Adios Malaga, Buenos Dias Tarifa

We had a last leisurely day in Malaga, with a few things to do before our departure today. We moved our bike boxes and our hockey bags into Julia’s shed - a wonderful benefit for us in not having to worry about finding bike boxes at the trip’s end. We went for a lovely visit with Eva, our BnB host when we arrived in Malaga last year. Eva is the aunt of Julia, where we are staying now, and lives two blocks away on the same street. We will be staying in Eva’s apartment when we return to Malaga at the end of our trip. She said she likes Tarifa, our next stop and recommended a few other places down the coast.

Temperatures yesterday were about 10 degrees cooler than the day before but still sunny. We had a good hike up into the hills behind our neighbourhood, enjoying the different architecture of the houses from traditional to very modern and all the tropical plants. Development is continuing up into the hills as it is in our part of the world.

Back down by the beach, we stopped at one of the bars for a drink - my first sangria. I know it’s a tourista drink but I find it a nice change, light on the alcohol and very refreshing. Jim is always in search of draft beer and found unfiltered Aguila, brewed in Sevilla since 1904 but currently owned by Heiniken, which he thinks is pretty good. Cruz Campo is another one he likes. Beer is about €3-3.50. Mixed drinks like my Sangria are more - €5. Cheaper than home.

We decided to get takeout at the Mercadora. I was having a little carne craving so ribs, really good patatas and a sauté of sliced peppers and onions, with pannacotta for dessert did the trick.

I was able to join in on my Friends of the Gulf Islands weekly Zoom meeting - 10 am at home is 7 pm here - though the internet was a bit shaky at times. Will keep this up as I can.

The shuttle van came for us at 11 am this morning so we had lots of time to have coffee and breakfast and pack up our panniers. Much as we have come to love Malaga - and our accommodation - we are looking forward to new sights. Our street was blocked at one end so we moved everything out to the corner. It requires a lot of tricky maneuvering for big vehicles like this van to negotiate the narrow streets with all the parked cars.

Eventually we made it up onto the A7 freeway up above the coast. It’s pretty amazing infrastructure with multiple tunnels with 4 lanes of one way traffic. It all makes the George Massey tunnel look pretty sad. Again the development going on everywhere is astounding and disturbing. The coast has pretty much been built out and there are cranes everywhere in the hills.

Housing is a big issue in Spain (though we have not seen many unhoused people like we do at home - not sure why) as it in our part of the world and the Costa del Sol and Malaga province have seen huge increases in the prices of housing in the past year with the pace of the rise doubling. People are getting priced out of the city of Malaga and are moving out to other communities. Tourist accommodation like AirBnBs are the target of people’s anger, as it is at home too, and limitations on these are being implemented in certain areas. Tourism is a big economic driver but the distribution of wealth is more and more problematic. Big issues everywhere and what are the solutions?

We passed Marbella and then Gibraltar with the Rock looking astoundingly huge and out-of-place from up above.

Then we descended onto the smaller N34 highway to Tarifa on the coast. The van let us out in a little square not far from the hotel, Posada Vagamundos, on a narrow little car-free street where we will be staying.

It’s a very small hotel with rooms on 4 floors and a very small reception space. I am feeling dubious about their promise of safe storage for our bikes, but yes, we can bring them into that tiny space and leave them blocking what seems to be the only entrance into the breakfast room. OK! The very friendly woman at the desk does not speak any English but we meet Tom from Brazil, also working at the hotel, who has spent time in Ireland & has pretty good English.

We are initially given Room 10, on the 3rd floor, which in Europe is actually the 4th floor, a bit of a hike up with no elevator. Then he asked if we preferred a room on the 1st floor, actually the 2nd floor, and we said yes. But that room is very small and dark - and cold & I think I will not be happy there for 3 nights. I had asked Tom if they were busy & he said no, so I thought it was worth asking if there was a brighter, larger room. Yes, #10. OK, I will happily go up and down 4 flights of stairs for a better room. It’s not that much bigger but it’s a corner room with windows on both sides & and even a bit of a view of the Med out one window and a view of an old church steeple and a tiled roof out the other. Definitely atmospheric if much tighter quarters than we had in Malaga. Plus there is a small sunny terrace next door. I immediately feel more cheerful!

We do some negotiating about where we can each keep our stuff in the limited space, and head out to explore. As mentioned, Tarifa is a place for wind sports and we soon found a long beach promenade where we could walk and watch all the kite and wind surfers. Kite surfing is a pretty amazing sport - we could not believe how much air these people got. We are happy to see that the beach Paseo also has a paved two-lane bike path that will be the one we take west when we leave. We are even happier to see some signage for Zahara de Los Atunes, our next port of call.

The beaches remind me of ones in Australia - huge with golden sand, so beautiful in contrast with the blue sea - or seas rather as here the Med and the Atlantic meet. It must be packed here in the summer. We see lots of motor homes and read that it is a popular spot for digital nomads to base themselves. There do seem to be a lot of young people around.

Terifa has some old city walls and towers along the ocean for defense beginning in the 10th C. It’s strategic location meant to has been the site of a lot of military action between the Moors, the Christians, the Spanish and the British against the French and there are bunkers remaining from the Spanish Civil War. This peculiar building, the Castle of Santa Cantalina was contructed in the neo-Gothic style in 1933 as a semaphore flag-station.

The whitewashed old town is really lovely with many very narrow, virtually car-less streets and lots of cafes, bars, restaurants and small shops.

It really is cold with the strong wind and I am glad I brought my long rain jacket and puffy. It begins to rain a bit so back in town we duck into a little French-style cafe. Cafe con leches are typically about €1.5, also cheaper than home.

We finish our long walk on the other side of the old town where we find signage indicating a Sendero (path) Europe’s, 26 Km trail, the GR92/E12 going east to Algeciras. There are the remains of several old houses on the beach, and a nice concrete lookout has been added to one by the Sociedad Española de Salvamento, the Spanish Shipwreck Rescue Society. No doubt there have been many shipwrecks in these waters over the centuries - we can see lots of rocky shoals and the winds would we problematic. I read that Algeciras is one of the largest ports in Europe and the world and we can see lots of large container ship traffic. North Africa is very visible from Tarifa with Ceuta, still Spanish to the east, where Lyn and I started our Moroccan adventure in 1971, taking the ferry from Gibraltar, and Tangier to the west..

On the walk back, we watch an amazing bit of seamanship on the part of one of the large catamaran car/passenger ferries that go between Tarifa and Tangier, only 14.4 Km. A tiny pilot boat went out to meet it as it approached the Tarifa port which is not large. We couldn’t see if a pilot got on board but likely. Then the ferry proceeded very slowly into the small opening in the breakwater, and then in a very narrow space, rotated on its axis to basically parallel park along the dock. A lot could go wrong!

We headed back to our hotel to warm up. There’s a heat pump on the wall that seems to only emit cold air, no mater what we tried - maybe only used for air conditioning in the summer, and a plug-in heater that worked. About 7:30 we went out to look for dinner. Some places are closed for vacaciones but we ended up in a very atmospheric little bar perched on stools in a back corner with a good view of the very small one-cook kitchen. It was a limited menu, also in English and we both had their delicious home-made grilled sausages that came with with the best fries ever and an ensalada. With a copa of vino de rioja for me and a beer for Jim, we were cosy, happy campers. We ended up chatting to our neighbours at the bar, a couple from Aulbfeira, Portugal who told us we will love it there, and a couple from Garden Bay on the Sechelt Coast! Who knew!

Back at the ranch, we discover there is no running water in the bano. Fortunately we could send a message on What’s App and we quickly had a phone call to say they would be investigating and if it was only our room, they could move us. We said that wasn’t necessary; the tap dripped enough water so we could brush our teeth, but a short while later, there was a knock on our door from a guy with bottled water for us and who said that their had been a broken pipe and that entire street was affected but it would be fixed soon. And when Jim got up sometime during the night, we did have water again. Whew! We had seen workers out on the street earlier with a manhole cover up and Jim thinks they maybe had the water off then but forgot to turn it back on.
It was very quiet at night; always a relief that there isn’t a nearby bar we didn’t know about. A good first sleep in