We had a wonderfully cosy night’s sleep in our paradise cave and woke up to the best window ever. It was a bit overcast but the sea looked calmer than yesterday.
We went to the swimming spot O found yesterday and reassessed where to jump in and where to climb out. It wasn’t very high where we were choosing to jump in but for some reason we both got the fear a bit when standing looking into the water. Fear the water would be freezing? More shallow than we thought? Full of sharks? I don’t know. Anyway, O went in first and survived, so I followed.
This was proper wild swimming!
The waves picked up a little while we were in there, but it wasn’t cold at all. We swam alongside the rocks by the cliff edge, planning to swim into a tiny beach cove that O had spotted the day before. The water leading into this beach was a different colour, a bright turquoise. We didn’t know why this was, thinking maybe it was something to do with the chalkiness of the rock or something. It was a strange sensation swimming into this odd coloured water, something seemed suspicious about it.
Just after we’d entered the weird coloured water zone, I felt a huge pull towards the cliff. I looked at O, I could tell he’d felt it too.
“Let’s get out of here!” He shouted over the water.
We turned and swam back to the rocks we’d entered from. We swam fast, both a little unnerved by the sudden pull of the water and the thoughts of what could have happened. But we got to our rocks and out of the water easily, feeling fresh and alert after our morning swim.
We headed back to our cave and prepared a salad brunch, as I cut the tomatoes I realised how much of our equipment we’d acquired in some form along the way. The tupperware left by our departing roomy at the hostel in Madrid, a fork we’d found on the floor in Bordeaux (and had to pick up because it was so shiny), sea salt we made over the fire on the beach at Playa de Rijana, rosemary from those same cliffs and thyme from our camping spot the night before last.
As usual, we enjoyed our salad with bread and a whole lotta olive oil and the sun came out in time for us to eat. We sat and feasted in the sun in the little seating area outside our cave, feeling very lucky.
After food, we took a blanket, notebook, books, ukulele etc. down to a flat area closer to the water and planned to chill in the sun for most of the afternoon. However, the weather must have not got the memo about our plans because it got pretty cloudy. We were stubborn and stayed there for a while anyway. We saw the rain clouds in the distance but thought that maybe, just maybe, it would stay away from us! We were, after all, in one of the driest places in Europe with very little rainfall each year – surely we wouldn’t be unlucky enough that it would fall now?
But, it did start to softly rain on us and we retreated to the comfort of our cave. What a perfect hideout it was. We could lie and watch the weather outside and keep totally dry and sheltered. We really were lucky, after all the wild camping we’d done with little to no rain protection, that when it actually rained we had our perfect cave to hide away in.
So, we had our lazy afternoon in the cave instead – watching the weather (the sea got pretty lively) and the birds, reading, writing and chatting. The hours passed quickly and we headed to bed as it got dark. The weather and the sea was quite noisy overnight and our sleeping was broken. At some point, we were also visited by some bats hiding from the storms.
Josephine Hall 