Day 10

Sant Llorenç de Montgai. The nightlife at the campsite was exciting. The owner gifted me a cold can of coca cola to take to my tent and introduced me to the night guard. I had no idea there was a night guard, patrolling the  premises after midnight but I wasn’t surprised. “What are you guarding me for?” I asked. “Mainly kids looking for trouble and making noise at night,” he answered. His shift was just about to begin. I walked to the sanitary building where to my surprise dozens of bats were flying around the little square in-between 2 buildings. I tried to control my reflexes because they were all around me. They have a perfect radar system though, so I knew they wouldn’t hit me. A loud sound, kind of in-between chirping and singing came from the gutters around one of the buildings and it was there they entered and flew out off again. Inside there must have been hundreds of them, I saw some peeping out. Did they have nests in there, were they catching insects to feed them? I looked at the spectacle for a long time, sometimes people entered the building but nobody seemed surprised or scared or enchanted, like I was. I guess this was a regular event. I drank the coca cola next to my tent in the dark. A cat was hunting and then another animal arrived, too big to be a cat. When it got closer it turned out to be a fox, passing me at a few metres, wandering around for a bit, then walking in the middle of the main road towards the entrance were the garbage containers were. In my tent, a rather big centipede had installed itself and didn’t want to be caught. I on the other hand didn’t want to go to sleep until I was alone inside. They are venomous and can inflict quite painful bites. Despite the name, no centipede has exactly 100 feet, their pairs of legs are an odd number ranging from 15 to 191 pairs. I caught it in the end, it had the size of my middle finger, I didn’t count the legs.

This morning I went for a walk through the mountains, in the footsteps of the Neanderthals who lived here. I tried to find a bakery or a shop in the village but failed and had a coffee in the restaurant. The waitress told me that her father was the village baker but he retired and since more and more people went to Balaguer to do their shopping, only 10 minutes by car, nobody was really interested to take over the business. The same thing had happened to the grocery store. My plan was to go back to the campsite, pack quickly and leave before temperatures rose but when I arrived at my 100m2 field, the unimaginable had happened: my tent was flooded. Not for a moment had I thought about checking where the lowest points in the field were, rain was out of the question, but I hadn’t taken enthusiastic tree watering into account. In one of the other fields somebody had put a hose and left the water running. I evacuated everything to the next and higher field and was angry for a moment until I saw who the culprit was: the night guard, now on watering duty. He must have slept very little. He apologised at least 3 times and felt very guilty but I assured him it would be fine, and that the trees were happy. I told him about the fox and he started smiling. “She kind of grew up here,” he said. “Sometimes she eats out of my hand. She’s still wild though.”

I asked one of the other men, who had just finished cleaning all the areas with a leave blower, for some help fixing C. (nothing serious) but he didn’t have what I needed (small metal rings). The staff was huge, everything was spotless at all times, sanitary buildings, fields, paths. Did I already mention the air castle, merry-go-around, speaker announcements of activities taking place?

Time to go.