20 years ago today – Day 52

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April 24 – an extra day in Benidorm

Somehow Mike told Josef Sanz, our Servas host in Valencia, that we’d arrive tomorrow and not today, and he isn’t prepared to receive us a day early so we are resting an extra day in Benidorm. I can handle that, though. I need to learn to enjoy myself.

I feel like being alone today, after last night’s drinking and frustrations. I enjoy a quiet breakfast in a sidewalk café alone, watching the street life and other tourists in the cafe. The town has a strange tourist mix of trendy, yuppie gays and over-weight bad-taste straights. I don’t feel like I’m part of either group but I do like strolling around the markets. I am itching to buy things, as if I am living here and don’t have to carry everything I buy from town to town.

I spent the afternoon on the beach absorbed in Anna Karenin. When I get to warm I go for a swim, my first swim in the Mediterranean on this trip. I find that realization curious since we have passed so many beaches so far, and they have all looked inviting. It is even stranger that Mike hasn’t had many dips since Sagres either. He has had a few though, and each time I ask him how it was he had replied, “Like a fresh mountain stream,” which did nothing to encourage me. Now I am thinking – and I know it’s Tolstoy’s writing that has got me thinking this way – that I have spent too much time as wall flower or perhaps a turtle when it comes to having fun. I need to try more things, take a chance once in a while.

Mike joins me on the beach. He doesn’t stay in the water as long as I do. It isn’t too sunny but that doesn’t stop the tourists from coming to the beach. Perhaps it’s like having an extra plate at an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord even when the food is boring – you want to make sure you are getting your money’s worth.

Mike has been enjoying his time alone too, his preferred mode of life it seems. He engages a young Icelandic man in conversation, who tells us Benidorm is one of the two most popular Spanish resorts for Icelanders. He doesn’t say what the other one is. Mike was born and partially raised in South Africa and knows how to say, “Pass the salt” in Xhosa, the pre-Dutch indigenous language with all its clicks and pops at the back of the throat. He has the Icelandic lad teach him how to say the same phrase in Icelandic, claiming that this will be a start in writing the first-ever Icelandic/Xhosa dictionary.

I have a three hour nap in the room from later afternoon to early evening. We opt to eat dinner out of our panniers in our room this evening, instead of going out. Mike stays in afterwards, as he hasn’t had a nap like I have. I go to Minerva for a couple drinks, and then check out the upstairs at People.


PHOTO 1: Benidorm beach scene, 1991
PHOTO 2: palms and bluff beside beach
PHOTO 3: Benidorm Island and seniors
PHOTO 4: Placa del Castell, Benidorm
PHOTO 5: gay night club in old town Benidorm