Monday, 15 January
This morning, I arrived early in the hotel to send out those e-mails to the publishers for the guide books. I sent out 4 as that is all I had and one to restaurant client from April 2006 who has a friend at a UK paper and will ask this friend to consider a piece about the area based on what I wrote. I was a bit late in sending the article (8 months late to be exact) but hopefully they will still send it on to their friend.
We then went to Ronda to run some errands as per usual. We stopped by the office of CIT Serrania de Ronda which is a tourist office for the area which aids businesses such as ours. The main guy there is Alfredo, the same Alfredo who penned a letter to the Malaga government on my behalf about our hotel road signs.
Among the things we spoke of today was the Ronda Festival in May. We as a group, are going to start discussions shortly for this festival where, last year, there were cooking demonstrations by various restaurant chef in the valley and Ronda. Ivan participated in that and will do so again this year. We also talked about the jazz festival. I will send out an invite again with a couple of options on dates to have first meeting and will hope to have the festival for 2008. There definitely is interest in seeing what we can accomplish with this.
Other point, even Alfredo is frustrated with the lack of support from any official agencies supporting tourism. All the publicity goes to the coast and it seems at every turn, the government, whether it be the Junta de Andalucia, the Malaga government or the Patronato de Turismo de la Costa de Sol , puts obstacles in the path of tourism here, nothing to makes life a bit easier for any of us.
Anyway, we also covered the fact that I will be sending out invites for a meal, lunch or dinner, to owners of the valley businesses, an idea I had last summer but failed to follow through on, including Alfredo. This could possibly develop into a forum to discuss common concerns, issues or problems amongst business owners and maybe even develop into an owners association of some kind for the Serrania de Ronda of hotels and restaurants, something lacking in this area at the moment.
After we finished with that, Ivan & I headed to Estacion de Jimera de Liber (one valley over from ours named Guadiaro Valley) to try out a restaurant called Quercus which apparently has a good reputation run by a Spanish lesbian couple. After a 25 minute ride to get there (we did not have telephone contact details to call ahead), it was closed and probably closed for the whole month of January and perhaps February as well. So we decided to head to Estacion de Cortes de la Frontera to try a restaurant there that we heard of run by an English couple. Again no luck, they closed their doors permanently a couple of months ago. Not surprising as they had come to our place for tapas once and told us about their place but they didn't really want to continue with it too much longer. So we decided to head back to the village of Jimera de Liber and have lunch at a place run by Javier, someone we know, a small hotel and restaurant. When we arrived, the place looked a bit different and Javier was no where to be seen. Of course, we soon discovered that he left the place two months earlier. So no luck really!! We headed back into the Genal Valley and in Atajate we lucked out... the venta (roadside restaurant) was still serving lunch even though it was already 4.15. Most places in Spain will stop serving lunch at 4.00 and the kitchen closes, period. And then back to Juzcar.
The weather is a bit foggy today, a damp haze everywhere you look and low hanging clouds/fog over the mountain tops. However, all the almond trees started to bloom about 3 days ago and every day there are more flower blossoms appearing in pink or white.
