After an overnight stay in Málaga I caught a bus westward to Tarifa passing Algeciras and Gibraltar in the Costa del Sol. The first thing that I noticed when I stepped off the bus was the strong warm desert wind that would prove to be a very common phenomenon in that place. It is not without reason that Tarifa has a reputation as a surfer’s paradise.

The second thing I noticed was the silhouettes of the Atlas Mountains on the other side of the straits of Gibraltar. I found a guest house in the middle of the city and booked a room for two nights. I spent the next day looking at the sights and investigating how to get started on the GR-7 trail. In my guide-book Walking the GR7 in Andalucia the authors suggestion were that you start out on the beach walking several kilometers westward and “paddle” over the river Vega that splits the stretch on the beach in half. According to my findings it was a much better choice to walk a couple of hundred meters further inland in a bird sanctuary where there was a good trail. I also found out that there was an alternative to getting wet in Río de la Vega (whose flow in the beginning of May that year was quite impressive to me), namely: the river could be crossed on a bridge, if you didn’t mind walking on a paved road for a couple of kilometers. I thought it a was small price to pay for not having to struggle through beach sand for several kilometers and then in the middle of it strip naked to cross a river that looked a bit nasty to me.

The next morning I tried my backpack on and it must have weighed well over 20 kilograms. No way that I was going to carry that. I had to get rid of some stuff to bring the weigth down to maybe 18 kilograms. Although I was a seasoned wanderer even that weight was actually too heavy for me as I wasn’t trained to carry more than maybe 5 to 6 kilograms in the hikes I had made lately.

When I got on my way the sun was already burning and the temperature was well over 20 degrees centigrade. I took the route through the bird sanctuary but I couldn’t resist taking another look at Río de la Vega before deciding to take the alternate route passing the river on a bridge instead of swimming. The temperature rose to around thirty at noon and the wind blew quite hard and steady. The Cádiz province is wind power country and scattered all over the hilltops were hundreds and hundreds of wind mills rotating furiously. I made some navigational mistakes according to not having my GPS device adjusted properly and the sun, the constant blowing of the wind, and the heat was beginning to get at me. I found a spot of grass by a stream where I put up my tent for the night. I ate some supper and then fell fast asleep.

Later that night a strange sound caught my attention. It sounded like somebody was hitting a tin can with a stick. I looked out of my tent and saw a cow with a big cowbell around its neck four meters away. My tent occupied the only spot in the proximity where a cow could make its way down to the stream, so I kept an eye on the cow for a while until she noticed me and decided to move off. After that I went back to a dreamless sleep.