Chasing the dragon

No, no. Not that chasing the dragon. I know the expression is usually about serious drug abuse, but that’s absolutely not what I mean here. This is about my becoming a camp follower to a bunch of dragon boaters. 

Boatless dragons

Do you know about dragon boats? I didn’t just a few weeks ago. They’re a Chinese invention, a variant on the notion of a canoe, with a dragon’s head and dragon’s tail for ceremonial occasions, and large crews. I’ve seen crews of ten or twenty. 

Our Dragon Boat on the Mar Menor

The crew doesn’t row. It uses something like a single canoe paddle, not the double-headed kind the kayakers use. You paddle on just one side or the other, you don’t swap sides.

It turns out that because the exercise is good for upper-body strength, the sport is beneficial in particular for breast cancer survivors. Fortunately, it can also be enjoyed by many others, including my wife Danielle.

We live near Valencia in Spain, and south of here, in the province of Murcia, there’s a wonderful lagoon called the ‘Mar Menor’ – the ‘minor’, or perhaps I should say ‘smaller’, sea. Protected from the main Mediterranean by a long sandspit, you can imagine it provides a wonderful area for all sorts of sports involving boats or boards. Winds can get strong, but generally they’re manageable, so windsurfers and leisure sailors can have fun. As for the swell, it’s practically non-existent most of the time, making it ideal for rowing, canoeing or, indeed, dragon boating.

Some years ago, a woman called Jan Collins (not Joan), breast-cancer sufferer, who was described to me as English, but I think may have been Canadian, discovered the Mar Menor. 

“What a place for dragon-boating,” she exclaimed, or so I’m guessing (I wasn’t actually there).

Pink Flamingo

There are flamingos on the lagoon. They’re pretty much entirely white but our  Spanish friends just seem to regard the word ‘pink’ as part of the bird’s name (flamenco rosa) whatever its colour. Anyway, the dragon boating group Collins set up is called ‘the pink flamingo’. 

Our dragon boaters with the Pink Flamingos coming to dock

This was the first ‘BCS’, Breast Cancer Survivor, dragon boat group in Spain. It’s thriving. So our local group in Valencia naturally wanted to visit them, to have some training from their coaches, try out the pleasure of paddling on the Mar Menor and meet some women who, according to our association’s team captain, were pretty damn good company.

Joint Pink Flamingo and our dragon boaters: guard of honour

And they were.

The thing about dragon boating is that it’s hard work, and I say that as someone who’s only ever been out for a trial session. People like Danielle have real intensive workouts. What that means is that, once they’ve done an hour or two, they’re wrecked and need to stop. 

Leaving them with, I don’t know, maybe sixteen hours of the day to fill up. We had to find some leisure activities. Fortunately, these weren’t the kind of people for whom that was a difficulty. Indeed, if anything, keeping up would be more our problem.

Some of our dragon boaters on Tabarca

It started on the way down, when we took a break from the travelling to visit the island of Tabarca. It’s under 2 km long, so we walked around it – well, strolled– in little over an hour. A good walk, since one end of the island is a nature reserve. The other end, I reckon making up more than half of it, is built up. Properly built up, with houses, streets, squares and everything though, bliss, no cars. I believe the permanent population has reached the staggering level of about 70, but it grows significantly during the day, as staff come out by boat – there’s no other way to get there – to staff the shops, cafés and restaurants.

One of those restaurants introduced me to the delicacy of ‘gallina’. That means ‘hen’, but this one wasn’t going to lay the kind of eggs you scramble or fry. It’s a particularly hideous looking fish. though, to be fair, it tasted far better than it looked.

Gallina: ugly fish, fine meal

Once down on the Mar Menor, the enterprising dragon boaters quickly identified a bar which served excellent mojitos. That place saw us rather a lot over the weekend. As did the café that served its own home-made, freshly baked Madeleine (or Magdalena) cakes with its coffees. 

Mojitos on the Mar Menor

We also enjoyed a great lunch at a place that claimed to be run by a Portuguese (’Domingos El Portugués’) though I noticed nothing specifically Portuguese about the cooking – it was fine but definitely Spanish. One especially enjoyable Spanish aspect of the lunch was that they’d closed off the street outside the restaurant, so they could set up tables for us in it. Traffic? It could find another way around. And it was a delight that we could eat out of doors, after the appalling weather we’d had recently, whose only merit, as far as I could see, was that it filled up our reservoirs after a drought lasting some months.

Lunch in the street at Domingos El Portugués

In the evenings, Danielle and I slipped out on our own, to a small gastro-bar. It served good food and boasted that all its main dishes, desserts and even waiters were home made. The last claim was mind-boggling. I didn’t ask for the recipe.

Why did we slip out? Because the rest of the company, excellent company though they were, just showed more energy than we could follow. That mojito bar also had a disco area upstairs which attracted a lot of interest from the other dragon boaters. Well, I don’t just have two left feet, but two cloth ears too, and far too little stamina for any of that. Our gastro-bar provided a sanctuary from activity beyond our strength (or my ability).

But I was impressed by the dynamism of the group. Especially as some of them were seriously ill. They had a depth of merriment that left me (sometimes literally, for instance after our hike along the landspit at the edge of the lagoon) breathless.

Above all, it left me laughing a lot. Good food, good drink, even better company. That, I feel, is very best kind of dragon chasing.

Who could ask for more?