As if it would be some sort of duty, perhaps a light form of the discipline that I haven't manage in the last ten years, I sit in front of the keyboard this morning, first of a normal week, the first working week since holidays where started in this northern country. It is about time to report on my blog, and why not be extremely unoriginal and go and talk about holidays, prostitution and crowds in La Costa Brava?

Since about a year already, my family got caught in scuba diving. As pretty much any other sport in this organized north, such being caught implies becoming member of a club, and assist the orderly classes given in a local swimming pool, eventually going out to explore the -cold- waters of The Netherlands. Behind are the unplanned and unprepared dives that all my life I have done in the Caribbean. Here diving is about having the proper equipment, the right training, the good planning, even the correct attitude; all which is supposed to bring people up to... the right accreditation, certified-by-the-EU-carnet included. All this, of course, under the unstated promise that the summer is for some other latitude, warmer and richer in biodiversity and transparent water. Not surprisingly then, about six weeks ago we started the rented car towards the warmer and promising south, in a sort of peregrination towards the dive centers of the Mediterranean. Cap d' Ague, L'scala, L'startits... Names well known for european divers, and terra incognita for us, since we have been biking, walking and climbing the last decade. Always open for something new, they say. And there we went.

To talk about the water itself is a bit of an exercise in the obvious, since in our internet days there is nothing that I can say other than what a couple of google hits would deliver. No doubt, for Caribbean standards of biodiversity the Mediterranean is pretty much a dead sea. But it is still a sea, and each opening eyes under transparent and warmth water delivers, always, a surprise. Squids and octopuses, morenes and sea basses, sea cucumbers and jellyfish, even some minuscules barracudas. A constant delight to the eyes of my nine years old son, by first time discovering snorkeling in a rocky shore. Delight, must be said, that went from the moment of dunking the mask in the water to the moment of taking out if it. Because the beach was a very different story indeed.

I must acknowledge that all the photos that I have spent my life seeing of the rocky mediterranean shore are indeed true. The minuscule bays, with blue green water and fishes that even from the shore are to be seen are no photoshop miracle. But there is a catch: most of those bays, about 99% of them indeed, have no land access. Which is great if you have a boat of your own. But if you are a simple tourist, limited to park your car at a short distance from the water -to be able to carry all your gear-... you become part of an unbelievable huge crowd of people that is trying exactly for the same spot. And besides the fact that scuba dive gear always looks pretty cool in the midst of other people, the cool dies about five minutes after being trying to make way in a mass that has occupied pretty much every square centimeter of the sand.

And not only the beach. Because the decades, or rather the centuries in which the Costa Brava have been a touristic destination, makes that every single camping to be found has capitulated to the Club Med approach. Huge fields where tent concentration is comparable to the deportation camps of Frontex, but instead of having desperate migrants for neighbors, we got the drunk adolescence of the rest of europe. No surprise that in the books on small campings of south europe that we lay hands on, no reference was made of Costa Brava. There might be some idyllic small camping place somewhere. But we did not find it. And accordingly, we expend some relevant time driving in between towns, chasing a vague reference here and there. Which is when we witness the next surprise in this otherly order europe: the road prostitution of spain.

It is enough to drive outside pretty much every other town. The road becomes what any other road of the european countryside is: a two lanes, sunny and picturesque way between siesta sleeping towns. With the addition of the ladies of the road. Waiting under an umbrella, sporting long legs and browned by the sun skin, waiting for clients as if for a bus that will not bother to come. More likely waiting for my drunken neighbors in the camping, eager to sport their manhood in spain. Apparently in the middle of nowhere, surely without any protection beyond the suspected presence of their pimp, perhaps driving around, perhaps not. 

Prostitution in Europe is one of the last refuges of national identity. Because indeed in every country that by now I have travelled through it has different shapes. From the low key, classy and strictly under appointment Swiss model, to the blatantly regulated exposition of the trade in the vitrines of The Netherlands. Passing by the uncountable brothels in the no man lands between France and Germany. Adding now these girls on the spanish roads. Which gives reality to the nightmare of road prostitutes killers that we have heard of in the newspapers. Once I wondered how somebody could pick up so many women and kill them before being brought to prison. Now I need not to wonder. The road prostitution in Spain, open and without any pretension of safety or control seems to be one of those high risk professions that the european trade unions regulate to the last detail. I very much doubt that there is any such concern for the spanish prostitutes. Women that, if we believe to the official statistics, are mostly undocumented and of migrant origin. Another group of the dispossessed, forgotten by Brussels and other european -chic and progressive- capitals.

So here I am again, writing from my very safe terrace in an Utrecht cafe, enjoying the last days of sun of this ending summer. And even if I would like to think in policy that could recreate the once endless diversity of the ocean, even when I read about sustainable ways to go about fisheries and ecotourism, which might get implemented... I keep on going back to that other old profession, as old as the fisheries are. I think in that woman waiting in a road in spain.