James and Christine's Big World Tour: Glamping in a hippy paradise

As usual we are running well behind our schedule and are over an hour late leaving La Linea to find our next stop. Luckily we manage to do the drive before it gets dark because our 'magical lake paradise' is in the middle of nowhere. The directions were pretty good but our interpretations not so much so Christine had to do a bit of running ahead of the car to see if: a) the roads we tried were correct and b) to see if the car could actually make it down them. This turned out to be a wise move since James came about 100m from getting the car properly stuck in a ditch! At least after a bit of reversing and a 57 point turn we managed to correct ourselves. The next challenge was avoiding the horses who, despite having acres of grass to stand on, thought the 'road' was a more interesting place to be. Turns out the way to make a horse move is just to keep driving at it until its face is basically pressed against the windscreen!

Our host, Buzzel, owns a large area near Tarifa, right at the bottom of Spain, and we knew that there were different places to stay on it so we'd be bumping into a few other people so we were more than a bit surprised when we got through the main gate and couldn't find another soul! Christine spots a path leading somewhere so we go for it. And there it is...our private lake and our tent sitting just behind it, it definitely fits the description. Still not a soul to be seen though so we keep driving up to a house we see sitting just over the next hill where we are finally warmly greeted by our host. He shows us round a large, communal house where we can cook, relax and enjoy the amazing view across the hillsides and over to Morocco and we are introduced to a few other guests staying there. Too many names to remember so we'll just have to bluff it when we see them!

Since it's starting to get dark we settle in to our tent. We have a wooden platform that it is sat on and a table out front so we can enjoy our private lake and a winding path through hedges, lit by fairy lights, to our outdoor bathroom. Have you ever wished you could sit on the toilet or take a shower and look it across beautiful countryside at the same time? Well that's just what we did! And how do you spend an evening in such a beautiful campsite...cover yourself in mosquito spray, eat some chicken butties, make a start on a 24 pack of slightly warm beer, stare at the stars and play snakes and ladders! Hehehe.

We woke up to another glorious day by the lake, and the site of Buzzel wandering round in his pink robe! We could have done a walk to the nearest town, or driven to the beach, but we just wanted to make the most of our campsite. It was nice to spend the day just relaxing, playing hide and seek with turtles and spot the fish in our lake and eating biscuits. We both looked a fair bit more tanned by the time the Sun went down! We were so relaxed and rested we even managed a bit of socialising with the other guests in the evening, travellers like us from Australia, Bulgaria and Germany. A boring day to write about but a very enjoyable one for us.