Cuenca, Spain

The next day, we left for the Serranìa de Cuenca, a stretch of mountains and green-moss rivers and pine forests. We made our way to the café at the top of the mountain near Ciudad Encantada. We ate tapas: Manchego cheese and olives and a tuna and tomato sauce for the bread.

We drank beers and then entered the Ciudad Encantada - a regional park of river-washed stones in the shapes of mushrooms and bears and silly things. I told Susie that the wonder of this place compared to the bizarreness of Southern Utah. Hot springs and caves, and corridors and fissures. It is much like an ancient city, although the blocks of giant limestone here come from the erosion of millenia.

We left from the Ciudad Encantada to the walled city of Cuenca, an eighth century Muslim fortress built on a geological 'island' between two green rivers which fork into each other. Necessity crowded the city out to the brink of its walled-cliffs, so that the houses and apartments hang over its vegetated cliffs.

Cuenca is like few other cities in the world. It blends into its mountainous backdrop; it is aesthetic perfection; a beautiful city with a cathedral lit in yellow, and rows of tapas bars. During the Christian age, medieval buildings were built around and in between the mujedar architechture, which made a good place to eat tapas:sausages and lomo, and olives too, and Manchego cheese.