El Chorro '24

British winter is awful. Damp, slimey crags and cold drizzle offer little in terms of real enjoyment, even for the most psyched of climbers. The solution for many is to jet off to sunny Spain to clip some bolts in El Chorro!

The famously warm, dry, and reliable conditions attract a huge gaggle British climbers, including us! Tom, Chris, Matt, Jono, Sam, and I are the only folks from a large groupchat of punting prospecters who actually get around to booking some flights (mostly living together also helps!), and we agree to fly out together on the 15th December, pretty much as soon as the university term is over.

Day 1 - Sunday 15th

After a radically early 10 o'clock bedtime for me on Saturday night, we walk exitedly down to the bus station to get the 2:40am coach to Manchester airport, crossing paths with many people just finishing their night out. At the bus stop, we're approched by a street performer who asks keenly if we're going hiking or something. When we tell him we're climbers, he suddenly becomes super psyched and the conversation somehow boils down to British bolting ethics and how we shouldn't trust those "little wedge things" and we should bolt every route in the UK. "Hmm, just as well Tom's not getting the bus with us" I think as the man whips out his didgereedoo and starts to demonstrate the "crazy primal tones" to his bleary eyed and politely nodding audience of sleepy climbers. The bus finally arrives, bringing a welcome end to the surprisingly educational encounter.

A couple of stops and a few winks of sleep later, the bus pull into the airport and we meet up with Tom and Sam who drove down and checked the bag in already, making our lives very easy indeed. We're hours early for the flight so the order of the day is to poke around WHSmiths for a bit, flick through Climber magazine, browse through some boring papers, then settle in on the terminal floor to write the shopping list for the trip.

When we're called to the gate, we all don our helmets and rush down towards the gate. In his usual fashion, Tom flings himself down some railings but ends up doing a classy ragdoll fall down the stairs - just as well he had a helmet on. We arrive at the gate unscathed and take to following glorious selfie:

On the flight, I'm assured that the sunrise was very pretty despite being on the wrong side of the plane to see it - great. Tom and I did get a bit of moon action out of our side though.

Upon arrival in Malaga, we leave the airport terminal and head to the metro to get us into town. Now, the metro in Malaga operates a very convenient tap-on, tap-off system just like the London underground where a simple bank card lets you through the barrier. One by one, we smugly pass the clueless tourists queuing for train tickets and tap our way smoothly through the barrier, thanking our lucky stars for Matt's local knowledge. The last person through the barrier is Chris, who scans his card on the reader and, you guessed it, nothing happens. Swiping his card against the barrier with growing frustration, a red hot rage starts to boil behind his eyes. He tries the other barriers one by one, muttering something about "useless machines" and "stupid technology" until Matt passes him a card the lets him through. A busy metro ride later, we arrive in the city centre of Malaga and approch the barriers that let us scan off the train. Once again, we make it through without issue but Chris is not so lucky. He tries the barriers one by one with no luck and growing agitation, the usual cries about "useless machines" start to spew out as he hops from foot to foot and steam flies out his ears. After some time watching this pitiful but admittedly rather entertaining spectacle, a kind station worker puts Chris out of his misery and scans him through the barrier.

We spend a few hours in Malaga, doing a very heavy shop at a Lidl quite a long way from the train station, getting cash out, buying train tickets, etc. The time to get our 15:43 train starts to roll around so we head down to the platform. But wait! The dastardly ticket barriers wouldn't let us through that easily! The barcodes on our train tickets won't scan, and a chaotic din erupts, suggesting we're at the wrong platform, that this is entirely the wrong line, that we're doomed and the whole holiday is ruined! Turns out we just needed to rotate the tickets 90 degrees to make it scan - phew.

Around this time, Matt casually drops in the fact that the walk from the station to our accomodation in El Chorro is around half an hour. For the group carrying a huge 25kg gear bag and around a metric ton of shopping it's fair to say this was disheartening news, but it was soon reconciled by the amazing view out of the train window. Dozens of crags flash by that would have been prime destinations in the UK, but Matt assures us that they're not even worth climbing compared to Frontales. We have the train nearly to ourselves as it pulls in to El Chorro station and we're greeted by a face of rock that, by my standards, was pretty huge. Pockmarked with caves, grooves, and buttresses and bathed in bright afternoon sunshine it's fair to say we were all pretty psyched.