Al's Travel Blog - Part 3

Thursday June 6th 2008

 

I wake up long before Claire does today, and I'm still worried about getting caught. However, after a quick look around our campsite I see we are practically invisible (Claire is very good at this spot selection business) and my fears from the evening are dispelled so I let her sleep while I read some more Hemingway (no doubt accounting for the dry nature of my notes!) and look out over the cliffs from the Castel de San Joan and also down at the enormous ants that populate this sandy earth. They're fucking enormous and I watch one carry an entire crisp to the cliff edge. Unfortunately, said crisp acts as a sail and takes the unfortunate yet determined insect to his death. A member of the Guardia Urbana drives up on his motorcycle and ignores me and turns around and I take my first breath since he drove up the slope. I read until 9.30 and then Claire is up and getting ready and as the track gets a bit busier I am very thankful I got up early: people are now walking past us and I negotiated the comedy that is shitting in the woods long before I had an audience.

 

We walk down the main beach at Lloret de Mar and despite what the signs tell us it only takes twenty minutes and is absolute hell onEarth. The beach is jammed with board shorts and bikinis clinging to bodies that are simply better than mine to look at; wall-to-wall ice-cream stands, cheesy vendors (Claire almost headbutts a guy for being cheeky while she tries to buy a hat) and everyone, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, American, Canadian, Swedish, Austrians and of course the British are all here, in one place, to get burned, drink too much sangria and beer and ogle each others' semi-nude forms. In theory it sounds like a good basis for the formation of the European Union but it can be a little disturbing to hear a lewd song and not be able to tell what language it is in except the universal language of men+beer...

 

We have decided to take a boat from Lloret de Mar to Tossa de Mar (I am never above a cheap snigger), cutting out what we think is 13km (a days hike) of tourist beach after tourist beach. We wait another hour in the sun and board the boat and decide that our next big adventure will be a sailing one and sadly we were wrong and the boat glides past 13km of deserted national park land, deserted coves and the like, none of which are represented on the comprehensively shite map of the area i've got. The boat cruise is pleasant and although Claire nearly loses her hat several times we get a couple of pictures before the boat puts us in Tossa half an hour after leaving Lloret. (€8.50 one-way, if you want to know...) We escape the boat, jumping from a ramp on the front like Marines in the Pacific from landing craft. I have spied what looks to be a castle a I leave my pack with Claire who sits on a bench with the water and does some work. It is the hottest part of the day and I am glad she wants to sit in the shade because I can explore unencumbered. I walk the walls and it turns out that the 'castle' is in fact the remains, remarkablñy preserved, of La Vila Vella, or 'Old Town.' La Vila Nova is the town stretching North along the beachfront and it is decidedly less interesting. Vila Vella sits on a rocky outcrop, and the walls are mostly intact although inside most buildings are in the process of becoming restaurants, or so it seems. However, it is pleasant and cool in the narrow, ancient alleyways, with shade from buildings made with old, cold stones. I await Louis de Bernieres to set a novel that I hate to love there. After looking around and imagining the times when such a fastness was a security asset I rejoin Claire.

"How was the castle?"

"Good. But they're restoring the church. They're restoring everything. I can't decide if that's a good thing or not."

"Sounds good to me, or it'll just crumble away. How about you go get us a couple of baguettes?"

 

I wander through Tossa, finding mainly novelty shops and restaurants (I alsmot buy a replica 300 Spartan sword and helmet but am saved by my not possessing several hundred Euors for such frippery. It wouldn´t work without the red cloak, anyway...) and then I find a fast-food like place that is kind of a cross between Subway and Burger King. I buy us two hot bacon and cheese baguettes and walk back to Claire's bench and we eat and then shoulder our packs again and set off. We refill two of the water bottles at a beach bathroom and then follow a street uphill to the main road. A Btitish driver pulls over and offers us a lift:

"Where are you going?"

"Palermos," says Claire.

"On foot," says I.

"O," says the Englishmna. "I thought you were going to town. Well, good luck!"

"Thank you anyway," we say, and he drives off. We later wonder if we should have asked for a lift to the top of what turns out to be a very long, winding uphill road. We slog along and get to the main road and the sky by now has gone from birlliant blue with fluffy harmless white clouds to a very ominous grey. We stop at a lookout point and take pictures and put on, for the first time, the raincovers on our backpacks. It spits only as we walk along the coastal highway. This is frustrating mostly because it winds up and down hill, and we walk two km for every one we move up the coast. This is the area where the GR92 footpath, I think the E7 for the European Trail designation, goes inland. We are nowhere near it. The country is beautiful though, with thick trees  and orange rocks and sandy soil and the rain brings out the smells of the ground which is particularly pleasant. The road, however, has sheer cliff on one side going up, and a barely sloping descent onto jagged rocks and the Mediterranean on the other. At times the barrier on the seaward side is simply concrete blocks six inches high—frankly bloody useless as they merely add ton the hazard. There are some moments where we are sandwiched, motionless, between speeding mechanised death on one side and plummeting jagged rock drowning death on the other and to be honest these are unhappy moments. Despite this we make good progress and find a supermarket in a hotel by a beach resort where we stock up on supplies. It begins to rain heavily and Claire puts on her waterproof. That, along with her brown trousers and the black raincover over her rucksack make her look like a cartoon beetle. I call her a cockroach and sing La Cucaracha as the rain gets heavier and she laughs at me because I, the ever prepared boy scout genius, brought nothing even remotely waterproof with me at all.

 

We get soaked and thanks to Claire take a very long wrong turn and then it's back on the road and she is getting really angry. Four French girls nearly stop for us but I swear they see the bags and speed off. We make jokes about the French and then concede that we are the mad ones and they were going the wrong way anyway. We keep walking in the steady rain and we find, by accident, a path leading up to an Espai Natural and we explore up it and everything is quiet except the patter of the rain and the occasioanly roar of a car but they aren getting less frequent. Closer to the road we set up the tent on the one flat piece of land we can find. It still slopes slightly, and the road we walked up looks like it is a river in the wet season. But we're tired and it has stopped raining and we inflate the air mattressses and eaat a cold but wonderful dinner and lie next to each other and play 'Go FIsh' propped on our elbows but I can't remember all of the rules. I win and then it starts raining again, really, really hard: the noise is astonishing on the sides of the tent andneither of us get much sleep. I am thinking about flashfloods and Claire is nervous that there is the drop into a ravine only se3ven feet (and slightly downhill) from us, with only a few bushes to catch us if we slide. I also wonder if there are bears in Spain. We neither of us get much sleep and our poor Argos tent is little match for the weather and we know that come morning, if we live that long, we'll be swimming no matter what.