Today featured a winding route through several very
interesting areas, but an attempt to reconstruct it chronologically would be
beyond my powers at this point of the day.
We walked 16 km in temperatures around 24C in bright
sunshine all day. The terrain was fairly
flat, but included treks through salt marshes, beaches and salt pan flats. Despite the relatively barren conditions, we
saw carob trees (Brian says
that’s where Carobeans come from.............),olive trees, kumquat, and others.
The salt marshes were intriguing, with lots of water birds,
interesting vegetation, and low tide boats.
Lunch was at a restaurant on the edge of a beach that was
miles long, and beautiful.
Beside the
restaurant was an Anchor Cemetery:
remnants of the tuna fishing industry that eventually died out. Apparently, these anchors, weighing about a
ton each, were carried out to the water, where they were settled with a buoy
attached by a rope. Some kind of netting
system (now totally illegal) was used to capture the tuna as they came in to
eat the sardine/anchovy shoals. These
anchors are about 4 feet high and four feet long, and the cemetery gives a
haunting impression.
After walking 2 km down the long, beautiful beach, we caught
a water taxi (max capacity 12), piloted by Rudy the heartthrob who has a
reputation of devastating lady tourists with his good looks and charming
personality.
The water taxi took us to a small village, Santa Luiza,
which is a major octopus fishing area.
These were some of the octopus fishing boats.
Finally, we walked along salt pans which were harvested to
generate large amounts of salt for human digestion. The piles of clean white salt looked much
better than the look and smell of the salt pans.
Our hotel features a buffet meal each evening, with a
variety of local offerings. I regret to
inform you I did not have a picture of one of last night’s feature desserts
called “Camel Drooling”. (Could I make
up these things? NO!) I will stay vigilantly posted until it’s
return, when I will document it fully with proper photographs.
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