Invasión de mosquitos (mosquito plague)

San Vicente del Raspeig,

Monday 30 September 2019

Due to the abundant rain of the Gota fría, the soil and the air are very humid. Let that now be the ideal conditions for insects to develop. Especially the mosquitoes and the last few days also the flies are present in large numbers, pertinent even. It is so bad, that along the entire Costa Blanca the government has had to resort to drastic means. Helicopters and drones are used to spray mosquito repellents all over the area. It remains a scary thought that they spray all those insecticides on us, and I hope it doesn’t harm our health. But it is really necessary, because the mosquitoes are extremely aggressive, in the sense that they just move a few centimetres further on your body when you try to beat them away. They are also active day and night, early in the morning, 24 hours a day. It is typical for these tiger mosquitoes, characterized by their striped body and paws.

It almost sounds sweet, when I talk about paws, but believe me, they are not. If it wasn’t so annoying, it could almost occur in a caricature, everywhere you see people walking with masses of red lumps, sometimes even considerable lumps in people who have an allergic reaction. But that’s only the outward appearance. The awful thing is that they itch terribly, those bites, and that’s so bad that it threatens to drive you crazy. Luckily we have the ideal solution in our garden: the Aloe Vera plant, well known in the world of skin care. You just cut a piece of the thick, fleshy and spine-toothed leaves and the thick juice that comes out you rub over the itchy spots. After a minute the itching will be gone, at least in that spot. I’m extremely prone to itching, so I’ll be busy all day with a piece of Aloe Vera. As standard I have a piece of plant and a kitchen knife at hand to cut off small slices each time so that I have new juice each time, to start lubricating a different place that itches furiously.

Another matter is prevention of course, so everyone here smells like the anti-mosquito stuff with citronella and deet… Hopefully the stuff from the government will do its job here soon.

But of course it is not all doom and gloom, on the contrary. Those mosquitoes are just an nasty side effect.  The garden has also enjoyed the rain, and everything has come back to life. We still have beautiful, flowering flowers and plants. The pepper tree carries its hundreds of clusters of pink peppers, the cacti proudly show off their cactus figs, the female date palms carry abundant clusters of orange dates, and the different colours of the beautiful flowers give our garden a beautiful range of colours.

Unfortunately, the weeds are also thriving. And just now it turns out that we can’t really count on our Spanish gardener. We are busy looking for another one who appears faithfully on the weekly appointment, because there is quite a lot of work, and a well-kept garden is important for the guests. At the moment we have guests who are staying in the smallest villa by the pool and have spontaneously started to remove weeds from between the joints. Every now and then they do this for fifteen minutes. Lovely anyway, although it gives a bit of a double feeling. It seems as if we don’t (want to) do it, but we have learned to let go. Sometimes people just like to do some relaxing activities and not lie at the pool all day long. We accept this kind of help with gratitude, knowing that people on holiday don’t do things because they have to, but just because they feel like it. Let that be our motto for the guests; they only do what they want. Only then is it really a holiday with a big H.

Meanwhile we are at the end of September and we still enjoy the wonderful temperatures of just over 30 degrees Celsius. The days are getting shorter of course, and at night it cools down a bit more to about twenty degrees. The evenings are still great to sit outside, although most guests now wear one of the lovely soft bathrobes outside. Often Wim and I are the only ones who walk around naked for a long time because our bodies seem to have adapted better after all these months. It is wonderful to see the night fall over the city, to enjoy on the terrace the beautiful play of colours in the sky when the sun goes down. How lucky I am to be able to experience this on a daily basis, gratuitously.

In the meantime, we have also decided that we only go for naturism in Lavinia. There is too much ambiguity in our original dual concept of nudism in summer versus dressed in winter. That does, however, still offer the possibility of other opportunities. For example, in December a yoga retreat camp will be held, where a group will rent the entire resort to practice yoga for four days and to relax and enjoy the wonderful temperatures. We are in contact with a super sympathetic yoga teacher in the deep West Flanders, who wants to organize the camp here. I wonder what this will be, it will be new to me as well, and I look forward to experiencing for myself whether yoga is something for me.

Furthermore, we are going more and more internationally. Last week, suddenly, in the middle of the night, a Canadian booked. It feels really special that people are willing to endure a jetlag in order to come to our place on holiday. It makes me a bit blushing – grateful, that’s for sure.

This week we also published an article in a Belgian naturist magazine, a three-page article that I was allowed to write myself, with the icing on the cake being the cover. This makes me blush even more ! Curious to see what it will look like on paper…And soon we also expect the interview with Filip, our famous house photographer 😉. Thanks to Wim’s tremendous efforts in the field of marketing and social media, Lavinia seems to have a clear profile on the market. The reviews are also quite favourably. All this makes that we have started our first year well and can look forward with confidence to bookings for next year – which by the way are already starting to come in now that the flight data for the summer of 2020 are known.

But our season is not over yet. We still have a full house, and for now also in November some guests. We’re slowly entering the final sprint, and are starting to make plans for the winter, including the visit to Belgium around Christmas of course. Something to look forward to!

But we’re not there yet, although we did book our tickets. We can still enjoy the wonderful sun-temperatures while the weather in Belgium is apparently bad and fresh. Viva España!

Hasta luego,

Annemie ofte Ana