El Parque Nacional Doñana

Liliana and Katie acting silly at one of the main entrance signs and they WALKED OFF THE TRAIL! *gasp*

Yesterday turned out to be quite the adventure, and it could not have gone better.

Katie, Liliana, and I arose bright and early to catch our 8am bus out of the Sevilla bus terminal. The bus we were taking doesn’t normally stop at the park, but it passes right by, so Katie asked the bus driver if he could stop there, which he did. When we got off, we realized why the bus doesn’t normally stop there. We were left on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. No buildings, no other cars (granted it was early in the morning on a Saturday). There was just one little sign pointing to the Parque Doñana. After taking some pictures at the dinky little sign (all on Liliana’s camera, unfortunately), we followed its arrow and headed through the gates into the park.

We walked down a road for about 20 minutes. It was clear that people don’t normally go to the park by bus. The layout was very much for cars only, and we found out why a few minutes later when we arrived at the visitor’s center.

(Some quick background information: I had made a reservation for a jeep/bus tour thing through the park. Parque Doñana is very carefully preserved, and the only way you can see the bulk of the park is if you do one of these tours. The tours are 4 hours, which none of us knew (read: none of us had bothered to check and we assumed it would be less than that). Our plan for the day was to roam around whatever trails and paths we could, eat our bocadillos, do the tour, and go back to Sevilla).

We didn’t know when the last bus back to Sevilla was—when Katie had gone to ask at the bus terminal, their system was down and the woman had told her to come back later, but Katie had class—so we went up to the front desk to ask the woman. She gave us a weird look. We assumed it was just because of our Spanish. She checked the schedule and told us there was a bus back at 3:30pm and then another one at 6:30pm. I said something about how that was good, we could take the 6:30pm one after the tour, etc. She gave me another weird look and said “no, no podeís” (no, y’all can’t (yeah, I know, welcome to southern Spain)). We were confused. She told us the tour lasted 4 hours, so we wouldn’t be back until 7pm, after the last bus drove past on the main road to Sevilla. She asked us why we hadn’t checked this before, and we had no good answer. I guess none of us thought that the tour would be 4 hours and assumed that there would be enough busses going to Sevilla.

We had to make some decisions and do some serious brainstorming. We could just walk around the few little paths near the guest center and then leave to go back home on one of the buses, but doing that you see pretty much none of the park (I’ll be blunt and say that the paths were pretty lame). Still cool, still glad to have gone to the park, but not nearly as cool as getting a jeep tour along the beach, into the forest and the whatnot. So we walked along the lame paths behind the guest center thinking. (It is also worth noting that when we weren't talking, the silence in the park was unbelievable. I forget how loud real silence actually is.) Anyway, we checked maps and decided to see if there were any other buses to any other cities around the park after the tour, because it was probable that from there we could get a bus back to Sevilla (or, worse case scenario, at least have somewhere to stay for the night). The woman had also suggested to us that we might as well try asking other people on the tour to see if they were driving back to Sevilla after and if we could have a ride, and we all agreed that there was no reason not to do that.

We went back to the guest center after our walking and asked about other busses. She said no, there were no others. It wasn’t even just a weekend thing—there are never any busses after the tour, which was surprising. Ok, so that left one option: asking people for a ride back to Sevilla.

Ok, pause. I am not the kind of person to randomly saunter up to strangers and ask them for rides. I wouldn’t do it in the US, I wouldn’t do it in English. I just wouldn’t do it. Add Spanish to the mix, and yeah, it gets even worse.

So we loitered in the waiting area as people came in. We were all skeptical and all assumed we would just be heading back on the earlier bus and couldn’t do the tour. Katie was the bravest. She asked two different people. The first older woman just literally totally ignored her. Repeatedly. It was rude. The next couple said that they couldn’t understand what she was saying, which is pretty hard to take when you put yourself out there, so that was hard, too (Liliana and I thought Katie’s sentence was perfect and didn’t know what the problem had been). Katie said she was pretty much done trying. Understandable.

Time was running out. 4 minutes until people were supposed to start leaving to board the jeep-things. Liliana was prepping herself to ask the next people who came by. I was chicken, and went to go use the bathroom.

On the way back from the bathroom, something changed in my head. I don’t know what. I got back, they hadn’t asked anyone else, and at that moment an older couple (40s) showed up. Before thinking too much, I walked up to the woman, said we had a question and started to explain the situation. Before I could finish, she said “look, where do you need to go? Sevilla?” I said yes. She said “ok, no problem, we’ll take you there. 2 of us, 3 of you, it’s perfect, 5 seats in the car.” We talked with them for a few more minutes. They were so nice, so friendly. We offered to pay them, which was shot down pretty much immediately. We arranged a meeting place for after the tour just in case (there were several jeeps going out and we weren’t in the same one).

After that encounter, we could not stop smiling. We had asked. Two nice people had said yes right away, no problem. We were in Parque Doñana. We were going on the tour. Everything was going to work out. Things like that NEVER work out. But it did. And it was so fantastic. We had done the impossible, more or less.

Then we got on the jeep-thingie. Each one holds 20 people, and ours was the only one that was empty(!!). It was about half-full, meaning we all got window seats. The day had been going badly, we were bummed, and all of a sudden things were going our way.

The tour itself was pretty awesome. It was 4 hours of off-roading, bouncing around, seeing lots of different animals (the wild horses were my favorite), driving along the beach, and learning about the park, in general, from the driver. We only were allowed off at 2 different spots. I think this bit is better explained in pictures than anything else.

One of the other jeep-thingies going along the sand on the beach. This is what we rode in!

Katie embracing nature/conquering the world (ha, not sure if those go together) at one of the stops.

None of the pictures I took from the ride are that great, but I suppose it's better to put up one than none. Lots of the time was spent among these trees and grasses, stopping here and there to look at animals like this one.

After the tour we met up with Carmen and her husband (actually, as we learned later, they weren’t married because they were too lazy. The man (Julian, we think) knew a little English, and he told us “very lazys, no boda” (boda means wedding)). We got into their little red Mercedes hatchback and drove off. On the way back, they took us to a little town, El Rocio, to see the magnificent church there (there are no paved streets in El Rocio because the main method of transportation is still horse). There’s a huge festival there in spring, apparently, that’s like Semana Santa in Sevilla. They were so happy to show us around and explain different things to us. It was really clear they enjoyed having us along. We saw a wedding in the church, too, which was awesome. As we were standing there, in El Rocio, outside of the church, Liliana, Katie, and I couldn’t stop smiling. Our dilemma literally could not have turned out better.

The church in El Rocio.

On the ride back from El Rocio to Sevilla, we talked about all kinds of different things. They were vacationing from the north and were stopping in Sevilla on their way to the Costa del Sol. We talked about Bush and politics (I think if we were republicans we probably would have gotten kicked out of the car), we talked about Americans, generally, we talked about the different regions of Spain and the cultures there (Carmen and Julian were so, so much easier to understand than the people in Sevilla), we talked about music… it was just great.

We said goodbye to them in the center of Sevilla. No weirdness, no give me a call sometime, no obligation, no nothing. Just ok, thanks, this was great, have a good vacation type of thing. Oh, and hopefully America is smart enough to elect Obama :o). There were no strings attached on either party.

What happened yesterday renewed my faith in humanity, more or less. We were strangers to them, but they trusted us, we in turn trusted them, and we had a really fantastic time getting back to Sevilla. It’s so simple, but something that’s really hard to find these days.

So that’s that. I will not forget yesterday.