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Tuesday, December 30, 2008 Ronda, or Middle Earth  People tell me skydiving is scary. I've gone skydiving, and it didn't produce nearly as much fear in me as staring straight down the gorge in Ronda, Spain. Ronda is an old town built on a plateau--two, actually--separated by a sharp, 330-foot drop. The fear reaction that looking down from Puente Nuevo (the "new bridge" that took 40 years and 50 lives to build) produces is a visceral one--people do sometimes fall to their deaths, but much of the space any normal person would wander through is walled off or enclosed with iron grates. We weren't normal. Lauren, Jason, and I climbed down the slippery stairs that went down to the bottom of the gorge and wandered away from the more standard path to one winding directly underneath and through the bottom section of the bridge. (I don't think most tourist sites in the US would ever leave the path we took open for fear of lawsuits.) The path offered amazing views (the photo on the right was taken from it), but at any moment it would have been a little too easy to trip and fall--most of it was only two feet wide, with a long, sheer drop on one side and perhaps a shorter drop on the other. There were some railings, but they were flimsy (a single line of wire, rather than actual rail, just thick enough to grab, but of dubious help if you actually did fall, and a couple of sections had chain-link fencing), but many of the fence posts and attachments were loose or had fallen off.  There were a good number of beer and pop bottles even further down than we went (read: where there was no path at all), so I suspect that the town's teenagers (who all apparently frequent one otherwise intriguing Arabic-styled cafe) must run up and down the rocks. Ronda's beautiful, but there wouldn't be a lot for a teenager to do there after a couple of weeks.The town itself is amazing--it was Roman, Moorish, and Catholic all in turn, and pieces of each conqueror reflect themselves in its architecture. From one point, you can see the old Arabic bridge (which is still used), the Roman bridge (also still used), Arabic baths and mines, a castle, and a palace. Walking through it, especially near Puente Nuevo, feels like walking into Middle Earth. ^ Top | 11:25 AM | | | 
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