The Long Road to Valencia

From Valencia

Hola, amigos. A much happier and less hungry Brian is finally here in Valencia now at our new digs in the Red Nest Hostel. This hostel feels as if you´ve stepped into a hotel with a circus theme going on. Most of the walls are red (which I should have assumed given the name of this place). The bathrooms have wacky red, blue and yellow tiles all over the place, screaming "Wake up!" as you drag your groggy ass into it to take a morning shower. This place has character and a fun vibe to it, as well as a fully functional kitchen which I´m quite glad to see. It completely beats the place where we were laying our heads for the previous 2 nights: Camping Puçol, which translated, means "camping by the puke hole."

How did we end up at such a God-forsaken place like Puçol? Well, let me explain. While in Alicante, our little beach resort town that was like a paradise to us, we had totally forgotten about our oath (sworn in blood) made a week prior after the Sevilla debacle to stay ahead of the game and have everything planned out a few weeks in advance. Maybe it was the nice weather in Alicante that clouded our brains, or the beautiful beaches, or possibly the sangria. I don´t know. All I can say is that we were having an awesome time, totally oblivious to what awaited us after Alicante. Then, about 2 days before we were about to leave Alicante, we checked online...and everything in Valencia was booked. It was also the weekend coming up in Valencia. So in a nutshell...we were screwed. Oh, how screwed we were.

We debated staying another day in Alicante (hell, I would have stayed the rest of the summer there. I loved having the Spanish equivalent of Sean Connery as my slum lord. He was such a smooth character, spending the evenings chilling out in his faux wine garden, smoking on his hookah, reading Cervantes and chatting up the young ladies. We had a couple of girls from China show up, and as a prank, he placed a fake spider on their door while one of the girls was taking a shower. She came back to her room and freaked when she saw the giant tarantula just hovering above the door handle. Oh Spanish Sean Connery, how I´ll miss you). But we knew we had to press on and stick to the schedule, which basically equates to making it to Pamplona for the "Running of the Bulls." We were sweating this one, and knew that we might really be screwed in Valencia.

But a campsite in Puçol (I still don´t know how to pronounce it) said they had some spaces still available, so we were overjoyed just to have a place to spend the night for a few days. And it was only 14 kilometers north of Valencia, so how bad could it be?

After missing the 11:30 bus out of Alicante (some mean old lady cut in front of me in line, because she just had to get on that Valencia bus. She was stomping her foot and yelling at the ticket guy in Spanish to get her on that bus leaving in a few minutes. So, like a schmuck, I let her cut in front. Her daughter seemed mortified by her mother´s actions but thanked me for my kindness. We then had to wait another 2 hours for the next bus. Man, I´m such a schmuck), we finally got on the 13:30 bus and made it to Valencia around 17:00. And since we now had to figure out how to get to Puçol (wherever it was), that took a few hours and bumbling around. Turns out, there´s a train that heads up to Puçol that we had to get on, leaving out of the main train station.

We showed up, bought some tickets, and like a total idiot tourist, I started taking pictures inside the really cool train station (it really is cool). Then two police officers came right at me and barked at me for what I had done. Afraid they were going to take away my camera (I didn´t want to have to get ANOTHER camera), I deleted all my train station pictures in front of them, and they gave me the OK sign. So another international crisis was averted, thank the Lord. I must have been wearing my "Bad Idea" jeans that day, because I should have known that after the Madrid bombings in 2004, the Spanish would be really serious about security in their train stations.

Come to think of it, I´ve now had three personal encounters with police here in Spain. One of them that I haven´t previously mentioned happened in Alicante, while we were climbing up to visit the castle atop the huge hill overlooking the coast. After a 20 minute walk up to the top, we were about to get inside the castle, and we thought the police officer was waving us through to go ahead and go inside (he was directing cars at the same time). Then all of a sudden, he just starts yelling "AQUI!!!" at us, and even though I´m a big dummy when it comes to Spanish, I know what that means..."get your butt over here now!" So we go up to him, cowering, and he just starts tearing into us, asking us where we´re from, if we understand the castle closes at 20:00 (which we did), and if we were deaf (which we weren´t). It was a perfect misunderstanding, but it was probably our worst encounter with the policia here so far. But we did see the castle, which I must say was spectacular. Man, them Moors really knew how to build fortresses back in the day.

So, getting back to Puçol. We finally made it to the Puçol station, and with our full packs, had to make the death march through desolate farming lands (I´m not sure what they were growing there. Oranges? Are these the Valencia oranges that I heard so much about from my youth?) to finally make it to our campground. It must have been about a 4 mile walk...it took forever with full packs. I was just hating life. We finally get into Puçol de Playa (which translated means "puke hole by the beach") and we find Camping Puçol. From the outside, it looked like a white-trash trailer park. But to be fair, let me explain for you how camping works here in Spain.

Spain has a different concept about camping. It´s not the rugged type of camping that we´re used to in America. When Spaniards camp, they go to these trailer park-type places located on the outskirts of a city. These places have covered awnings with junky presupplied trailer homes sitting underneath. Walking around and looking at them, I was shocked at some of the stuff they had under these awnings: televisions, foosball tables, refrigerators, barbecue grills, bikes, plastic patio tables, etc. This wasn´t camping at all. This was just going to a place different from your home that still had all the conveniences of your home. It blew my mind to be walking around the campgrounds and hear Bart Simpson (talking in Spanish, of course) coming out of the televisions of every campsite there. And I´m not exaggerating on this. The Spanish love "Los Simpson." It might be bigger over here than in the United States, which I find so ironic, considering that a lot of the visual references thrown out in "The Simpsons" are stuff that only Americans would get. When I saw the Spanish version of "Family Guy" at the Toledo "hastle" with all these teenagers huddled around it, I really couldn´t believe my eyes, because that´s all American references. But I do have to admit...they´ve done pretty good at replicating all the cartoon character´s voices...except for Homer. Over here, he sounds like a suave Don Juan than the bumbling oaf we´re accustomed to.

But these campgrounds here in Spain just seem a little odd to me. It´s like being at a trashy version of a KOA. They all have concrete walls around them, with ugly teepees painted on them and "CAMPING" emblazoned in big letters. The Spanish obviously aren´t into aesthetics when it comes to their campgrounds. They also have certain grades for their campsites, such as "Luxury," "1st Class," "2nd Class," and "3rd Class." I don´t see much difference between the classes. Apart from maybe having a swimming pool or a ping pong table, they all look like white trash trailer parks to me.

So we spent two nights at Puçol. It wasn´t bad sleeping there if you can ignore all the stray cats roaming around and the kids screaming and running around half naked at midnight when you´re trying to go to bed. It´s quite a treat to wake up in the morning and find some 4 year-old kicking a pine cone in front of your tent. That´s obviously how the Spanish do their wake-up calls here. But despite the subpar accommodations, it was nice to be near the beach. What Camping Puke Hole lacked in looks, it made up for in its location.

But now we´re in Valencia, which is a big improvement. Not having to take the RENFE train up and down every day to Valencia cuts down on about 4 hours of travel time. Their trains are awesome here: fast, cheap, clean, on-time, and with a great soundtrack. They´ve got some guy playing a little ditty on the guitar when you´re about to reach the Proxima Parada. It´s really catchy, and I made up my own words for it. I found myself humming it all throughout the day. They also play classical music on the train, which is quite soothing. You feel like you´re in a real-life version of "Fantasia" in which Mickey´s about to appear with the out-of-control brooms.

Valencia is starting to grow on me. At first, it didn´t seem to be anything that great. But as you start exploring, you find some pretty cool stuff here. First of all, these crazy Valencians used to have a river that meandered through the city, but some time ago, they decided to get rid of the river, so they diverted it and turned the river bed into a giant park. Eric and I rented some bikes for 2 € and rode along the entire stretch of the park. (Word of advice: don´t rent a bike from a store that specializes in something other than bikes. We got ours from an internet cafe, which now that I think about it, was pretty dumb). My bike was meant for a girl about 5 feet tall, so I rode it like a clown bike the entire day. Eric´s kept making these horrible metallic grinding noises. Only 1 gear worked on both the bikes. When I took a closer inspection, I noticed how the wires on the gear shifters had been suspiciously severed. Oh, this couldn´t be good.

So, we rode these crappy bikes for almost 2 hours along the park, checking out the mega Cuidad de las Artes y las Ciencias complex that we couldn´t get into since they charge an arm and a leg for them. The buildings look like something you´d see at EPCOT Center...they have that futuristic look that you´d see in all the pulp magazines from the 50s with the flying cars and people in unitards walking around. We then rode our bikes to the other sights along the way: the giant "Gulliver´s Travels" kiddie playland, where the kids can pretend that they´re Lilliputians climbing over the creepy huge Spanish version of Gulliver; the dancing fountains and swan paddle boats on the city pond; and the Hooverville of all the homeless people living under one of the bridges (or it could just be all the backpackers who couldn´t find a place to stay in Valencia like us). After 2 hours of riding these bikes, our butts were killing us. They really were pieces of junk. It´s pretty sad when the bikes weren´t even worth the 2 € that you paid to rent them. But, we did get to see the Jardins de Turia in record time, so it that sense, it was priceless.

Another odd thing about Valencia that I´ve noticed is that the language suddenly changes. Just when you´re getting used to Spanish, you start seeing road signs appearing in a weird Spanish-French hybrid, which is what is known as Catalan. During Franco´s reign of terror, he made Spanish the only language spoken in Spain. But after he kicked the bucket, Valencians started relearning Catalan and pushed to change everything back over to it. So now what you´re seeing here is a "battle of the languages," where signage goes back and forth between Spanish and Catalan without any type of system or order. So as a tourista, it gets to be rather confusing and you wish they´d just pick one language or the other. But hey, that´s part of the backpacking experience: constantly throwing yourself into new places with new languages. It really keeps you on your toes and never gives you a dull moment.