Cadiz

Camping

Last week I packed my camping gear and took the four-hour bus ride to Tarifa, on the southern tipof Spain at the mouth of the Mediteranian. I stocked up on supplies in the supermercado (Eroski, my fave cheapo European supermarket), and started walking north along the beach.

There is a long ten kilometer stretch of beach before one gets to the headland at Punta Pampàloma, from there another four kilometers around the coast is El Chorrito, the beach where I spent the summer camping.

This time it was almost deserted, with a small group of people I didn´t know camping near the beach. I had the pick of the camping spots, and plenty of firewood. I chose a well hidden site high above the beach where the police would never find me. There might not have been many people around, but they still had a helicopter going back and forward along the coast, just to make people nervous.

I got to thinking about the summer that I spent on El Chorrito, and remembered that there were lots of stories from that time that I never wrote about in the blog...

Football

One lazy afternoon everybody was lying on the beach, enjoying the cooling of the air as the sun got lower. Bored. Probably stoned. Wondering what to do. Maybe something would come along?

A bright, round object was spotted floating out at sea.
¨probably a buoy¨
¨or a skin diver¨ (they have a bright floater attatched to them so that boats can see where they are and not run over them)

The object got closer, and closer...
¨coño, it´s a football!¨

While one hippy ran hollering into the surf to fetch the prize everybody else scrambled to sort out a pitch on the beach. Sticks marked the goals, and two teams were organised. The result was a no-holds-barred five-aside game of nude football.

Everybody turned out to be quite handy, which isn´t such a surprise in Europe. The girls watched as teams comprised of idle, stoned hippies, backpackers, criminals and musicians enthusiastically threw themselves into the game. It was a sight to see Carlos, a live-and-let-live hippy type sprint ten meters to shove somebody off the ball, then fight tooth and nail to retain it.

In the end everybody jumped into the sea to clean up, and set about cooking dinner.

Close Shave

I had spotted two police cars at the end of the road after the military checkpoint. It was unusual to see them in the area in the afternoon - they always came to raid us at sunup so that they could catch us while we slept. It is very unpleasant being woken by a scowling policeman (advice - pretend not to speak Spanish and act really stupid).

I dashed to the campsites to warn everybody that there might be some trouble on the way. But there was no sign of the police, and after an hour it was assumed that they were in the carpark for some other reason.

Everyone relaxed, and went back to their sites. I put on my pack and walked over to Fred´s site, a little ledge on top of the cliff overlooking the beach. I had my eyes on my feet and my head in dreamland as I wandered along, and I didn´t see the Policewoman talking to Fred until I looked up about ten meters from his site. She was standing side-on to me, and I thought that she would certainly see me out of the corner of her eye. Fred certainly saw me.

After a couple of seconds I started to back away slowly, I turned and walked quickly. I was waiting for the call, but it didn´t come and I ran to the little clearing where most of us were staying. There were eight guys sitting around the fire, with all of their possesions in various stages of unpacked. It took ten seconds after I said ¨Policia! Muy circa!¨, for everything to be packed and for us to be madly scrambling up the slope into the scrub where the police couldn´t find us.

Fred got a fine in the post, but he was asked to sign for it. He refused to sign, so he was never given the ticket, so he never had to pay.