Nerja

Woken by someone upstairs clomping around (new guests must have arrived and been billeted in the room above us) why is someone clomping around their room at 4 in the morning? Added to that, the bin-men arrive at exactly the same time and proceed to clang the bins and rev their engines…

So…I stick on my headphones (they’re the “plug” type that go right inside my ears and block out extraneous noises) and fire up the jukebox – the shuffle facility comes up with a great selection which helps me forget the clomping and clanging.

Without the car we’re stuck in Nerja today and the weather’s overcast so we can’t just sit by the pool and relax, as Anne would have liked.

I’d brought a book with me but finished it on Monday so I figured I needed a replacement for the trip home. We find “Spain’s largest English Language second hand bookstore” and a Sci-Fi epic, “Cold As Ice” replaces “I, Lucifer” in my reading list. They’re both tosh but keep me happy…

Leaving the bookshop, we walk around for ages, here there and everywhere, eventually settling at the Balcon de Europa for a seat where we could watch the antics of the large collection of feral cats that lives there, as they interact with the tourists and attempt (and fail) to catch the pigeons.

We head back to the hotel, stopping off at “La Vaca Loca” (The Crazy Cow), a bar and Internet Café run by a nice Dutch lady, and partake of the house speciality, Dutch Pea Soup for lunch.

In the afternoon, we're reduced to visiting the Nerja Hypermarket which turns out to be more of a Low-permarket and takes all of five minutes for us to look round and exit without making a purchase.

We sit in the bar at the hotel and are joined by an old German guy who’s been to Nerja four or five times before but this time is on his own as his wife had recently died.

He's a talkative chap with a reasonable command of English and insists on speaking our language even when we talk to him in German. He has some hair-raising stories of his travels in Venezuela and Mexico involving gangsters, robberies and beatings…he said Mexico used to be happy go lucky and he’d be fine walking anywhere at night but now he wouldn’t leave his hotel so there’d be no point in going…

For our last night, we decide not to dine at the Hotel but go instead to the Round Tapas Bar we’d visited on Wednesday and have a few glasses of red wine there before ending up at the Rendezvous, an English run restaurant with an extensive vegetarian choice, excellent food and large helpings. We share a bottle of wine before heading home feeling the worse for wear…