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By Mathias

I spend two weeks in this remote place with David Skov. A very interesting experience. Superb climbing, excellent weather, great place... Fred joined us for three days.

This was my first encounter with this friend of Fred's and it turned out to be a very learning experience for me (and Dave?) in ways to survive in the jungle of southern Spain. We met in Bristol where Dave was staying at Fred's place sleeping under the kitchen table. Dave was bringing all his gear to El Chorro as he was leaving England at the same time. I had brought quite a lot of stuff as well, so we where pretty packed arriving at El Chorro sunday afternoon.

Skov had been here before so he knew where and what to do (climb). We camped in the beautiful orange valley and stayed there for the two weeks only leaving a couple of days to Granada to skii. It was good - great climbing on brilliant sunny rock. In these two weeks I got to know David's creative cooking abilities. Pretty interesting stuff. One course in particular is hard to forget: One evening we went up to El Chorro to do some shopping as usual. Skov was this evenings cook and after a quick look around the tiny shop, he had decided: He was going to treat me with one of his Rice-Specialities. Sounded good. But the ingredients was a big puzzle to my narrow minded brain. Pudding rice, tuna and olives with anchovies... I politely suggested normal rice and maybe some salt and pepper but Skov knew was he was doing and we left the shop.

We went back to the tents (a half-hours walk on the railway track) and started the cooking immediately. The preparations where very simple - boil the rice and pour in the olivies and tuna afterwards. I warned David about cooking the rice too long as it would turn into porridge. It ended up in being some halfcooked ricepudding with some extremely disgusting olives with anchovies and some cold tuna on top. The rice didn't have any taste as we didn't have any salt. It was a nightmare..But okay - now four years later I can finally eat olivies again, tuna is still a bit traumatic to eat, but the anchovies is impossible for me to eat still.

Fred joined us for the last week which was good fun. We drove off to Granada to do three days of skiing in the Sierra Nevada. It was a couple of days dominated by servere sunburns, some good offspiste skiing in jeans and with no gloves (cold!), some excellent fiesta grande in the centre of Granada. David has a lot of excellent photos from the trips, which we might get hold of one day.