I guess after over 10 years living on a boat, you become a beach snob. In fact in the good old yachting days we preferred to have a pretty beach to look at from the anchorage rather than actually being on one.
Travelling east up the coast from Malaga towards Cabo de Gata you cross vast areas covered in plastic. It appears that huge amounts of Spain’s vegetables are grown here in greenhouses made of plastic foil. You can see it on google maps, it’s not pretty.
Once you are past Almeria, you enter the Parque National de Cabo de Gata-Nijar, one of the few National parks along the spanish Mediterranean coast. I am quite convinced that this is also the spot where we anchored, seeking shelter from the blow that hit us when we left Mallorca in 2012 to cross the Atlantic.
We picked an Area de Autocaravanes a few kilometers away from the coast that seemed a good spot for exploring the western part of the national park by bike. As we saw later, all official parkings and campings closer to the coast were full anyway due to the silly season (Christmas to Epiphany in Spain) and overnighting in national parks is generally forbidden in Spain.
The bike ride we set off to the next day, was very pretty but rather tough. After descending to the coast near San José we followed the coastline west on dirt roads (partly hiking tracks), found the beautiful beaches Playa de los Genoveses and Playa de Mónsul, decided that we had to come back with the van for a hike and then took the gravel road up to Torre de la Vela Blanca.
It is a long and tiresome ascent on bad surfaces that seems to soak up all your power. Gaylyn started to show unmistakable signs of saddle tiredness.
Unfortunately there was another steep ascent waiting for us before reaching the flatland beaches and then another 10 km slightly uphill and annoyingly upwind along a busy road lined with plastic greenhouses.
We took a break near the town of Cabo de Gato and this would have been the perfect spot for me to leave Gaylyn with a beer and some snacks, rush to the van and go pick her up. Unfortunately that decision wasn’t made.
It’s always sad when a pretty ride or hike ends in a slow and painful crawl home that overshadows the good parts of it.
We did go to Playa de los Genueses again and had a beautiful hike along the rugged coastline. The path has some scary parts as it climbs over cliffs and descends into several bays.
The rocks are of volcanic origin, some of them consist of stones baked in almost white ashes. They take on amazing shapes and some reminded me of Hundertwasser buildings. One of the most beautiful seaside hikes I have ever done.
I guess we could have spent a lot more time exploring Cabo de Gata but we still have some problems unsolved regarding the van, one of which is our weak battery and our lack of solar power. So we need to get on power every three to four days and headed inland in search of less popular pastures with power supply.