High above the Alpujarra

With the cherries to hand and plenty left to eat, we continued almost due south towards the north eastern end of the Sierra Nevada range. We still searched for clearer skies and a bit of proper heat. The huge lump of mountain in the far distance had clouds cloaking the upper slopes. However here on the north eastern approaches, the temperature increased and the sky was ever brighter.

Morning coffee was taken at a typically understated wonderful spot. There were no signs, no mirador in fact nothing to mark the spot and no-one passed us as we sat there trying to take it all in.

That morning saw the end of one of our chairs. With an ungainly snap as I sat down, the seat gave way; the same failure mode as befell a previous chair a year or so ago. Serves us right for buying rubbish. Buy cheap, buy twice as they say. Well it was an excuse for a trip into Granada's Decathlon and to dice with their traffic. It's hard to pull away smartly in a 300TDi Defender and the car drivers have no patience. Still they daren't get too close as they have much to lose.

The Decathlon was the biggest we have seen, dwarfing our local store in Sheffield. I once got lost in a big shop in China and couldn't find the checkouts. None of the Mandarin language signs made any sense of course and I had to wave my wallet at the Chinese to try to get directions. It wasn't quite as bad here but still it was a big place. With a nice new chair (spent a few more spondulix so hoping for better quality) we used the self-checkout and managed to pay. We were very smug having easily worked out how to press the Union flag symbol at the start of the transaction.

We decided to miss Granada and the Alhambra. Stop shouting and telling us it's a mistake! There's plenty of other aspects of Spain to experience and anyway we are camping and all this turning up at 7am to get tickets or whatever is doubly difficult when you are at a campsite which is a bus ride away.

In any case we had a bit of an adventure up our sleeves. We headed for the southern slopes of Sierra Nevada and specifically Las Alpujarras. We had an invitation to wild camp at the very top of the mountains to the south of the region and directly in front of Sierra Nevada. Here, by just a few interactions on a Land Rover forum, we would visit Ashley in his "living the dream" location at 1,000m asl.

We had a reference to a Google maps dropped pin and I had transferred the coordinates into our TomTom. Ashley had said "just turn up" and so we did. At the dropped pin, "top of my drive", we pulled onto a very rural track and got about 20m before it became impassable.

Having previously communicated using WhatsApp, this time Ashley wasn't reading. As we would later discover, he was looking for his cows and so we waited for inspiration. It came in the way of boredom and thinking laterally, we decided to check the position of the dropped pin in Google maps (where it came from in the first place). We were only 1km out. Ahem. So we turned around and drove back along the ridge to another drive and this time, although rough, it led over and around the hill to Ashley's shack and of 22 hectares of steep mountainside.

After much in the way of introductions we set up camp in his corral just above the shack, about the only piece of level ground other than down at his shack. It's hard to describe the position, so here is the view.

Over the next few days we would get to know Ashley and appreciate the wonder and harshness of living so high in Andalucia, which experiences such harsh summers, yet is such a draw for people from northern Europe. We would visit Orgiva after first going there 10-15 years ago and re-live aspects of the novel "Driving over Lemons". From here I can see Chris Stewart's land 600m below!