Tara's adventures in Andalucia

There are times in life, even for a 33 year old who tends to stand on her own two feet, when you need your mummy. And going on a road trip around Spain to find the elusive ideal Wildfitness location, for me, is one. This is because, when I check out a place I am acutely sensitive to ‘Wildness’ – the depth of the silence, the swingability of the trees, the secret spots up rivers, the right-weighted and smooth-factor of rocks lying about etc.

But when it comes to rooms, I say ‘good!’ if I see a light bulb and running water. My mother, however, is a lady of taste and style who likes her creature comforts. She can tell whether a house has an aesthetic structure, whose lines are pleasing, whose paintings speak of real stories and whose colours pick up on the elements of the environment AND whose creature comforts work.

Essential consultant as she was on this trip, she hasn’t left Africa for a while. This is a woman who tries to make microwaves play movies, mistaking them for TVs. She was to meet me at the airport in Spain and she had no mobile phone and only Kenya Shillings. She missed her connecting flight and lost her luggage. Our ancestors were incredible at surviving in their natural environment, but, transport them to Amsterdam today and they would struggle, I now know.

How we found each other I don’t fully understand.

The parameters involved in finding the perfect Wild location are so rubitzian (rubitz – cube like (?)) that I have to say after extensive research, part of me offered the problem up to the gods, hoping that the force would be with us.

We needed to find a place that was short haul from the UK (where most Wild ones reside), hot in March / April, was accessible, but also remote, had a natural body of water nearby, had availability, had owners with whom you could do business, had enough rooms but not too many and had deep authenticity, silence, nature and soul.

After a month on the internet I had a short list of 8 places to see. However, in the end the obvious, and only choice came from a recommendation from a Wild one (Muchos Gracious Nathalie).

We arrived first in this field:

Where the tom-tom told us firmly was our destination, and then immediately ran out of batteries so we had to use the position of the sun and sounds and scents in the air to find our way onwards.

Mature vines, jasmine, hibiscus, orange trees blooming reverently over a historic beautiful Cortijo.

That the owner Genareo is the most coolest Spanish aristocratic, twinkly eyed, caring, funny dude ever. He had a dog called Tara, and delighted in telling me to be quiet and stop peeing on the floor before explaining that, of course, he was talking to the canine Tara, not the lady Tara. And when we were cutting a deal over laundry (which on account of regular sweating, Wildfitness includes as part of our offering), he said: ‘You see, some people, they have a lot of laundry, and others’ he made a brief gesture to my pink trousers and only jumper get up that I have worn every day since arriving, ‘others, they don’t have so much’. You need a serious amount of twinkle in the eye to get away with that. Genareo is one of 9 siblings who was brought up in the Cortijo.

If you aren’t sure whether you are, you probably aren’t, in love. We were sure we were in love with the Cortijo, and so we called up Colin in Kenya and told him to join us.

On further investigations we found:

A large lake that you can walk to through only wilderness and a couple of sunflower fields that is great swimming and allows no motorised things on it.

A mountain (me on the way up).

Me on the way down.

Deep silence within which you can hear the stars twinkle.

Me doing a handstand to the stars