Monday 22/5/2017.
Day two in Fuengirola. We walked to Castillo Sohail, only to discover it’s closed all week for an event. Gutted! We have a nasty habit of not checking things in advance and turning up when an event is on. Once, we nearly gatecrashed a wedding at Llancaiach Fawr. That was awkward. So we cheered ourselves up by doing some pole sits on a decorative lamppost.
We went to Café Nomad and had delicious vegan ice cream – vanilla, strawberry and chocolate with cream, strawberries, grapes and bananas. It was so delicious. Except for the bananas. They are the one fruit that we cannot stomach. The look, the texture, smell, and taste are all wrong. They’re the devil’s fruit. But we forced ourselves to eat them by covering them in ice cream and eating them with the other fruit to take away some of their nastiness. We always vow to try something new on holiday – in Venice it was pizza, in Fuengirola, it was bananas. Although technically, bananas aren’t new – we tried them as kids and hated them. The banana taste tormented us through the other fruit.
Roman ruins
We walked four miles to the Finca Del Secretario, the Roman ruins that are just at the side of the road. We were not expecting to find Roman ruins in Fuengirola! Workers discovered the ruins when digging out the ground for a railway. They date from the 1st-5 century AD. It was 26 degrees c, so we sat in the shade for a while. The ruins consist of a salting factory, with ten different sized salting tanks, baths, complete with mosaic flooring in the reception area, and a villa across the road that is yet to be excavated.
Driving drama
We caught the bus back to Cinta’s to hang out for a while then went to visit Neen’s uncle, Jerry. He took us to an abandoned, twisty country lane to learn to drive the car. Cat ended up down a dead end and had to do a multiple-point turn. Behind her was a tree, in front of her was like a cliff edge. And she couldn’t see where the bonnet ended to know when to stop. It was very stressful! We made Neen stand near the cliff edge to make sure Cat didn’t drive off it. We weren’t sure the insurance company would be very understanding of “we accidentally drove it off a cliff.” Whereas Neen’s life insurance would pay out in the event of an accident.
We were meant to go to a bar with Jerry to meet Fast Eddie, the last surviving member of the original Motorhead line up, but Cinta wasn’t feeling well, so we took her back home. We wandered to a fruiteria and bought lots of fruit for only €5. This included kumquats, which we’d never tried before. Fuengirola was all about new fruits!
Read Day 1.
Read Day 3.