June, 2023
Notes from a cave dweller
When I look back on that time, I see the coastline as if I'm seeing it from above. A strip of orange,
spotted with cactuses; the blue stretching outwards.
And then me, a girl in the world, a stranger.
A hitchhiker adrift on a dusty desert current.
Red backpack weighed down with questions and the caves around the corner, twenty, thirty, seventy, all different
shapes and sizes and sprawling out and around this battered cliff side coastline.
“I’m okay alone,” I told the sand. “I’m strong.”
The sand puffed in clouds around my feet.
“I’m walking on the sky,” I told myself, “And I’m strong.”
But I wasn’t sure.
How can you be sure that you are strong until you remove all the things that make you feel safe?
A meeting
I met Katzu on the shore a few days before leaving the Finca.
I’d been stacking rock towers on what I thought was a deserted beach and trying not to think about Julie,
about sailing, about decisions and about the future.
“So!” I heard behind me, “Australia, hey?”
I turned to see an old Japanese man, weathered as the cliffs and barefoot, making his way down the beach.
He was at least two feet shorter than me, which somewhat smothered the urge to rapidly dismantle my rock tower
in search of a pebble that hadn’t yet surrendered all its sharpness to the tide.
I stood up and smiled at him warily. “How did you know I was Australian?”
He sighed and sank down beside me, nestling into the stones as if in a beanbag. “How old are you?” he said,
looking up at me. “Nineteen? Twenty?”
“Nineteen,” I admitted, “but most people think I’m older.”
“You do seem older,” he said, “but I know how it is with you Australians, I swear they raise them differently
there. I see the way you sit, I see the way you’re comfortable in the world, alone in wild nature. You’ve all got a
bit of salt in your blood, a bit of rough dirt in your bones, you're tougher than the others. I can always tell which
travellers are Australian, they’re the ones that can sit still when the flies swarm and the wind grabs.” He jumped
back to his feet. “You’ve come to see the caves,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
I'd heard about the caves, and the crazy hippy community that occupied them, existing and foraging on the
outskirts of the town. Understandably I was intrigued.
I followed him around the headland. He slipped across the jagged rocks as if he was walking on polished wood
and I stumbled in his wake.
And then there they were, brightly coloured sarongs hanging down to mark the entrances, stretching along the
coastline as far as I could see.
Katzu waved his arm towards the line. “There’s an imbalance at the moment,” he explained, “we need more
women in the caves, the masculine energy is too high. The caves are quite full though, you will have to find
somebody to share with!”
With that he flung out his arm and latched onto a passing person who turned out to be a boy around my age
with curly hair, a crab shell necklace and the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen on a human being.
“You can sleep in Sebo’s cave,” Katzu told me.
I glanced at Sebo, but he just smiled and nodded.
“I'm going out in the desert for a few days,” Katzu said, “I am a Buddhist, it's important for me to be alone
in the sand sometimes. But I'll see you when I'm back!”
“Oh no, I’m sorry!” I rushed to explain, “I’m just visiting. I'm actually living up north and I won't be back down
here for a while. It was lovely to meet you though!”
Katzu fumbled in his bag, pulled out a joint that was longer than Sebo’s eyelashes and lit it up, a Buddhist
gracefully dodging the no substance law. He blew a cloud of smoke towards the ocean.
“I'll see you in a few days when I'm back from the desert,” he said.
Out, alone
Two days later I was picking my way along the clifftops, my backpack pulling me towards the ground.
The ocean was wild, whipping itself into a frenzy of spray, the once glassy water a mess of ripped denim.
What is the protocol for entering somebody's cave? I wondered. Do you knock? On the rock? Beside the curtain?
Is there a socially acceptable hour of the day to pop round? I watched a sailboat fighting its way through the
chop and wondered for perhaps the hundredth time what on earth I was doing.
After being dropped off by a sailboat in the Canary Islands, I had spent the last month volunteering at a finca in the north of Tenerife with Julie, a friend from the boat. We had been hitchhiking every weekend to the ocean
in search of a boat that could take us further, across the Atlantic.
But the season was ending and after months of searching, the only boat about to leave could only take one of us.
“You go,” I told her from the Finca’s only phone. “I think I have to stay,” not realising until the words were out of my mouth just how much I meant it.
“Okay,” she said. “But why?”
“I need to know where my edges are,” I tried to explain, “I need to know if I’m actually strong. If I don’t travel
alone, I’ll never know!”
“I’ll call you when I reach the Caribbean,” she said, and I could hear her smiling.
I told my boss at the finca goodbye.
“Where will you go?” he said.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, but that night I dreamed of rock walls and dark ocean and I knew.
Dust
The community cave was smaller than I remembered, or maybe there were just more people occupying it.
I stepped inside and my eyes were immediately greeted by about ten naked people, all various shades of dirty.
No one really acknowledged my arrival but after a few minutes a youngish man drifted over, said,
“Hey! Good to see you here!” and gave me a hug like he knew me.
“Did we meet already?” I wondered.
“Oh no,” he replied, “you just look like you belong here.”
I looked around at the tangle of dusty hippies and tried incredibly hard to take that as a compliment.
I sat there for a while watching sailboats, wishing I was on one of them, or in fact anywhere else, and was just
about to get up and leave when Sebo came picking his way down the rocks, wearing the same necklace made
of crab shells and a faded white cap with two clothes pegs clipped onto it.
He saw me, said, “ah, you’re back! I’m about to go and check the jackpot. Want to come?”
The jackpot was his name for the row of bins along the main street of Los Abrigos. “Behind the Airbnb buildings,”
he explained. “You wouldn't believe what people throw away!”
We found two oranges, sections of an old wooden picket fence, a leather jacket which he draped over his bare
shoulders and an old blanket.
“How long have you lived at the caves?” I asked him.
“A few months,” he replied, “it’s brilliant but I’ll leave soon.”
“Why?”
“Because we only take,” he said, glancing at me, “and we give nothing back, and that’s not fair on the rest of t
he people. Sooner or later it will be our turn to give and I want to choose that time before it chooses me.”
We were silent as we piled everything into our arms and started the trek home. On the way we met at least 20
other cave dwellers, also trekking back with armloads of supplies: blankets, bottles of water, bags of stale bread
from behind the bakery… Everybody was hugging each other, passing cigarettes, water and oranges and
exclaiming over the items. Nobody even seemed to recognise that I was new, they simply included me in their hugs.
A German man called Andy inquired about the whereabouts of my cave and on discovering that I didn’t have one
yet exclaimed, “Oh, just come and sleep in mine! I have four mattresses!”
“And he won’t share ‘em,” Scottish Joe piped up, “even though I've been sleepin’ on a single with me legs
hangin’ off the end for the last two months!”
“Yes, well,” Andy said, “You put a plastic tiger on my sacred altar.”
“I found it in the trash,” Joe muttered. “I thought it was cool.”
I felt a hand on my back, and turned to see Katzu, head wrapped in scarves, chewing on an orange peel.
“How was your time in the desert?” I asked.
“I brought you some dates,” he replied, whipping out from behind his back an entire date palm branch loaded
with the brown fruits.
“I’d say you could sleep in my cave, love,” Joe piped up, “but I roll… I roll like the North Sea!”
Dinner
That first community meal was an experience in itself. Most of the food had come from the dumpster so I
wasn’t expecting anything gourmet, however, I was still taken aback by the eclectic mix of ingredients being
thrown into the mix.
“You eat meat?” Katzu cried.
“No, no! Vegetarian,” I said quickly, shuddering at the thought of what meat could possibly come from the bins.
“Vegan!” Katzu hollered to the rest of the cave, “vegan food!”
I sat on the dirt with Sebo and watched the community ‘cooking.’
Into a huge paella pan went:
Rice, UHT milk, a litre of seawater, chunks of ginger, orange peel, eggplants with the rotten bits taken off,
actual orange flesh (went nicely with the milk) (which is not vegan by the way) and then every single spice
under the sun. I’m not exaggerating. Apparently, the acquiring of a whole spice rack from the bins was a fairly
recent find and so the people were a little too excited at the ability to flavour their food. Curry powder, cinnamon,
cloves, garlic, pepper, oregano, basil flakes, coriander seeds, cumin, dill, thyme, Mexican bean spices, pimento,
you name it, it went in the pot.
“Simmer! Simmer it!” Katzu bellowed.
The pot bubbled away. Portuguese Davi picked up a guitar and spun off a kickass rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody
where instead of singing “Mamaaa!” everybody sang, “Ya mannnn!”
Then the people cleared the floor for the pot, put their hands to their chest and one by one thanked Mama Basura for the abundant meal.
“What is Basura?” I whispered to an English guy called Jessie. He was giving off very reasonable, rational vibes, which was
unusual in the caves.
“Basura means trash,” he responded, with just the hint of an eye roll. “They are thanking the trash.”
He then stood up, raised his bowl to the sky and cried, “praise Mama Basura! And the tourists who can’t fly home with a can of chickpeas!”
And despite everything, I had to smile.
Company
It was night and I was lying in Sebo’s cave, the roof of which hung a little too low for comfort. A slice of moon
rippled in the entrance.
I’d been dreaming of Julie, surely out of sight of land by now.
I thought about how sometimes when you are lost but travelling with somebody who has such a clear and solid
plan it’s easy to simply slot yourself into theirs.
“I’m crossing the Atlantic,” she’d told me a month earlier. “You should come!”
And I’d said, “sure!”
Why not just carry on? I’d been moving around for months, I’d just keep going. I’d ignore the ache in my gut for
stillness, for purpose, for a bit more of a home, for this desert island with its wild and varied landscapes and so
much I didn’t know.
“Well, I’m here now,” I told the cave roof.
Which was when the rat dropped directly onto my chest.
One moment there was silence and the next a shower of rocks and sand, an indignant screech and then to my
horror, a frantic smattering of claws and a blur of brown fur scampering across my chest.
I couldn’t even scream. I lay in the dark blinking and trying to speak. Eventually I dragged enough air in to croak,
“Sebo, a rat just dropped on me from the roof.”
“Nah, don’t worry,” he was barely awake and completely unphased, “that’s just Piccachu.”
Every woman
It was day three and after the rat incident I had decided it was time I found a cave of my own.
Also, Sebo lined his empty crab shells up on the rocks, their glossy black, alien eyes all facing the same way and
every time I opened my eyes in the morning, I got the shock of my life.
I picked my way along the edge of the ocean and stopped at a small, humble cave, more of an overhang really,
but close to the ocean and well protected by rock walls.
Scottish Joe was sitting just outside, wearing patterned leggings under cargo shorts and staring peacefully out at
the ocean.
“Is this your cave, Joe?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “Yes, technically it is, but I never sleep here. I prefer to stay in the community cave, you know,
just to protect it. I only come back here to wash my feet!” He gestured to a bucket of seawater with a small cloth
inside.
I glanced at the ocean, less than ten metres away and then back to the bucket but decided not to say anything.
“Are you still looking for a cave, love?” he said, springing to his feet, “You can take my cave! I’m not using it!
You don’t have anywhere to sleep, do you? Yes, a young woman should have her own cave! What do I need my
own cave for? I’m just an old fuck! I can sleep anywhere, I can sleep in the community cave! Nah, you take it love,
it’s all yours, every young woman should have her own cave!”
And so, I had a cave of my own.
The deep
Time passed strangely there. Sometimes the minutes passed like hours, sometimes weeks passed like days.
I spent a lot of time alone, picking along the rocks, taking shells and stones to decorate my cave with. When it was
calm, I free dived off the edge of the rocks, left my thoughts on the surface and flew into the deep. I felt like I
was discovering the very essence of surrender. I felt like my edges were clearer underwater, enclosed in deep
dark blue.
My head was calmer than it had been in months. My whole mind went quiet, and it was just me and the water.
Every ribbon of fragmented light, every ocean of silence. It was my kingdom.
Basura
Often after diving I’d return to my cave only to realise with a resigned acceptance that it was, once again,
time to go hunting.
Scavenging.
An entirely different branch of diving.
Digging through the dumpsters for discarded, unopened food did, I'll admit, instil in me a childlike excitement,
especially when accompanied by other cave dwellers and hearing cries of “Gluten free corn chips, people!” or,
“Orange juice with pulp this time, WITH PULP!”
I couldn’t forget what Sebo had told me on my first day, though. It never left my mind, the irony of escaping
society while relying solely on society to live. We couldn’t live for free without working if others in the town
weren’t working and buying and throwing away.
Even so, stumbling back to my cave with an armload of trash treasures I couldn’t help but feel as if I were genuinely
fending for myself out in the wild. I saw the way I must look from the outside: perched up on the crumbling cliff side
singing to myself as I wrapped food and strung it up in my cave. Rats, it turns out, can be kept somewhat at bay if
you treat them like bears.
Next door, my cave neighbour, a fruitarian called Remi, was lining up 20 or 30 apples in the sun to dry.
“My lentils have sprouted!” he announced, gesturing wildly in his floor length kimono, “come and see!!”
“Do you ever talk to yourself Remi?” I had asked him a few days before, genuinely concerned that I was beginning
to go a little crazy.
“Oh, it’s fine to talk to yourself,” he’d replied, breaking open a melon with both hands, “you should only worry when
you start answering back.”
At that moment a brown flash of fur skimmed by our feet.
“A rat!” Remi shrieked, leaping onto his nearest melon and attempting to balance, “it was a rat!”
“Ah,” Sebo said, emerging from his cave, his curly hair flung out in a browngold halo, “I actually prefer to call them
mice, you know. Rat just sounds so…bad.” He shuddered.
“Sebo, you can call it a fucking guinea pig if you want!” Joe shrieked from his bucket, “it’s still a bloody rat and it
still dropped on me when I went into your cave to get my foot scrubber back!”
Shivers
The day Sebo finally left I was sad. Although I love this way of traveling, I’ll never get used to the heartache for
people and places left behind. You simply have to learn to love and then leave, and sometimes it’s desperately, heart
wrenchingly difficult.
I went exploring along the shore with Pirate, another Scottish man who dresses in full traditional pirate gear yet has
never stepped foot on a sailboat, but my heart wasn’t in it. I decided to go into town and use the cafe bathrooms
because having clean hands always improves my mood.
I happened to pass the community cave on my way and saw that Katzu was there.
“How are you?” I smiled at him.
“Sit,” he said, pulling me down into the dust next to him.
Then he put his hand on my head and said, “It’s ok to hurt sometimes, you know? Sometimes we just have to feel the
pain, we just have to let it pass through us. Looking back it won’t be as bad as we thought it was at the time.”
“How -?” I started.
“Shhhhh,” he whispered, pulling the air above my head into swirls and patterns. “Shhhh, just let go.”
“I knew you before,” he said, “we’ve met before in another life, your spirit is completely familiar to me. But I
learned a lot of things since then, since the last time we met and now I can share them with you.”
As he spoke, I felt my whole body soften. I felt vibrating strings being pulled from my head, my entire body tingled
in the dust, and I thought, what the hell? You’re sad about a boy who casually sleeps with a rat? Pull yourself
together and go look in the trash because you have nothing to eat again except Remi’s dried melons and although
you’ve probably dodged scurvy, diarrhoea isn’t entirely off the cards.
“I think it was Luna,” Katzu whispered, “maybe that was your name the last time we met.”
Which is crazy because Luna is what I called my imaginary twin before I even knew that I’d had a twin and lost her.
“Thank you, Katzu,” I managed. My whole spine felt like it was wrapped in fairy lights.
“When you come to Japan,” he said, flipping back into his everyday voice so deftly I wondered if I’d imagined the
other one, “you can stay in my yoga centre for free as long as you need.”
Rock
One day I was exploring with Sammi, a Dutch girl living three caves down from me, when we came across a group
of climbers, free solo climbing the jagged rock over the ocean. We both stopped and stared.
Watching them move was breathtaking. So much power, so much perfect grace, every movement precise, calculated
the tension drawn out on a string, and then a sudden slip, a snap and they’d fall through the air with a shriek, the
evening light catching their turning bodies before they splashed into the ocean.
“They come from inland,” Sammi told me. “Up the mountain in the pines, there’s a whole community of them,
climbers and musicians. They live together in a hostel, volunteering in exchange for climbing gear and every day
they go out to the crags to climb.”
“Have you tried it?” I asked her.
She nodded, “it’s terrifying,” she said. “It’s the best thing ever.”
I laughed but she was serious.
“You want to know your limits?” she said. “You want to know where your edges are? You think you know yourself andthen you find yourself halfway up a cliff, fingers cramped into the rock, pretty damn near crapping your pants and
you think, oh hello self! how does it feel to be alive?”
She put her arm around me. “Why do you dive?”
“Because the whole world stops and it’s just me and my body and the ocean.”
“There you go,” she shrugged.
And I thought, she’s right. This is why we are alive. What is the point of being human if we don’t feel what it feels to be human? What is the point if we don’t push to the edges, explore the silver-lined barrier of fear and something
else, some vivid, pounding, euphoria laced around the pain.
Policia in the cave
Three days later I was sitting with Sammi outside, Davi singing behind us as he cooked up his pasta with BBQ sauce
from the trash, watching the sun light up a naked man playing the flute on the edge of the rocks.
And then came the cry from the community cave. “Policia!! Policia in the caves! The police are here parked behind
the cliffs, four cars this time! Policia in the caves!”
Chaos reigned.
Hippies ran back and forth past my cave, stashing mattresses in the rocks, smoking the air with Palo Santo,
chanting and singing. The vibe was either full panic or immense calm, there was no in between.
“Policia, policia!” Freddy shrieked, sprinting past our cave with three pillows and an entire antique bookshelf
strapped to his back, “stash everything in the banana plantation! They won’t check there! Tomorrow they will be back
with the coastguard and thirty trucks to clear everything out! And you better be ready, because they grab at you! They do! They grab for your clothes and if they catch you there’s nothing you can do!”
“It’s nothing, girls,” Remi murmured from the ledge above his cave where he had perched, naked, in the fading light.
“There’s nothing to worry about. They just want to scare you. If you meditate and put out a good aura, they will sense
it and leave you alone. Go back into your caves, rest up, remake your beds, it’s all going to be okay.”
“Flights to Morocco are eight euros!” Andy yelled from the community cave, now decorated with a sign saying
Lost Abrigos. “Let’s all go to Morocco and start a community in the desert!”
“Girls, I’m hosting a women’s circle in my cave tomorrow night,” Amanda graced past us with a stick of incense.
“You’re welcome to join!”
“Someone needs to do something about Louisa!"Davi bellowed from the headland. “The police are at her cave and she’s naked and throwing piss again!”
“Leave her be,” somebody yelled back, “last time she was throwing rats.”
“It’s black magic she does,” Remi said. “That’s why the police come in the first place, she hisses at the tourists when they walk past her cave.”
Sammi and I turned circles in the confusion, packing and unpacking our bags every time somebody else came past
with new advice. Eventually, unsure what to do, we confronted Scottish Joe.
“Are you worried about police, Joe?”
“Ahhhh noooo,” he responded. “My priority today is laundry. Getting chased by police is not very high on the list.
Besides, they never actually kick anyone out. I’ve been here for years. They only want to scare you.”
I thought of the climbers, fingertips brushing the light as they pulled themselves up the rock.
I thought of Julie, halfway across an ocean and so sure of who she was and what she wanted.
I thought of myself if I stayed here, like so many others had, existing in a state of declining lung health and blissful
apathy.
I thought of the pine tree mountains, I thought of the rock. I thought of my body and my backpack and the two
of us, a team.
How well do you know yourself?
How much are you willing to learn?
If I never go there, I thought, I’ll never know.
I hugged Sammi, and Joe and the blissed out meditating Remi.
“I’ll come back to visit,” I told them. “Take all the food and blankets from my cave.”
Then I climbed out, with my back to the ocean, and started inland towards the pines.
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