Tarifa…!! Another Milestone on the GBWT…

Nothing to this bull fighting lark...!! The Gypsy Biker takes on El Torro...!!

John and I left Gibraltar (after watching the All Blacks toy with the Springboks….!!) and rode our bikes through the border and into La Linea, before going on to Campamento and the town of San Roque. Here we stopped at the local bullring, to see if it was open… I would have liked to have walked into the centre of the ring, and tried to imagine the drama that played itself out there, while an angry, black Andalucian bull, tried its best to make mincemeat of a Spanish Matador!

The bullring was unfortunately shut, but out in the front of it was a magnificent statue of a fighting bull, mounted on a plinth… I couldn’t resist jumping up onto it and confronting the life-size statue with my jacket… (I know…!! I know…!! I can be such a “boy” sometimes…!!)

The road to Tarifa winds along ridges covered in wind turbines...

From San Roque, we turned southwest, and rode around the Bahia de Algeciras, and into the large town of Algeciras itself, which is the largest Container Terminal in Spain. This port also has a massive oil refinery on its northern side, where crude oil from North Africa and beyond is brought to be refined… Traffic clogged the streets and part of the highway we used to skirt the worst of it, and we were soon out on the N340, the road that leads down to the coast and Tarifa, the Southernmost Tip of Continental Europe…

Tiger and the Big Fella parked in a layby, with Gibraltar way off in the background...

On the hills and ridges lining the route, the blades of large electricity generating windmills, turned lazily in the light breeze that blew off the Mediterranean… The road wound its way through the countryside, high up above the sea, dipping into shallow valleys and climbing up and out of their other sides, skirting ridges and sometimes running along them… This would have been a great road to ride a little more quickly than we were, but weekend traffic had picked up by the time we were negotiating the twists and turns, so we backed off and rode to enjoy the scenery, rather than the road itself…

We stopped at a viewpoint where a small café served snacks and cold drinks to passing folk, who wanted to look out across the bay and onto Africa and Morocco beyond… The view would have been a lot better, had it not been for the low haze of cloud that was scudding in from the west and the Atlantic Ocean… Apparently when the weather plays ball, the coast of Africa seems a lot closer than it actually is, and the individual peaks of the mountains in Morocco can be clearly seen…

The Atlantic on the western side...

...and the Mediterranean on the eastern side...

We motored on and down into the little town of Tarifa, a playground for Spaniards and tourists alike… The weather was perfect for showing off flesh, and the majority of women were clad in their costumes and sarongs, walking the narrow little streets and sipping coffee at the many little pavement restaurants in the old section of town. This was obviously the original section of Tarifa, where the streets were cobbled, and parts of the original fort ran around the perimeter.

We've made it to the southern tip of Europe...!!

And Tarifa is the most southern town...

We rode into the harbour area, and out onto a narrow causeway that links the Isla de Tarifa o de las Palomas to the mainland.

The island itself is a military zone, so we were unable to get to the very tip of it, and had to stop at the small parking lot just outside the gates of the naval base. A large group of  Scuba divers were being put through their paces by a few instructors in the shallow clear waters off the island. On the one side of the parking area stood a sign indicating the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other side was another indicating the Mediterranean… The narrow spit of land split the two bodies of water right at the point of land where we were standing…

To the west of us lay the long white beach of Tarifa, which is normally crowded with wind and kite-surfers alike, but the light breeze that was blowing was keeping them away… The beach was however, fairly crowded with sun loving folk…

Tuna fishing boats tied up in Tarifa Harbour...

The three Tuna fishing reels with their massive concrete sinkers...

We rode into the harbour area, where John showed me the tuna fishing boats that were tied up against the concrete wharves. Groups of large metal anchors lay in neat lines on the jetty. These anchors are used on the large Tuna traps which are held offshore in the currents, waiting for the migration of these large and valuable fish… A few smaller boats that catch the Blue Fin Tuna on lines were also anchored there.

John described how the three lines on each boat were baited with three individual hooks set well apart from each other, and then with large concrete sinkers attached, were sent to the great depths of the this part of the coast… Many of the boats were gaily decorated with many small flags, and had probably taken part in a festival of sorts in the recent past…

At a little restaurant in the old part of town, we ordered a light meal of Boquerones, Gambas and a Russian salad. Boquerones are small sardine-like fish, deep-fried in oil, and Gambas are shrimp cooked in Olive oil or butter, and seasoned with chillies and garlic…lots of it…!! The Russian salad proved to be little more than a traditional potato salad, but was enjoyable nonetheless… We sat watching the tourists and locals stroll by, sipping our coffees and snacking off the plates set before us… Tarifa has a great feel to it… That “seaside holiday village” feel that gets you into the mood to relax and wind down completely… I could see why it was such a popular destination…

Boquerones and Russian salad... Tasty afternoon snack in Tarifa...

With John on his Tiger, and me following on the Big Fella, we made our way back to Gibraltar, after first taking a short ride into the countryside to the west, looking for some of those fighting bulls to tease….er, I mean photograph… Perhaps they were doing some work sparring indoors on the heavy bag, because we didn’t see a single animal in the fields we rode past…

We stopped a few times on the way back to take photos of the Rock from the roadside, and I marveled again at the forces of nature that caused this piece of Africa to remain clinging to the European continent… It’s a magical place…

The old stone fort that once defended the town of Tarifa...

Sheets of cork, on their way to the factory to be fashioned into stoppers on wine bottles...

Riding back into the underground parking at John’s apartment, I smiled to myself as I realized that I had ticked off another of the waypoints I had set out to see on my journey around the world…

The western face of the Rock of Gibraltar, seen from the seawall at La Linea...

My next target was The North Cape, thousands of kilometres to the northeast, and almost six weeks away…

©GBWT 2010