A year out

Sunday | July 29, 2007

Camillo is a 50-something wiry Dutch hippie who runs this 600 acre hostel on an old olive farm in Granollers de Rocacorba, 1 hour west of Girona. It is vast, almost as big as the very wide and vast Girona cathedral which I strolled through yesterday; a beautiful, listed, 3-story, stone building with a vista of unending forest and overlooked itself by dramatic rocky escarpments.
A huge fig tree greets you at the entrance, as well as an Eco-shop. Camillo also runs the largest distribution company in Spain for ecological products. Thus, we knew that everything we ate or drank was pesticide free and most likely vegetarian. And so it proved. Dinner was brown rice with delicious home-grown vegetables and leaves, washed down with an excellent red from the nearby Rioja region. This kind of food never fails to make me feel good, and inevitably prompts inward resolutions to eat like this every day.
We´re staying in this paradise in the Pyrenean foothills for another night, then driving westwards to higher mountainscapes, hoping to be in San Sebastian by Friday. Although as I floated in the green stone pool up by the vegetable terraces late yesterday afternoon, the silence broken only by the buzzing of dragon flies and the rise and fall of the cicadas' sonic cycle, gazing up at the hazy blue sky and the surrounding high forests, I wondered why we had plans to leave. Then I remembered that one of the reasons we´re here in Spain (and there are many reasons, all good) is for me to practice my spoken Spanish. Por que en Septiembre, yo voy a Ecuador, y aqui, tengo que hablar Espanol todos los dias!
Helen