After yesterday’s traipse around Granada we took it slower today starting with a walk up to the bakers to get some pain au chocolate. As described previously, like all shops, the baker here is carefully disguised as a house lest anyone find it and purchase something. To aid this further all shops also open as infrequently as possible shutting just at the time when it would be most convenient to buy something. It really is like a trip back to the 1970’s or a trip to France… Now.
Breakfast out the way we set off to the La Alpujurra region on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada aiming for three villages Pampaneria, Bubion and Capileria. These were reached up a winding mountain road which Helen treated as some sort of white knuckle ride! We stopped at Pampaneria and went for a wander around the streets looking at the well maintained, white washed, houses. A feature of the houses is the high chimneys on the roofs, each having a little hat presumably to prevent snow coming down.
Rugs seemed to be a speciality of this area and there were examples of all colours, shapes and sizes along the twisty footpaths through the villages (no hiding the wares here!). As luck would have it we have been looking for a new rug for the lounge and to date hadn’t found anything suitable but here, half way up a mountain,was something that appeared ideal and was likely £200 cheaper than we expected to pay. So we bought it, you can see it on the picture below furthest away from the camera, but we were quite a long way through the transaction before the question “how are we going to get this home” surfaced.
I have form when it comes to bringing home rugs from far flung places. I once brought home a rug in a rucksack from a shop just outside of Agra so I knew that it was possible to do. We were assured by the shopkeeper that it only weighed six kilos but it felt an awful lot more than that when I lugged it back to the car. Right now it appears to be a toss up between the rug and my dirty clothes as to which one makes it back to Reading so check back in a few days to see which one makes it!
