Los Molinos de Bournos

I'd come for some chill out time and to learn some Spanish but my stay at Los Molinos de Bournos (The Windmills of Bournos) was a great adventure in itself. From the first night I could see that this was a place where people had to look after thelselves. Help was provided when asked for but noone was going to mother you or help you get settled in. A place for people to test their own survival skills, physically and pschologically, not for the faint hearted.

After waiting a couple of hours I was picked up by Poala, a 75 year old german woman, in an old blue bus, she didn't seem to speak a lot of English but spoke very highly of a couple people at the farm. I arrived after dark and was greeted but noone showed too much interest in the new comer at first. I was shown ´the bedfort´, a small hut on the back of an old truck where I could sleep and the toilet where you had to wipe your own ass with your hand and a bottle of water. Apparently toilet paper doesn't compost to well, but at least I didn't have to face that until morning. After a day on the bike though, a shower was unmissable even though it was just cold water from a hose pipe. That's all you need though, simple but effective.

After three days I knew my way around the farm and had found work I both enjoyed and learned from. Of the the seven people who'd been there when I arrived three had left and two more had come meaning I was now the only native english speaker on the farm and rest were native german speakers. With the exception of Paola (the owner) they all spoke pretty good english but often reverted to german between themselves and at the dinner table. It is a rare experience for an english speaker to be excluded by language and I looked on it as a chance to understand the experience of non-english speakers. The exclusion is real even if unintentional but I was happy to chill out and spend some time in my own little world digesting earlier experiences and whenever I wanted to know what was going on I just had to ask and someone would fill me in.

I hadn't anticipated staying longer than a couple of weeks but somehow the place just grew on me. Tough as it is, it is not without fun and love. After being there a month I felt at home in the place and those of you that know me would have been surprised to see me in denim overalls, two woollen jumpers, surrounded by cats and completely comfortable. Since I arrived there had been a complete turnover of the woofers and I was now the longest resident woofer and most of the new comers were native english speakers. With each bunch of people who came through the culture and atmosphere of the place changed. This was the result of the freedom allowed each person to decide how they wanted to contribute to the farm. Not everyone found this easy, in fact it took most of us some adjusting to at first. As always when 10 people live and work together there were communtiy issues to sort out and in my second month I heard other people saying the same things I'd said after my first couple of weeks, then I found myself giving the same responses I'd heard before and being accused of contributing to a culture of blame. It was definately a time when we all learnt a lot about ourselves. Much of this I can't articulate but one thing was that mediating between people can be unhelpful if it prevents them from saying what they need to directly to one another, especially when they don´t have a previous relationship. There were good community times too, playing cards, chess, viking chess and most interestingly for me an ancient Japanese game called Go.

Amoungst all of this of course was the work. As I said, the beauty of this place, (apart from the amazing scenery), was you could choose (most of the time) what work you did and the choice was fairly broad. Tere was no shortage of work either gardening, building or with animals. Primarily I did building work, quite a bit of re-doing doors and windows and building various forms of fences but everything from painting to smashing through bedrock, cementing posts, fixing, cleaning and generally making order out of chaos. Gardening was the usual weeding and tilling soil, planting and transplanting, shovelling manure and removing rocks. As time went on I became more interested in animals as well, the real heart of Bornos, helping to walk and inject the goats and for a week or two taking care of the horse and learning how to ride and train it. This was quite stimulating and something I took on because several people had worked with it and said they could not get it to do what they wanted. It had run off into the neighbours wheat field a couple times, which was disastrous for neighbourly relations. Trying to strike the right mix of love and discipline I was doing okay but then an Austrian girl by the name of Andrea arrived who´d grown up with horses and was a complete natural. She began to take on working with horse but also taught me a few things about these intelligent and empathetic creatures.

Once a week I was entitled to a day off. Two of these I spent exploring the mountains in the neighbouring valley, a beautiful rugged landscape, dramatically shaped by water into twisting valleys full of caves and other rock formations. It was great just to wonder and explore by myself in a place that was big enough to be unknowable and wild enough to be unpredictable. One afternoon Bernado (Austrian permanent resident/foreman with whom I got on really well) and I went hunting for the source of one of the few permanent streams around. This proved almost impossible but was a fantastic adventure having an excuse to wander up countless mini-valleys with tributaries most of which required some climbing up small waterfalls and other rock formations. We even found a few pools where one could bathe in complete isolation.

We had some community times out too. We spent new years eve with a bunch of german/spanish bikies and discovered the spanish tradition of eating an olive with each dong of the clock at midnight. New Years day we went to the beach and I had my first swim in the mediteranean (remember new years is the middle of winter up here - what winter?). The best day though was a mountain biking adventure I had with Immogen, one of the toughest people (mentally) I've met, a real British trooper type. We rode the coastline of the Cabo de Gata National Park, which was mostly rugged and beautiful, real mountain bike riding. The first bit though was flat along a set of saltmarshes where they still mine salt. That was an interesting sight, but not nearly as good as the resident flamingoes! Aparently we were really lucky to see them so early in the year but there must of been at least 100, standing, flying, landing, not bunched up like you see on TV but just doing what flamingoes do while we watched for about 40mins. Later on in the day we discovered a couple of beautiful beeches, one of which, Genoveses, had this great area of sand dunes with gum trees that just seemed like an idyllic slice of Australia. It was a 50km day, a lot for Immogen who'd mainly just ridden in London and not done much mountain biking but we got home by 3pm so went and chilled in the bar for a couple of hours, a great end to a fantastic day.

So as you can see Bornos was a full on expereince. The whole time I was there I didn't think I would stay longer than another week or two but ended up spending two months there. In a sense it is the first placed I have lived away from home. I learnt a lot about farming, self sufficiency, community, games, and above all myself but not very much spanish. Eventually I took the decision to move on, and so one morning I got up packed my things, said my goodbyes, got back on my bike and rode out of there. A part of me will always remain there though and a part of Bornos will always be with me. A big thanks to Paola, Bernado and everyone else with whom I shared my time there.