Cross Country magazine
January / February 2010
As most of Europe shivers, one part of Spain basks in eternal sunshine. Ed Ewing discovers Andalucia
FELIX passed the pipe. The old man turned, spat on his fingers and, in one swift corkscrew movement, popped out his false eye. “I raise you an eyeball,” he whispered, his voice barely audible through the thick smoke.
I looked at Felix. He was bleeding from his left hand, where he had given up a pinkie. But the game was still on. Lost deep in the mountains of Azirastan we were in a game of chance that had only one possible outcome … screech … actually, it wasn’t like that at all.
Having read one or two of Felix Wolk’s paragliding travel articles, and seen his photographs, I was looking forward to spending some time either flying upside down while drinking local arak, lost in some jungle, or in the bar being wooed by mysterious opiates.
Instead, I was sipping wine, trying not to gulp it, while tinkering with tapas and listening to the Andalucian minister of tourism on my right. “We feel that Andalucia is not a geographical destination, it is more than that, it is a feeling…”
On my left Felix was looking spruced up, like a Teutonic hairdresser’s model, in a clean shirt and with Because-I’m-Worth-It hair. Dotted around the table were other writers and editors from paragliding magazines. Chatter, chatter, chatter they went in French, while toying with olives. I wiped the rim of my glass, hoping no one would see.
The rock towers of El Yelmo had appeared through the trees like an enchanted castle in the forest. The journey had taken us through the olive groves of the plains, skirted the still snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada and brought us over the pine-forested hills and gorges of the Sierra de Cazorla. We had arrived in paradise… (2,000 words)
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