El Chorro Waterfalls

We had been expecting rain today as it had been forecast, but why did it have to rain up until we finished our walk?

Today’s goal was to do a circular walk up to El Chorro Waterfall, a 10 km trip. There was some pretty hard climbing as we approached the bottom of the falls, and in the rain and mist we took what was a pretty silly decision to press on. After a while, about 350 m into the final 550 m we actually became lost, not a nice situation. Robyn slipped on a huge granite boulder and thought she was going to slide a long way down, and the GPS was not lighting up the screen enough to see clearly. We backtracked, found our place, and headed up again. This time we were successful, but the fog or misty rain was too thick to really see the falls. We did, however, see the remnants of the snow fall from last weekend, so it was pretty cold.

The trip back was okay, but the mist made it impossible to see the views over the town and the Palace and Gardens. This was a great pity because it was easy to imagine how good the view would have been on a fine day. Part of our track took us along two walls of the Palace estate. We were amazed at just how big the estate was, being approximately 1 square kilometre. That’s a lot of garden and forest to enjoy.

As Hotel Roma is not opening the restaurant at this time of year, except on weekends, we were once again forced to look elsewhere. However, before that we enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine and a game of Scrabble in the bar of the hotel, where we enjoyed the company and interest of the barman /concierge / owner(?). He was very helpful with advice, we enjoyed discussing such things as speed limits and police cars, cycling and the weather. He suggested three different restaurants for us to consider.

The first one was closed, the second one was not doing meals that night, the third one was not yet ready for dinner, and we were hungry. Any port in a storm, and it just so happened that there was a pizzeria ready, willing and able to help us. It wasn’t too bad, and it was nice being in a place frequented by the locals.

To finish the night we had more wine back at the Hotel Roma bar, this time sitting in front of the fire. The barman had nobody else to look after at that time, so we talked a little more. He is in the middle of reading a book by Catherine McCulloch, and was quite knowledgeable about her writing. You just never know where a little bit of Australia is going to pop up.Read more