Queue up: Theme song to The Return of Batman

It was a long day, and it’s 9:45 PM as I begin to write this. For those of you who know me it is WAAAYYYY past my bedtime. So this will be short-ish.

We woke up to a clearing in the sky, but it looked ominous in the direction we were supposed to hike….a 6 mile hike that we would be on for hours. So we decided to split the proverbial baby. We began by going underground to an even more spectacular cave, Cueva de la Pileta. Again, no photos allowed (BOO).

This cave was located on private land, and only 25 people at a time could enter to ensure all our hot bodies (I’m speaking of temperature here people…come on…keep it clean, this is a family blog) didn’t raise the temperature of the cave and irritate the bats or compromise the cave paintings.

Speaking of which, this one cave has the largest collection of cave paintings in southern Europe….possibly even all of Europe, but honestly I can’t remember all the details because the guide was throwing around tens of thousands of years like they were rice at a wedding.

In a nutshell, the oldest paintings found in the cave were 40,000 years old (painted with yellow ochre), the oldest bones found in the cave were 100,000 years old. We got to see a pile of those – weird, and wonderful in a macbre sort of way.

The cave paintings were the headliners of the cave. We saw one instance that was like the Neanderthal version of graffiti. They would paint over each other’s paintings, but tens of thousands of years apart. Yellow paintings were the oldest, black charcoal paintings the newest at 4,000 years old. The newer the paintings the less figurative, and more schematic. Think of a line painting Picasso would have done of a horse, that would have been 40,000 years old. Now think of a stick figure a 5-year old would do, that is 4,000 years old. The guide pointed out one painting that was a symbol of female fertility, in the shape of her body part (which in my opinion was questionable), Peter in complete awe leaned over and whispered in my ear “Paleolithic porn”.

It was definitely a different experience to walk through this cave. A farmer discovered it in 1912, and his progeny built the steps we walked on in 1932 so scientists could explore the cave. They did this after a full day of farming in the fields. Now imagine, there are no lights in the cave. Unlike other caves we have been in that have lighting along the way, we were given 4 lanterns for 15 people and had to help light the way for each other….for an hour….on slippery hand hewn steps…that were there for almost 100 years….that many many people walked on…..that were slippery and wet because of the record rains…..viewing cave paintings from 40,000 years ago….it was really that dramatic.

Ok after all that we emerged to sunny skies. Had a tailgate of sandwiches and the most amazing cookies set out on the windshield of the van. Then someone, not saying who, decided this was too much sun for us all at once, and we and set off for the storm covered mountains. Most of us decided to do a 1.5 mile hike to town, umbrellas in hand (is it really a hike if you have an umbrella?), to meet in a bar at the end. The less hearty of us waited in the bar. Of which there were only two. Of which one…well…I won’t name names….but those of you who know Peter can guess which group he was in, that’s all I’m saying.

I’ll leave it there for the night and pick it up again tomorrow.