23.1 km today.
125.5 km this trip.
820.4 km from start.
0 metres minimum height.
45 metres maximum height.
175 metres ascent.
163 metres descent.
Track Log: Logged.
Travel: Bus.
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2006-04-11-Cala-de-Mijas-to-Torrequebrada.gpx
2006-04-11-Cala-de-Mijas-to-Torrequebrada.kml
Beach, road and golden mile.
Cala de Mijas to Torrequebrada. Another day of "golden miles". Before Fuengirola, we left the coast and walked to a small island of woods and shrubs, not yet concreted over. Fuengirola was a long dull slog through crowds of tourists. It helped to think of Blackpool (things could be worse).
I get some sleep this night as I had an early night, an early supper and my back was recovering nicely. I even get up and make the breakfast. This dislocates Neil's preparation protocol and he fails to bring any Easter eggs on the walk. I am improving all the time with the Differo but there is little to say about today's walk. There continues to be a succession of river mouths some of which can be leapt over, crossed using stones or a sand bar or simply waded through. There continue to be promontaries to be clamboured round where you get your feet wet if you don't time it right or if the accessible rocks are submerged, and there continue to be pecuarias to give some relief when you get tired of wading through deep sand.
One of these (pecuarias) was particularly lovely with litoral spring flowers all in bloom.
Our bus this morning did a very bad thing in Spain and turned left out of the bus station. This involved crossing the central reservation of the four lane road.
We pass the Punta de la Calibra. There is a lighthouse (a single short flash every four seconds) and then head inland for a change through a new housing estate in order to get past the lighthouse which is on a high cliff. We get to the far side of the estate and here, a fire break beckons. It skirts the estate and it a veritable paradise of flora after the relative desert of the beach. We make our descent with the help of the wire fence and have lunch at the bottom in a flower garden of unparallelled beauty, sea lavender (statis) large pink mallows, phlomis (blue) many kinds of pea and daisy etc. etc. We had hoped to go on through this garden but had to abort it as the path eventually veered off in entirely the wrong direction so we turned back and headed up the other side of the fire break and back towards the coast.
The lighthouse was now far behind us so we had achieved our objective in passing it and seen a new habitat into the bargain. We reach a large castle with some Roman ruins excavated in the grounds. Here we have our second abort. We find ourselves fenced in and have to retrace our steps and go on to the beach once more. We are now on the marine parade of Fuengirola. It is tidier than when Mini and I came to Mijas but not much more prepossessing. We have various stops along the marine parade to zip off my legs (today was much cooler with high cloud almost all day and a mist obliterating the mountains). Now towards evening, the sun has come out and it is getting warm (yesterday it topped 29°). Neil spots a statue where he suggests we have our grapefruit in order to adorn it later with the mésanges (skins).
Neil and Anne are involved in an argument. Anne thinks a mésange is a tit as in "the Fallen Madona with the big boobies". Neil thinks it is a tit as in a blue or great tit. Neil has just looked it up on Google and - hah! - it is a blue/great tit.
We had hoped to get all the way to Torremolinos today but time was getting on. Once the distance to Malaga was down to 18km (as the crow flies so hopefully doable in one day) we crossed over the road and looked for a bus stop. We had to wait quite a long time as the 17.28 was very late. The following bus (17.53) arrived in Fuengirola just minutes after ours. The three buses all at once rule obtains here too. We needed three different buses to get home and were quite late back. I had supper in bed from the remains in my mustang. Neil had something more substantial.