Regional Geographic presents...

So yesterday I decided I was going to make a bit of tourism. Recently I have heard of this beautiful sanctuary called La Balma that is about 2 hours drive from where I live.

That amount of kilometers (4 hours in total because one’s got to get back home) looked reasonable for a Monday after lunch trip.

So we jumped into the car, we pumped some gas because we knew we were going to get in no man’s land got some water and hit the road.

We passed some towns in the way but as we were driving, the roads became narrower; the speed limit lower and there was not one single soul around. We passed through several abandoned small villages, a river that I didn’t even know about and that it carried no water.

GPS verified that we were not lost even it might look like it. So we kept on driving just to finally see a worn out by the sun sign that indicated the monastery was 3 km away. We got there. Somehow it reminded me of Rivendell except for the lack of super tall trees. We parked the car, and walked towards the monastery.

There was nobody around. But since we were in the middle of nowhere it didn’t quite bother us. A few minutes later… a closed fence.  I looked up and there was a surveillance camera on top. So I tried to say hello, to see if they’d be kind enough to show us the place since we had taken the longest ride.

Nobody answered and I didn’t dare to climb the fence or anything because I didn’t want to get into trouble for trespassing property, even though it was not private property.  There was this sign that had been torn apart except the French part and it clearly said: Mondays closed. The rest of days open from 15’00 to 17’00. Wow!

I have been to Montserrat monastery before, which is much bigger and it basically is open every day. So what’s up with this one?

I got so frustrated I started to laugh my ass off. To see the faces of people… Having taken that trip to the middle of nowhere, just to arrive to a beautiful emplacement and find a fence that forbids you to get in there.

So we head back to the car and back to civilization. On our way back, I saw a wild Spanish ibex. These animals are pretty hard to spot, so at least it wasn’t a complete waste of a trip. Since we were the only ones around and didn’t bother quite much the animal, I managed to take a photo that considering it was taken with a pretty bad camera it came off really good.

Not a National Geographic wide angle Carl Zeiss photo, but a photo indeed.

On our way back home we stopped at Morella (a small medieval village) but this I’ll tell you in the next post. Otherwise it’d be way too long. 




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