Lolling around Southern Spain

We´ve spent the last couple of days in a nice beach hotel near Tarifa, where my step-sister Karen lives when she´s not travelling, as she is now. Tarifa is nice but we´d rather be in Morocco, which we can see just over the Straits of Gibraltar.

Salamanca LR were awaiting some parts this morning. Rather than just replace the one seal, we agreed they´d sort any other bits out while they had it apart. We´re hoping to get it back this afternoon, but if not, we´ll be here for the weekend, which will be annoying. If so we´ll head up to Granada.

In Gibraltar we bumped into two Land Cruisers piloted by Andy Thompson and friends. They´re heading for Gambia but will be there some time ahead of us. They´re taking supplies to schools there, although when we met them they´d been detained by the awkward Spanish customs people on suspicion of smuggling English school books out of Gibraltar. One of their vehicles was also having problems in the unaccustomed heat, so we´re glad it´s not just us. Andy is a veteran of the Plymouth-Dakar Rally and gave us a copy of the book he wrote, which was highly amusing and also very informative, as he covered more or less the same route as we are planning to.

The wait in Spain is frustrating but it still made more sense to have everything sorted here than to press on. Fingers crossed it won´t be too much longer.