Dreams of escape

We ventured into the hotel on the next headland - to explore and try their coffee. It's only 150 metres away across the little bay and accessed by car down another of these tunnels which slot down between the dark high walls surrounding the banana plantations.
The hotel is, as expected, just a balconied box with a smudge of palmery-greenery around it which is only kept alive with sprinklers.  An air-conditioning unit under part of the building is making a tremendous noise - unbearable.  Everything is groomed, glossy. It's like being a brochure photograph.  Not a blade of grass out of place. Everything shining and clean. It's all very 1980s.
We can look back across the bay to our apartment - a novel view. Our building looks quite small from here, more like the 1960s.
The hotel's clientele at the moment is a mass of German retirees, who create a kind of fleshy fringe along the gardens, lying on a double-border of sun-loungers. They are quiet, well-behaved, taking their silent rest after the exertions of a lifetime, and in various stages of nakedness or leatheriness. None of them speak to each other. We thought, if this was the English there would be catcalls, shouts, jokes, drinking.... But the Germans are really quiet. The swimming-pools are empty. The cafe is open but not able to serve coffee or even orange juice as the electricity is off.
We wander back and head off down the coast road to the tiny village of el Remo, which could not present a greater contrast.....
We have approached through these fortified banana fields with their tall dull grey and black walls and fencing. The walls are made with huge black boulders at ground level, up to about 15 or 20 feet, and then topped with either pierced concrete-block walls or the wind-defence mesh. These structures line all the roads near sea level and make for a grim and prison-like landscape; they go on for miles. Suddenly the highway comes to an abrupt end with a massive volcanic wall of rock. The road veers off to the right onto a bumpy track down towards the beach and then we are in a forgotten lost world.  Stretching for about a mile, between the bananas and the crashing sea is a straggling hamlet or shanty town, old and poor. Most of the buildings are single-storey concrete houses, some with little verandas. Some are derelict, some have been rebuilt by architects. Some have greenery, most do not.  Some are clearly lived in - by old people, and some are presumably weekend cottage or holiday lets. It reminds us of Mersea Island, Jaywick, Winchelsea Beach or even Whitstable. A few small dogs sit in the sun. A deep pond is proclaimed to be a nature-reserve. There are two or three rotting boats well up inside the village - how anyone ever launched them from the hard black lava cliffs is a mystery, and in any case nowadays the sea in front of the village is a strictly controlled marine nature reserve with no fishing or diving. Leatherback turtles used to come here and a certain dolphin - the authorities hope to lure them back.  It is a place on the edge of the world, small, dusty, un-made, rough, workaday.
We wander right up to the end of the village and back again. We have lunch in a tall designer-shack overlooking the rocks and the glittering ocean, thinking we might have done better in the less swanky one near the pond.  The whole place is magic - no doubt with its own cares and arguments but - for today - looking idyllic and full of potential.  The girl in the older cafe says her name is Wendy, and gives us the phone number of an estate agent.  She and the waitress in our lunch cafe are both stunningly beautiful and made up like Hollywood stars. Their dreams are of escape, like ours, but travelling in exactly opposite directions.