Day 26: 10 Sep ’91 Tuesday A rest day in La Azohia

Absolutely dripping hot last night. Not a good sleep. Finally, woke up to see the sun on the outside of the tent. Dan went to a nearby supermarket to get breakfast of bread, butter, jam and tea. Tea is our only consistently good food. The rest of the food we have eaten in Spain has been poor. A very sparse amount of fresh vegetables in the areas we have been through. We are living off far more tinned food than we would like.

France was much better by far for fresh food. We prepared a greater amount of food such as onions, tomatoes, peppers, meat, beans and more. Here, we live of tinned sardines, tuna and pasta (Little did we know that tinned sardines and rice was pretty much what we going to live off for several months once beyond Europe). Home cooking is being missed badly.

After breakfast, we washed some clothes and then headed off to a beach which an old Belgian man had told us about on the camp site. The Belgian lived ‘opposite’ us in a caravan which looked quite permanent. He came down to live there for a year and had stayed for six. He also told us about a spring in a nearby valley which was quiet and peaceful. We decided that he had probably not seen the interior of Spain.

We walked down to the beach. The area had large expanses of greenhouses growing tomatoes. There was debris from the market garden business everywhere with Heaps of dead plants, old plastic and rubbish. Rubbish was very noticeable in Spain. They did not seem to have dealt with it very well (whereas, in fact, most farms I see in the UK are equally messy with old machinery, plastic bags and all sorts of tangles of disused materials everywhere). Everywhere we go, we have seen tips and verges packed with rubbish. It is quite revolting in places.

On the beach, we threw stones at polystyrene targets (see, I told you there was rubbish everywhere!) for a while before lying down in the sun. It became too hot so we walked down the beach to a sandy patch before heading back along the road to the camp site. It was very bright, fairly hot and both of us felt quite tired.

Back at the tent, we had a couple of biscuits each before crashing out for an hour and a half, woken by ants biting and flies pestering me. I felt much better for the kip. After watching some ants carrying away breadcrumbs for a spell, we went to a supermarket to buy supper. The supermarket was badly run. This morning, there was a boy at the till who kept short-changing us because he could not add up.

We ate supper, showered and went to a lit up barbecue area to write up our journals. We are waiting around for Steve and Simon now (Dan’s friends). We have got down here more quickly than expected. We have to kill time before meeting them in Granada which is a little frustrating. We are ready to go into Africa now. It’s not far away and we want get there soon. Spain is mediocre on the coast and full of trippers that we don’t want to hang around with.

Hopefully, a good sleep.