Senderismo en los Cahorros

This past week felt like the longest week of my life.. which is crazy since I was sick on Monday and slept all day.  So I only had a 4 day week of school.  But luckily the weekend came and was soooo fun and so tiring!!! I took so many unexpected adventures around Granada.. things I didn't even know existed.  Friday night, a few of us decided to go out for sangría and hang out.  We went to a little tapas bar to begin with where we made friends with the owner and the owner's cousin.  They gave us extremely cheap drinks and were so nice.  Then we decided to go to another little bar that looked fun.  Later in the night we went home, we knew we had a big day of hiking ahead of us on Saturday.

Sarah, Chante, Me

In a lot of the restaurants, there are random pig legs hanging from the ceiling.. at first it was really gross to look at, but the more I see them, the more I get used to them being there.

Saturday morning, I woke up bright and early to meet at Isabel la Católica.  While I was waiting for the other girls to meet me, I saw a lady with the brightest orange hair I've ever seen.  I'm not sure why she thought this looked good, but it was something I had to take a picture of!

pumpkin head

After meeting a few girls at Isabel la Católica, we walked down to a bus stop across the river to meet up with the rest of our group to go hiking in Los Cahorros.  I wasn't exactly sure what we were getting ourselves into, but it turned out to be one of the best days I've had in Granada so far.  We took a 30 minute bus ride to Monachil, a pueblo outside of Granada.  We walked through the city and began our adventure on the trails of Los Cahorros.  There are a lot of pictures on this blog; I hope you enjoy the beautiful scenery that we saw!

Monachil

Before we even started our hike this was what we saw.. the beautiful Sierra Nevada in the background.  I can't imagine what all this looks like when the trees have leaves!

There was a part where we had to walk over a small suspended bridge.  Jamie and Eric decided that they wanted to take the Indiana Jones route and walk through the aquaduct.  Not a route I wanted to take!

livin on the edge.. literally

There were several suspended bridges that we walked over, this was the longest one.  There was a sign in front of it that said we were only allowed to have 4 people on it at a time.

Some of the trails were very, very small spaces.  As you can see in this picture, there is a mountain on one side and a river on the other.  Makes it so you really have to watch your footing as you go through this hike.  When we were passing an area like this we saw rock climbers.  One of the guys in my class, Devin, goes rock climbing here all the time!! He says it's absolutely amazing.

There were even some parts that weren't big enough to get by just walking.  So we had to plant our feet and hang on to the handles  for dear life!  There were many spots like this.

Brittany

And parts where we had to duck-walk through.  This trail is only for people that are hardcore. haha

We walked through a cave, this is what we saw on the other side, it was absolutely gorgeous.  In the caves, there were rocks to climb on, except it was very muddy and wet.  One of the guys we were with is like a monkey, so he was climbing on all the high rocks.. crazy!

Being a swimmer came in handy as we were walking through some parts.  There was a part of the hike where we had to jump down onto the rocks in the stream below because the trail was too small to walk on, and then lift ourselves back up onto the trail.  Some people had problems getting back up, but since it was like lifting myself out of the pool, it was easy for me.  We all did a great job of helping each other in these situations.

When you first look at these yellow flowers, they're pretty and smell good.  But when you look closely, they are covered in thorns.  Some people in our group found this out the hard way and tried to pick them and got stabbed.  We climbed up pretty far off the beaten path and climbing back down was kind of scary, so there were a lot of people sliding on little rocks, after panicking, they would grab these plants that we scattered all over the place.  OUCH!  Amanda's hand was somewhat stunned from grabbing one of these plants.  She was in pain from it like 2 hours after it had happened!

"Whatever you do, DON'T pick the yellow flowers!"

Hahahah, Chris found this big rock and noticed it looked like an old man's face, so he's getting words of wisdom from the old man! hah

We found a nice place to eat lunch.  During our time eating lunch, the temperature dropped like 10 degrees!  Eric, Mr. Outdoors, made us a little fire to warm up!

After walking, about 5 minutes later, we saw this sign.  It says, "Starting Fires is Prohibited"..oops.

I love this picture! With the Cahorros sign and the scenery in the background.  So beautiful!!

We passed by real live toros!  I'm not sure who takes care of them because they're just out there by themselves!  But it was neat to see them! No worries, there was a fence protecting us from them.  As we walked on the trail we had to watch out for GIANT patches of cow/bull/horse "caca".. it was disgusting.

We were on the hike for a total of 6 hours!  It was so fun and so beautiful!!  After our hike, there were 7 of us that went and got Kebaps.. amazing pita/wrap things and ice cream!  Much later that night, we decided that we were all going to meet up to go to a Salsa bar called Copacabras.  The bartender put sparklers in our drinks and lit them on fire! It was the craziest thing!

Some of the girls that went..

Chante, Brittney, Amanda, Me, Brittany

Sunday morning, Yanira called me asking if I wanted to go to an outdoor market type thing. Vendors go there to sell their things for really, really cheap.  There was everything there from Moros trying to sell their knock off jewelry to farmers selling fruits and veggies.  It was quite the experience. The people that were there to buy things were nuts; they would fight people for the items that they wanted to buy!  The vendors would heckle people that were at different tents because they would have "the same thing" for a lower price.  I ended up buying a nice watch for 8 euro from a knock-off-selling Moro, a pair of leggings for ,50 centimos, and a pair of flats for 5 euro.  I thought I got away from there pretty well off!

Kids play area near my house

Later on Sunday, Yanira and I decided that we wanted to go to the park to do our homework.  She lives kind of close to me, so we met up and walked to the park.

Notice how the park has no grass.. this is normal. Granada doesn't have much grass at all.

The huge Spanish flag from the park.

You can't see these guys very well, but they were extremely drunk, or messed up on drugs or something, and causing a huge scene in the park.  There was a big group of college students sitting on the steps to the left of this picture, and one of the guys got into the trash can that dumps over and was screaming (in Spanish of course), "I am the Captain of the alligators! If you want to follow me raise your hand!!!" and the college students would raise their hands to lead him on.  It was ridiculous

After a great weekend, and being so tired, I didn't wake up to my alarm this morning.  So just like the rest of you.. I had a 3 day weekend too! woo hoo! Luckily my teacher is very forgiving and it won't be a problem!  I'm excited to see what this week will bring.. and I'm extremely excited to go to Barcelona next weekend to visit my friend Kassie! (and a 3 day weekend next weekend!!!!)

P.S. my dad told me that there are lots of people that, after reading my post, want to vacation to Spain.. I'm writing you DOs and DON'Ts of Spain.. You'll love it!