1995 Eivissa (Ibiza): I rave all night

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Gran Canaria

 

1995

3 Months

NYC

A Jewel

Eivissa

Tree Abuse

ECO

Black Friday

Bocadillo

Danger!

Estofado

Sangria

Rave

Cannibis

Camino Viejo

Neutrinos

Weather

Roosters

JCS

The PM

Plongeé

Smila

Customs

O. J. Verdict

1995 Eivissa (Ibiza): Fish Monger

A Roar

MacWorld

Padinkos

Bye E, Hello GC

Gran Canaria

Where

A Tour

How

Food

Yumbo

Las Palmas

Playa

1995 Gran Canaria: Potpourri

Norteños

More Food

Irishmen

Heading Home

USA

With Dad

Back at Home

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1995 Eivissa (Ibiza): I rave all night

Friday 22 Sept 1995

Krystof 1028 finds me at Cala d'en Serra, in the ruins of a hotel constructed without the proper permits and then abandoned. An all-night party has been going on, survived the sunrise, and continues into the balmy morning. Krystof (at left) and I, in his Mercedes, just now drove over from Fernandito's. We took the same bumpy hard-packed roads as Kathryn and I did seven years ago. Not much has changed except the incredibly ugly cast concrete electrical poles which seem to spring up everywhere.

The ruins, at the northernmost tip of Eivissa, are situated away from everything else. There are between 75 and 150 people here, from the ages of newborn to 70, all in various states of sleepiness. Some are dancing to the techno-pop beat, others are sitting on the stone walls of what once was envisioned as the exclusive playground of hotel guests.

Bedsheets, converted into fluroescent banners replete with symbols from reggae and eastern traditions surround the dance area. Helium-filled balloons fly from every surface. A DJ orchestrates the music from what would have been an impressive corner suite. Several enterprising folks have brought portable kitchens and are preparing and selling all sorts of foods, from soba to chai, at prices that range from free to the outrageous. Small children, festooned with ribbons and flowers, run all over, followed by a small pack of dogs.

As the sun rises to about 40 degrees above the horizon, people start to wander off the dance floor, though some die-hards continue to bump and grind with the assistance of watermelon slices someone is handing out. Up to now nobody has noticed me blind-writing on my Newton, holding it unobtrusively in my lap. (I'll spell-check later.) A local bar owner notices and walks over; we speak for a while in a mix of Spanish, German, and English. Before taking his leave, he invites me to a party to be thrown the following Sunday.

Old-style wall With my feet moving to the beat, I leave the party via the only road that leads to the ruins. It's an uphill climb which gives me several stunning views of what would certainly have been a spectacular hotel. A few minutes later I walk under electrical lines. I follow them, heading off-road through the trees. It's quiet, and other than the cicadas no sounds can be heard in the arid woods. I follow what appears to be a long-abandoned dirt road which runs alongside an old stone wall (thumbnail at right), the kind that apear all over the island.

Agave cactus Nopal patch All of a sudden I come acoss a house with a rather luxurious garden of nopal - prickly pear cactus (thumbnail at right), century plants, agave (thumbnail at right), and some stuff I can't recognize. Everything is overgrown but still impressive. The adjacent half-size carport holds a harvester that was drawn by a horse or small tractor. Next lies what appears to be a pull-seeder, perhaps dragged annually, several months before the harvester.

Through the woods I catch a glimpse of a lighthouse; the map in my fanny-pack says it's the Far des Moscarter. I set off towards it. The entire structure is painted in a huge black-and-white spiral barber-pole pattern. At times I stay on a long-abandoned dirt road, at others I go cross-country through dry riverbeds. Soon a humming fills my ears, drowning out even the cicadias. It's source is the power box for the lighthouse, inside a 3-meter tall concrete bunker. The aging transformer is working badly, spewing electrons into the air, making the hair on my arms stand on end.

Giving the building wide berth, I head through the an open gate in the meter-high whitewashed concrete wall and walk to the foot of the lighthouse. Tourist grafitti is scratched into and written all over the base of thc tower. Above the door is a sign, in tile, warning visitors about the attitudes of the local constabulary viz-a-viz defacement of public property. At the bottom of this series of custom-baked tiles, in very small print, is the name of its maker:

Harvey Pavings
3 Gothic Close
Wilmington Kent DA1 1PR
0332 228804

Litter surrounds the area, from paper to rusted-out machinery. Such is the detrius of human visits. Defacement and litter. I sigh and move on.

The wall encloses an area about 100 meters on a side. The northern edge of this area has no wall. Instead, the boundary is marked by the authority of cliffs. As I walk over to the edge I feel a familiar fascinating tingle of mortality - gravity doesn't care who you are. A great distance below the crystal-clear water crashes into the rocks, raising plumes of white froth. The mist doesn't reach me; I'm too high up. I sit for a while, enjoying the view. The sky is a rich blue, unobscured by clouds. From time to time an airplane lifts off from Eivissa airport and dissapears to the North. The jets drown out the sounds of the party, sporadically coming to me through the forest through which I walked.

To the right and left of me stretches the coastline. Cala Portinatx, to my left, is a collection of multi-story white tourist hutches that stretch into the Mediterranean. I start to walk towards the town, keeping at least a meter away from the edge. The overhang worries me; I don't want to find out that it can't hold my wieght by having it collapse. Sadly, litter is scattered along the way.

Views along the crennilated coastline are varied and breathtaking. The clear water, which shows off the white sands and coastal rocks, fades into a light blue-green (or black, over the kelp forests) and then into a deep tranquil dark blue. Only the white froth that marks the top of breaking waves gives a feeling of depth to a viewer on the cliffs, high above.

After a while I reach the first beaches of Portinatx. Immediately I sense a difference. Unlike Benniràs, the beach to which we've been going, this is tourist country. Pale skin, brand new bathing suits, and cameras are everywhere to be seen. All shop signs appear in five languages, each with a small flag symbol. I walk through town, noticing that all the bars, cantinas, and restaurants feature virtually the same menu. Everyone has the same special: mixed grill. Hungry and thirsty, I stop in the supermercado to pick up three-quarters of a liter of bananna-strawberry yogurt. It's gone before I leave the city limits.

The road out of town is hot and dusty, but the local flora are interesting, and I'm not bored. Two kilometers later I find my self overlooking a very little cove, an inviting alternative to what I just left. Only a few buildings are here, and I can count the beachgoers on two hands. I walk further down the road until I find the turnoff. A sign reads "Cala Xarraca".

Cala Xarraca is as nice up close as it looked from the cliffs above. The short side-road makes three hairpin curves before straightening out between two small corn patches and ending in front of the only bistro. (I know about the road from leaving Cala Xarraca. I entered by making a bee-line directly to the end of the side-road, a trek that leads me through the corn and left me standing on a fragile adobe roof, from which I quickly climbed off.)

The walk from the road's end to the beach takes seconds. I walk among the families to find a quiet spot to sit and remove my hiking boots. The shade is cool, but I want to be cooler yet. I doff my Tilley hat and tee-shirt and head into the inviting surf. The water is envigorating: clean and cold. As I float on my back, from my perspective a cruise ship in the distance travels between the pink icebergs of my toes. I notice the difference in temperature between the surface water and the layers through which my hands lazily traverse. After a while I leave the water, don my hat and shirt (though not in that order), and leave Cala Xarraca with boots in hand.

By the time I've followed the twisty little road back up the hill, my feet are almost dry. I sit on the edge of a curb on the main road and use my socks to dislodge as much of the remaining sand as is possible. When I stand up and head off down the road towards Sant Joan, my feet crunch on the sand remaining, but only a little.

The road from the coastline twists and turns as it rises inland over seven kilometers. Just before I reach the crest of the last hill that I'll have to cross today, just before my path changes to a gentle coast into town, I meet two German women on bicycle. They're somewhat lost. "We're planning on doing Eivissa cross-country," the older one, the one with the cigarette hanging from her lower lip says to me. This sounds like an achieveable goal, I think. I become less sure when she tells me that I have another ten kilometers to go before I arrive in San Joan. (I know the entire coast to town distance to be less that, and I've been walking for a while.)

Once we confer with the map they're carrying I understand part of the problem: they're not comfortable with reading it. In the most cautionary tone I have, I orient them, explain how the topographic lines might be of help to those crossing unfamiliar terrain, and bid them good luck. We end the conference and move in our respective directions.

I coast through the remaining two kilometers and arrive in Sant Joan just as the sun's grip on the day is beginning to weaken. I shower at ECO and have a belated lunch at Fernandito's. Fernandito, Thomás, and I watch a Spanish TV news broadcast about the meeting of European Union heads of state on the neighboring island of Mallorjca. A few minutes after a show about the ecosystems surrounding the California brown bear comes on I excuse myself and write this journal in the restaurant's outdoor section. Shortly thereafter Shraddha comes by in her Jeep and asks me whether I'd like to with them to Benniràs. I close my Newton and head off to the beach.

Later that evening I set my wristwatch back by one hour.

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