Kings of the Beats: Part One

 Saturday 5th March 

A plan to visit a castle, forty minutes out of the city, come to an abrupt end when a group of tired teachers get off at the wrong train station miles from anywhere.

On the way back towards Valencia, Hamish had an idea. 

“Why don’t we get off at the next stop, Silla, and find a way to visit the lake, Pobles del Sud, that’s a few miles away?”I was interested. Hamish had mentioned the lake a few times; a lake you could see the sea from and vice-versa. Reputedly, the area had some of the best paella in the Valencian region, too. 

Nobody else was interested, but me and Hamish jumped off at Silla station. Leaving the train station, we came to the sleepiest town we’d ever seen - not a single shop was open, and the quiet was unsettling after the constant noise of Falles-time Cabañal. The sound of firecrackers and explosions intermittently broke the silence whilst we worked out our next move. It was a 25-minute drive to the town of El Palmar beside the lake, or a three-hour walk. After discovering there were no buses and no taxis, and spurred on with a desire to not be beaten and return, embarrassed, to Valencia, we started to walk. 

Sheer stupidity, really. With both of us unfamiliar with the area and neither with much phone battery, we carried on regardless. 

“Why don’t we hitchhike?” Hamish suggests nonchalantly. 

Well, I’m out for an experience. 

Trying to hail a lift was tricky at first, despite both of us being (I think, anyway) pretty unthreatening characters. Eventually, however, a black car pulled over to the side of the road and the driver asked us where we were going. 

“El Palmar, is that cool?” The driver nodded yes, get in. The guy was from Cameroon, a laid-back dude called Anol, who lived in Spain with his Polish wife. We drove the 25-minutes to El Palmar in almost constant silence, with bits of conversation here and there in English, Spanish and broken French - Anol’s main language. 

We soon discovered why the walk would’ve taken us three hours; as the crow flies, we could’ve walked from Silla to El Palmar in probably just over an hour, but the roads there zig-zagged erratically across and between the endless rice paddies they were laid through. Around us the rice paddies hemmed the car into narrow lanes of dirt track, and in the distance mountains loomed blue and strong. 

Eventually we came to the end of our dirt-track road and Anol stopped the car just outside of the town. “Muchas gracias, man”, I said in broken Spanish and handed him ten euros for the trouble. He tried to wave it away initially but me and Hamish insisted; without his help we would’ve been lost to the maze of rice-paddy roads that seemed endless. We got a quick picture and went on our way, leaving Anol to navigate those roads one more time.