Hola.

Yeah, hehe – some photos and long stories for you!

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This article will be long and cover many different topics…I thought about splitting it up into different articles for a long time but somehow this all seems to belong together

So, here you will find some infos about

our time in Beneficio

the Valle de Sensaciones

and Sante Fe Hot Springs

BENEFICIO:

BENEFICIO

Things are going really tranquilo in Beneficio… manana manana…

I can’t really tell what we actually did all these days…

Anna and Sam were hanging out down in Orgiva many days to prepare the trip after Beneficio,research and contact projects, etc.

In the meantime we were spending lots of time reconstructing our rain-and wind-destroyed camp over and over again and cooking on wet-wood fire, and sharing and talking with many different people. Some of us were dumpster diving in Granada… some learning some French and Spanish, Coco and me repairing the black busses handbreak…

A brick-making workshop took place and me personally I learned how to make little books out of recycled paper and read a lot about different free schools over the world and permaculture.

Some of us were also doing some excursions, Bary went to a wwoofing farm and to El Moreon, Coco and Zsolt were scouting the former free (Waldorf) school, some of us went to the hot springs of Santa Fe several times and Sam, Anna, Coco and me went to a really nice party in the beautiful community of “Padre Eterno”.

Not to forget Bary’s animal rights actions! (Saving a cat from the crazy wild son of Edgar who was hunting it with bow and arror and bringing a little sick dog to an animal farm to recue him from Beneficio)

I tried several times to make a skillsharing and tsolife- workshop, which somehow always failed because of rain and wind …

Will foculise a skillsharing book as fixed infrastrucure to leave in Beneficio and put some permanent notes on the blackboard

VALLE DE SENSACIONES

We (that is Peter, Sam,Anna and me, Zsolt (Hungary), Bary (Ireland), Coco (France), Kaisa (Sweden), Laura (Germany) – the Latvian girls left) now finally managed to leave Beneficio all together for some days!

We were in el “Valle de Sensaciones” before, and then at the Santa Fe hot springs

Now I am sitting in the white bus, in a parking space in very “civilized” surrounding (streets, supermarkets,industries, all these kind of things that I didn’t see in a while).

We were planning since a while to leave Beneficio yesterday – we wanted to go to the hot springs in Santa Fe and later on to Granada. But our plans changed immidiately when Sam came back late night from the free WIFI – cafe connection and reported about the latest news from “outside world”.

Some people from a place that we had already erased from our list of projects (as they seemed to be a lot after money) had invited us for a free visit, as they seemed to like our ideas.

They invited us for a day where a journalist of ARTE would be there to join the fullmoon-celebration they had organised (one month earlier than they had planned to show this media-guy some special moments in Valle de Sensaciones). They said it could also be a good chance to introduce our project to

him.

Even though it was going to be hard to organise on that short advance and though they had told us to tell them if we would come for sure and we just told them very late – probably too late – that we’d come we couldnt miss that chance.

So I ran around the big Rainbow-Family-fullmoon-celebration-circle that was taking placein that night in Beneficio to inform everybody who was there about the latest good news and change of plans: that we would go “as early as possible to this place for a guided tour and a nice fiesta in the evening.

Well, of course it didnt really work out to organise an excursion that “dynamically”, without even a meeting…

The morning: After waiting a while until the camp had been set down and everybody had taken a shower or bath and breakfast

and after (more or less) solving some handbreak and battery-problems with Black Betty

we first made a first “big” step down to Orgiva at around 2 (!!).

We moved the discussions if we could bring some German hitchhiking girls along to later (what turned out to be a problematic later) and tried to be as quick as possible.

We split the busses to go to the internet again with one bus for finding the way, and the other should go to get some oranges in the meantime.

Somehow that turned out to be more difficult than expected and they came back with some very sour oranges 1 hour later.

Still very motivated and believing that we’d make it now, full of joy we finally started drivin away from Orgiva at around half past three – and exited on the wrong side of the village to get totally lost on a small street. It turned out to be good, as I just realized then that my tank was almost empty.

Well, I wont describe longer all the details about people going to supermarkets again and again getting lost until we arrived in the valley of sesations just after sunset.

What followed now was a long chain of miscommunication.

Yes, we were unorganised, I must admit. The people in the Valle de Sensaciones turned out to be so organised that they couldn’t manage to be very welcoming “dynamically”. Two worlds crashing together.

Well, we kind of fucked up to introduce ourselves – they didn’t make it too easy though, the whole atmosphere seemed like , well, we had interrupted their party-preparation-process.

It got worse when the food problem came up: we had some food with us but very basic stuff, were not really so prepared for coming to a party where they charge 7 Euro per person for the “stylish” food and wouldn’t really accept some simple stuff (rice) in exchange.

Zsolt then cooked some rice for us with some wild cabbige that I’d collected and we ate separately at the busses.

For the whole evening it was quite a strange feeling to be among all that people eating fancy stuff and feeling excluded from it. Bary became very upset about the sentence “and then you wash the pot with your own sponge” even though we could never figure out if that was a joke or not.

The whole party was not that much our taste, it seemed to be a quite artificial/forced atmosphere and me personally I -after several month in the nature with accustic music all day around the camp- couldnt really handle the music.

Most of us went to sleep early then (after an internal miscommunication about sleeping places in the vans) and so the only ones who stayed longer (and of course were not really able to tell a lot about our project) were the hitchhikers then…

In the morning Achim came to tell us that they didnt want to us enter the area any more, as they had all felt quite distracted about about we showed up and they didnt want to have that strange atmosphere especially as the cameraman was around.

We then had a quite nice short feedback-exchange which made quite clear why things didn’t work out on the day before and what expectations were behind on both sides - and he also told a little bit more about the project.

After we had some long internal discussions about the situation, our organisation, the sence of this tour and unnecessary negativity until he the end he invited us back in and have a short lookjust when we wanted to leave.

So we went back in and had a look and left with more impressions, a better feeling and the contact to an interesting journalist from Lisboa in the end.

This project started when Achim (German) decided after years of travelling that he had found his place here in the Sierra Nevada. He asked the place what it wanted to look like and his visions look like this: tree houses (even domes in the trees!) and other weird constructions, some gardens and ponds and lots of arts. Organic food and a very special and sophisticated education for visitors.

The place is not exactly cheap: To stay there costs the normal type of person something like 29 Euros a day – which includes the organic food and all materials used in the workshops. It also includes food etc for the teachers (even though at the moment some of them even pay their food themselves)

It is an ecological place for sure, an artistic place, but not self-sustaining at all.

But the buildings and arts themselves are very inspiring, indeed.

He started ofwith quite random travellers who could stay there as they wished – the more complex the infrastructure became the less open became the place: now they prefer to take “proffessional” people with high quality skills and standart.

At the moment there are 2 people living there permanently and 5-15 people normally stay in the place and form the community. They organise with meetings in the mornings and a beautiful magnet system based on the elements that is supposed to work very well.

Achim also stressed that they normally put a high value on having an introduction circle for new people (which didnt work out with us as we were late)

We talked a little bit about the diferent types of complexity of organisation of projects and that our group definetely needs more structure if we want to fit in places like this or e.g. Tamera in Portugal.

SANTA FE

Learning from this experience we organised our trip to Santa Fe today perfectly!

We had lots of little meetings all day, dynamically organised food for the evening – and even manaed to lend a pot from our friends from “the Genetik Mistake” (the rock band from Israel we shared our parking with in Barcelona)- then we chilled a while in the warm pools.

This morning we talked about the future route and what to do in Granada (and about unnecessary negativity again… ).

Now all those people are running round in Granada while I am still sittin hunry in this bus. I should really finish!

I’ll stay here for some days and try to get some stuff done, others will go back to Beneficio soon. (Peter maybe even today!)

Dragon will be just playing in the wholes that police made in the ground, so we don’t really know if it will work out to earn any money there. We at least won’t do our stand there…

Henrik, Mandus, Chris, Andi and Mia and a mysterious irl called Ela will arrive in the next days – so life will keep us busy!

Last 5 posts by anja

• Que pasa? - December 15th, 2009
• project update - July 22nd, 2009
• erste Infoveranstaltung in München / first info event in Munich - June 21st, 2009
• back in the land of rain - June 6th, 2009
• game over ... the last day - May 31st, 2009