Jan 27
This place (Los Molinos de Rio Aguas) is totally amazing !!!
I totally love the people
and the nature is – well, let’s say, very special!
Just to explain in some words what this place is like:
It was an old abandoned village, former agricultural place, in a half-desert, where some freaks started to settle as far as I know in the 70s.
The most well known project here is Sunseed desert technology, which was founded in the early 90s, and since then attracks a lot of volunteers and other guests. Basically it is a scientific and educational project aiming to find and teach about sustainable solutions for living in deserts.
And there is lots of other people living here in other houses… like for example Timbe who runs an Agave museum with lots of informations about the “Tipas” (Sam wants to learn how to make Tipa drums and Didgeridoos, I already learned how to make strings from it)
The place we are staying at is Permanostrum, the place of Jesus
who wants to build up some kind of community space here.
And then there is Canyaviva, a project specialised in building structures of Caña, some kind of bamboo that is growing here like crazy.
Our group has been quite productive in the last days.
We had a nice skillsharing session on the campfire with about 10 people of the sunseed project and the village on the second evening that we were here and on Sunday set up a workshop plan for the whole week together with some of the volunteers.
It was abit sad though that we did not hear a lot about Sunseed in that circle, but only told about our project – but then we had a tour through Sunseed yesterday.
Sam had a Geographical Information Systems workshop with Andreas, a volunteer at Sunseed.
Peter and Paz learn how to make flutes of Caña.
Today we agreed on a herbs tour with Jesus, who then showed us some plants that grow around here and what they are used for.
6 of us and a bunch of sunseeders joined in and now we had some delicious wild spinage, saltbush and other crazy plants for dinner.
I was busy most of the day knitting (I learned to do with 5 needles!) and working on the (caña!) compost toilet
- poor Henrik hurt himself while building on it yesterday with an old rusty nail
and as it was hurting a lot and he been sick before he now takes antibiotics.
Motivation for finishing it is shrinking so…
Henrik has to stay in the bus now all day and is sorting photos and bills…, which is good for us ;-)
Tomorrow we will have a crafts sharing and after that Spanish lessons, and the day after hopefully a permaculture workshop.
On the weekend we will use “the yurt” for making a grand juggling/dancing/jamming/Yoga/Mediatation/… fiesta. Me encanta!!!
Then also we wanna repair the Caña bridge and built a dome with this nice material together with Jesus.
I feel really well in this place and think we can learn a lot here.
So I definetely wanna stay a while!!!
Later more, Internet is closing now
Febr 3
I am sitting in the Betti-Bus in Sorbas and writing the next update from Los Molinos de Rio Aguas…
Ayuntamiento free internet is closed for some reason and we are trying hard to find other free possibilities of getting online…
Our favourite free-WIFI-spot also doesnt work today for some reason so we gotta find other solutions
and so the others are hanging out in a bar now with WIFI… buying beer and coffee and stuff
But there’s nothing we wouldn’t do to get in the net!!
(weird kind of eco-hippies… really…: no shower, sharing swimming place with wild turtles -but WIFI? must be!)
We (that is for the statistics 6 people: 3 boys, 3 girls, from 4 different countries) are still in Los Molinos del Rio Aguas (the mills of the river water) – which is called like that as “el rio aguas” is the only river in this area that has water all year and not only in spring.
Today was linguistics misunderstanding day – long discussions about the words “chaos”, disorder and order :-)
Anyways it is really nice this language chaos we have here – especially with the 2 girls always chatting in Latvian (you only sometimes understand some words like “didgeridoo”… ), and then 2 native English speakers with their funny different styles (rasta-British-English and American)… And then us 2 Germans, who are speaking more German again, as we are getting bored of all the English around us (as Sunseed is an UK project there is mostly English-speakers in this place).
Every once in a wile you also hear some Spanish though…
We heard a lot of stories about this place already and it is getting more and more.
We learned a lot already and I think it will get more and more.
Today “the boys” went to harvest caña with Jesus and the Sunseed people to repair the bridge over the river that Jesus built 4 years ago and that was broken totally. We, the “squaws” stayed in the camp to cook lentechas (really good that we went to this organic farm and got 15 kilo sacks of grains!) and sauce with wild spinage and vinegretta (vinagar plant)
and prepare jam from jumbos (cactus fruits).
Ah, and of course taking care of our littel “goat monkey” Pocito… sweet puppy baby doggy dog :-)
We are now camping next to the river on the terassa of the sweatlodge, as we were moved out from several parkings… think we had to move 3 times or something within this village… anyway, it is much nicer here in the valley within the mountains :-)
Tomorrow we will go on with taller de puente (bridge workshop) and on Friday we learn how to make soap from olive oil and plants.
We had an amazing contact improvisation workshop in the yurt in the weekend that Ieva and me prepared. Playing, touching, jumping round and getting very drunk ;-) Hell that was fun!
We now have better drinking water than before, as we drove to 15km away spring, which has one of the best waters in this region – by far better than the tab water from Sorbas which really sucks. Yeah, the drinking water problem… in 20 years Sunseed desert technologies could not find any solution to get drinking water that the state would prove as “potable”. This makes living here – of course – less ecological and nice. Filtering rain water, water from the springs nearby, all failed. But the tab water with all its Chlorin inside, that smells really ugly, is proved “potable”… aiiiiyyyy….
But there’s many other things to see and learn that make it a place worth staying for a much longer time…
You are running around in that surrealistic painting dominated by “pitas” (agaves), jumberos (cactees) and solar panels, palms and weird caña constructions, solar cookers and colourful handpainted sunseed signs explaining the gardens, the pump, etc…
And then there is the amazing mountains and the river and these funny old houses, some of them ruines…
and really nice people!
I’ll finish backuping fotos and then join the others for a beer and WIFI
hoping that Sam will prepare chapatis for tonight
Febr 11
Hey, Hola
after spending 3 (!) weeks in this MAGIC place, DYNAMICALLY HANGIN ROUND, and learning lots of amazing things ((had a soap making workshop, were baking lots of bread, …) we are finally leaving with the same number of people in a different constellation (8 – Henrik – Nacho + Anna + Bari = 8 again !) to a wwofing farm nearby here and after that to San Pedro hippie playa.
The white bus left today, Sam and me are hanging out in the internet for another day and go to Spanish class tonight and then follow with black Betty tomorrow
Also we set ourselves a deadline for being in Granada in 2 weeks latest. We had an inspiring meeting about our aims and goals, our organisations, what we are up to and what is the difference in between us and some normal bunch of hippie travellers…
and how to present ourselves on the website so people dont get a wrong impression what expects them!
