Sunday at Son Bou
Sunday at Son Bou, and not a menu del dia to be found. Of course there wasn’t. The bargain lunchtime menu is a weekday thing. We were hoping the cafe Ali had scouted on Tripadvisor would have its doors open, but no such luck. After a couple of circuits of the small seaside resort in a state of soft alarm at the prices on the menus in front of each establishment, we were eventually swayed by the avuncular charms of the septuagenarian proprietor of the bar at the end of the precinct. Food acceptable, portion sizes miniscule, final bill distinctly hefty. Four euros and twenty cents for a flipping cortado, don’t you know! Four euros for two medium sized gulps of coffee. I’d paid one fifty somewhere away from the coast for one of these. We made a note to purchase a freezer block and some tin foil and bring sandwiches on the next weekend outing to the coast. I could bring my own coffee in a flask too for that matter. In the background, a CD player reeled out reggae makeovers of famous hits. “Beds are Burning” was being played at the moment. For some an anthem speaking out against injustice, but here, a jaunty Sunday afternoon grin-along with a dash of calypso thrown into the mix to lend the place an air of reassuring mediocrity. I presented my credit card to our smiling host and prepared for the hit. “No thank you, we’ll skip dessert.” He was a delightful old rascal, clapping my shoulder with a wide grin as he encouraged my attempts to order from the menu in Spanish. Still a rascal with his eyes on my credit card though.
And then to the beach. If I’d been looking forward to the long sand blown strip that hugs the south coast of the island here, I was soon going to be disappointed. The only thing didn’t seem to be sandy was the sea bed, and a foray into the surprisingly choppy waters revealed a sharp and rocky expanse beneath my feet that I hadn’t been expecting. No bodysurfing here then - not unless I wanted to come out of the sea sporting a fetching new array of weeping grazes all over my body. After a brief dip, I gave up and returned to the novel I was reading. If all else fails, fall asleep in the sun. Always a good motto for a place like this.
Of course there was another motive for coming here. Although it was one where it didn’t look as if my usual obsessive planning had materialised quite as I’d hoped. Ali made it quite clear I’d be going on my own. It was quite a long way to that rock, especially over a course of unrelentingly soft white sand. And any notions I had of walking over two kilometres of duckboards through the dunes behind the beach were soon cast aside to be buried in the sand that I very quickly found myself wading through. Was it going to be worth all this hassle - just to photograph a rock? I reminded myself that I found that rock after the light had vanished, just three days earlier when we’d walked to the point from the opposite direction. Bearing in mind our disappointment at the beach itself, this was going to be my only chance. I kept on walking, making painfully slow progress as my boots filled with a billion grains of fine white sand. Two kilometres took three quarters of an hour on foot. But eventually, and with time to spare before sunset, I arrived at the rock.
It looked like a huge, stubby fish, sculpted from the sea bed, top heavy and mounted on a plinth in the shallows for all to see. It was the rock I’d come looking for on that earlier visit, one of the very few landscape photography subjects I’d known about before boarding the plane. On the crown stood an unpaid model that very briefly left the scene just once during close to an hour that I spent here. Apart from that, it barely moved at all, as if some passing tog had superglued its feet to the top of the stack. I returned to the spot at the bottom of the low cliffs that I’d found a few days earlier, balancing on that wobbly rock once more as I settled into the scene, a soft yellow sun glowing gently as it lowered towards the horizon. A passing dog came to say hello and see what I was doing - the owners kept away from the strange man concentrating on the rock with the seagull on top, juddering back and forth on his unstable platform as if in some strange quasi-religious trance.
Here in my happy zone, time flew by like this particular seagull didn’t, and it wasn’t long at all before the blue hour was announcing an intention to head for the curtains and usher in the darkening veil of dusk. It was time to start the long walk back to the car, which was ten minutes of even more sand beyond the place on the beach from where I’d set off earlier. This was going to be a bit tiresome. I did at least have a torch. The things we do to get a picture at times.
Sunday at Son Bou
Sunday at Son Bou, and not a menu del dia to be found. Of course there wasn’t. The bargain lunchtime menu is a weekday thing. We were hoping the cafe Ali had scouted on Tripadvisor would have its doors open, but no such luck. After a couple of circuits of the small seaside resort in a state of soft alarm at the prices on the menus in front of each establishment, we were eventually swayed by the avuncular charms of the septuagenarian proprietor of the bar at the end of the precinct. Food acceptable, portion sizes miniscule, final bill distinctly hefty. Four euros and twenty cents for a flipping cortado, don’t you know! Four euros for two medium sized gulps of coffee. I’d paid one fifty somewhere away from the coast for one of these. We made a note to purchase a freezer block and some tin foil and bring sandwiches on the next weekend outing to the coast. I could bring my own coffee in a flask too for that matter. In the background, a CD player reeled out reggae makeovers of famous hits. “Beds are Burning” was being played at the moment. For some an anthem speaking out against injustice, but here, a jaunty Sunday afternoon grin-along with a dash of calypso thrown into the mix to lend the place an air of reassuring mediocrity. I presented my credit card to our smiling host and prepared for the hit. “No thank you, we’ll skip dessert.” He was a delightful old rascal, clapping my shoulder with a wide grin as he encouraged my attempts to order from the menu in Spanish. Still a rascal with his eyes on my credit card though.
And then to the beach. If I’d been looking forward to the long sand blown strip that hugs the south coast of the island here, I was soon going to be disappointed. The only thing didn’t seem to be sandy was the sea bed, and a foray into the surprisingly choppy waters revealed a sharp and rocky expanse beneath my feet that I hadn’t been expecting. No bodysurfing here then - not unless I wanted to come out of the sea sporting a fetching new array of weeping grazes all over my body. After a brief dip, I gave up and returned to the novel I was reading. If all else fails, fall asleep in the sun. Always a good motto for a place like this.
Of course there was another motive for coming here. Although it was one where it didn’t look as if my usual obsessive planning had materialised quite as I’d hoped. Ali made it quite clear I’d be going on my own. It was quite a long way to that rock, especially over a course of unrelentingly soft white sand. And any notions I had of walking over two kilometres of duckboards through the dunes behind the beach were soon cast aside to be buried in the sand that I very quickly found myself wading through. Was it going to be worth all this hassle - just to photograph a rock? I reminded myself that I found that rock after the light had vanished, just three days earlier when we’d walked to the point from the opposite direction. Bearing in mind our disappointment at the beach itself, this was going to be my only chance. I kept on walking, making painfully slow progress as my boots filled with a billion grains of fine white sand. Two kilometres took three quarters of an hour on foot. But eventually, and with time to spare before sunset, I arrived at the rock.
It looked like a huge, stubby fish, sculpted from the sea bed, top heavy and mounted on a plinth in the shallows for all to see. It was the rock I’d come looking for on that earlier visit, one of the very few landscape photography subjects I’d known about before boarding the plane. On the crown stood an unpaid model that very briefly left the scene just once during close to an hour that I spent here. Apart from that, it barely moved at all, as if some passing tog had superglued its feet to the top of the stack. I returned to the spot at the bottom of the low cliffs that I’d found a few days earlier, balancing on that wobbly rock once more as I settled into the scene, a soft yellow sun glowing gently as it lowered towards the horizon. A passing dog came to say hello and see what I was doing - the owners kept away from the strange man concentrating on the rock with the seagull on top, juddering back and forth on his unstable platform as if in some strange quasi-religious trance.
Here in my happy zone, time flew by like this particular seagull didn’t, and it wasn’t long at all before the blue hour was announcing an intention to head for the curtains and usher in the darkening veil of dusk. It was time to start the long walk back to the car, which was ten minutes of even more sand beyond the place on the beach from where I’d set off earlier. This was going to be a bit tiresome. I did at least have a torch. The things we do to get a picture at times.