Eastern or Indian jugs for washing your left hand. There is almost no soap on the property. We have managed to find a few pieces, but in the kitchen, you just scrub things. Much of the day not a lot of light enters, though there is a skylight in the kitchen, so you can't really see the dirt. As far as oil, which gets on your hands when you cut yourself a piece of bread and paint it with olive oil using a paintbrush attached to the lid of a jar of oil (pressed on the property), and eat it without a plate... well, you can't really wash it off your hands so you just rub it in... hands, face; it's good for the skin.

The only real trouble is the bed. Dehlia (23, from Barcelona, and the only other person I have ever met who goes around singing Jose Merce songs, and is also able to do decent enough palmas for me to dance a Rondenas - I am in the area!) sleeps on the single bunk above. I share with Sadie (48, from Lyon, France, a lab technician of the type that tests your blood, and also our comic relief...with several years training in being a "clown" - more like expressing yourself with comedy, not the traditional one with a red nose). Today we gave the mattress some good beatings, and shook out the blankets which undoubtedly have not been washed for a while (this is not a hostel). Last night Sadie and I shared the bare mattress with several blankets over us. We had no pillows, and the wind came in a missing window in our door, covered by only a screen. Our room is really cute though - whitewash with bare wood - a sort of loft with a slanting wooden walkway up to it.

Here are more photos:

We are 10 km from Genalguacil.