As I have said in previous blogs, the villa we are staying in is on the outskirts of a tiny village. The village itself is completely surrounded by fields. No matter which way we look, we see fields that have recently been harvested. Today we saw the combine harvester and bailing machine going round collecting the straw to make hay bales.

On our first night when we were sat outside enjoying the balmy temperatures (it was about 22° at 9 pm), we began to smell a distinct odour. Now living in Ormskirk, I’m used to, at certain times of the year, a certain aromatic fog which descends on the town as the farmers slurry their fields. But that is normally in the spring time, when the crops are growing. We could see with our own eyes here that everything in the field had been harvested, so we were a bit curious as to what was going on.

It was only after a couple of days that myself and Karen decided to walk to the next village, as contrary to our village, it said that it did have a bar. (In reality it didn’t. Google Maps, you need to do some updating.)

We had only walked a quarter of a mile along the road and the aroma began hitting us. We spotted a steaming pile of dung. We have noticed around here lots of low buildings with silos next to them. As we got closer to the building, and the smell got stronger, we knew exactly what was happening here.

The shed was full of cows. And it was them who were creating the smell. I held my breath and carried on but noticed another two of these low buildings. As we past the next one, we heard the distinct sound of pigs coming from within it. And by the time we reached the third one, yet more cows. I guess it’s really just too hot to have cows out in the fields here, so they need the shelter, which means they need to pretty much be raised indoors. At this point we were at the top of a hill and as we looked around, we counted at least 12 of these animal farms around the area where we were staying. That explained where the smell was coming from.

The only problem with this, other than the smell when the wind changes, is that we do have a fly problem. I’ll be absolutely honest, I’ve never come across a place like it. They seem to be flies that are quite used to humans, or simply confuse us for cows because they will literally come and sit on your hand. At one point I had two or three of them just sat quite contentedly on my hand as I was holding a cup of coffee. This has led to an ongoing experiment. How do you solve a problem like a fly infestation?

We noticed that we did have a few cans of fly spray knocking around the villa (now we know why). They are fine indoors, but we don’t really have a problem indoors. It’s out on the terraces and by the pool that they seem to congregate. We read that they don’t like lemon, so we put saucers with lemon out. That didn’t seem to do much. One morning I came down to breakfast to find a jug with fresh lavender in it. Tibu had read that lavender acts as a deterrent and we’ve got lots of lavender bushes in the garden, so he’d done a bit of pruning and popped that on the table. That didn’t seem to make much difference either. We read that vinegar was a good deterrent, so then we began using saucers with vinegar and lavender on the table. This had a limited effect for 15 minutes, and then they all came back again.

Down at the barbecue area, they have one of those insect zappers. We have one at home which we call Frank (I’ll let you work that one out). It was hung from the ceiling but just plugged into the wall so we took that down and plugged that on the end of the dining table as well. Again limited effect. Finally the other thing that we read worked really well was a fan and citronella candles.

Amazingly there isn’t a single fan in this property, so a trip to the Chinese bazar was needed and we purchased one. At one point we literally had on the dining table, a huge electronic insect zapper, saucers of vinegar and lavender, a fan, and citronella candles burning.

This did seem to do the trick, but the fan blew the candles out and made the food cold, so we now have to work a sort of shift system which we use depending on what we’re eating/doing at the time. Never did I think that I would come away from holiday with so much knowledge of insect repellents!