All that rugby puts hairs on your chest

Since living in Leicester we have enjoyed watching Rugby Union and we were surprised to see this being played at the sports fields next to the campsite on Saturday afternoon, we didn't associate it with Spain. Further investigation courtesy of Wikipedia revealed that what we saw was the local team, Club de Rugby Atletico Portuense, who play in the Honour Division B, equivalent to the Spanish third division. On the team's website they shorten their name to El Crap!

In Andalucia we have come across Padel courts; Padel is like tennis, always played as doubles and on a smaller court that uses the walls, in a similar way to squash. Padel racquets, or paddle's, are solid wood, not stringed.

On a sunny morning in Cadiz, we were interested to see a group of school children arrive on the beach with a couple of teachers; the children carried footballs and goal posts and were soon being organised into teams and warming up for a match.

There are no excuses for not taking part in some kind of sport in Spain; the weather is good, there is the national obsession with football, there are cycle lanes, long beaches with joggers and if none of these appeal there are always the outdoor gyms. At first glance these look like children's playgrounds, every town has at least one installation of bright yellow and red metal gym equipment. We are unable to pass these gyms by without stopping and playing for a while, but it is never just us and the other campers who use these facilities, the Spanish are always there too; typically the users vary from the serious keep-fit person with an MP3 player and an earphone, to children, who find them more fun than the nearby play area.

The one, so called, sport we have avoided is bull-fighting. We are surprised how prevalent this is, particularly in Andalucia, most towns of any size have a bull-ring. Thankfully, it is in no way as popular as football and some regions are looking to end it.

Life is so full of sweet, sweet things, I’d like to do some tasting

Jerez is sherry city and we had looked forward to visiting a sherry bodega and tasting some different sherries. We chose the Sandeman's bodega and as the only people on the English tour, learnt about how sherry is made from our guide and breathed in the syrupy aroma of the sherry ageing in the casks, before being sat down with three different glasses of sherry each to taste, along with a bowl of crisps. After so much alcohol it is not surprising that we emerged from the shop, that is handily placed before you exit the bodega, with a carrier bag full of sherry, we are only grateful that even in our alcoholic haze we managed to resist the souvenirs that were not sherry.

Jerez had other delights, aside from the bodegas; the railway station alone is a work of art, the tiling in the photograph is from platform one. The city has made money from exporting sherry to the UK and beyond and the wealth is obvious in the city's ornate buildings.

We are camped at El Puerto de Santa Maria, a small town, across the bay from Cadiz and extremely convenient for visiting Jerez by train and also Cadiz by train or boat. The site has good facilities and friendly campers and we are inclined to stay a few days; maybe even fitting in a second bodega visit.

Spain does not have Sunday shopping and Sundays here have their own atmosphere; cycling around El Puerto de Santa Maria between 3 and 4 pm on a Sunday afternoon you notice the restaurants are all thriving, the Spanish lunch time is usually from 2 pm. It may be January and only 15C, but the Spanish are tough and prepared to sit at tables outside. Those families not eating out are at the multi-screen cinema or on the beach; Sundays feel like a lively day here.

It's a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola

We were comfortable at the campsite in Tarifa and stayed there seven nights; an accolade only bestowed on four other campsites up to now on this trip; generally we like to be travelling, even if it is not very far and from Tarifa we only travelled 60 kms north to Cabo Trafalgar, to see where all the action happened in 1805.

The campsite here is the 100th site we've stayed on during the past nine months. We like campsites and the opportunities they give to meet people and observe human behaviour and various posts have described some of our experiences. Recent delightful characters have included a man from the UK who was painting his van with vivid pink emulsion; an amateur naturalist with such a breadth of knowledge we would have had to stay months to hear even a part of it and a story teller from the Netherlands who had learned his craft in Findhorn.

One thing you will always see on any camp site; Crocs, this is the footwear of the camper; everyone wears them, from small children to the retired, Italians to Germans. We have seen pink crocs, decorated Crocs, Crocs with socks, Crocs with dressing gowns, camouflage Crocs and fake Crocs. We own subdued blue and green Crocs; they are very practical for camping, being lightweight, washable, waterproof, comfy and versatile; you can wear your Crocs to the beach, in the shower, even in the rain.

One of the huge advantages of Crocs is that when it is raining you can leave them outside the van, thus avoiding bringing wet and muddy shoes inside. However, this was not possible at the campsite in Tarifa, as Lola, the owners West Highland Terrier would spot an unguarded Croc at 50m and mischievously carry it off to another part of the site. It was not uncommon for campers to ask if you had seen one of their shoes and we were seen hopping out of the van to collect a displaced shoe on a number of occasions.

Let them truckers roll, 10-4

Sitting in a café in Tarifa on Saturday morning we noticed lots of motorhomes driving up the main street; at first we thought a ferry had just come in and these vans were all returning from Morocco. After around 100 vans we started to wonder, could all these fit on one ferry? The convoy of motorhomes was a demonstration by the Andalucia motorhomers association (ASANDAC) about parking restrictions on the beaches of Andalucia. In an effort to stop wild camping by motorhomes and following pressure from campsite owners, motorhomes are now restricted from even parking by the beaches for the day.

We like campsites, they have showers, even if they are of varying quality, and other useful facilities that make our trip slightly more luxurious. For other motorhomers wild camping is a way of life; many of these motorhomers wild camp for one or two nights at the most, take their rubbish and waste products away, are truly 'kings of the road' and give no cause for concern. Other motorhomers will park like sardines in a can at a beach-side beauty spot, wild camp at this same spot for months and some of these will regularly empty their chemical toilets in a nearby ditch. As is often the case, the law does not have the subtlety required to allow travellers the freedom to roam, while preventing environmental degradation of long-term wild camping.

As we cycled back to the campsite the demonstration passed us, tooting horns and waving. The Cheshire Caravanner from our site said he'd counted over 200 motorhomes in the convoy.

Oh, Father of the four winds fill my sails

Tarifa’s geographical position has shaped the development and the atmosphere of the town and its surroundings; it is on the south west corner of Spain, the Straits of Gibraltar to the left, the Atlantic to the right. The winds off the Atlantic are welcome relief in the summer, when all four of Tarifa’s campsites will be full, but keep most of the long-term winter campers away; this breezy weather is ideal for kite and wind surfing, even in January people in wetsuits are messing about on the beaches. The contrast between Tarifa and the Mediterranean resorts and campsites is huge; the shops in Tarifa sell Rip Curl clothing and ethnic jewellery; our campsite is green, tranquil and un-crowded, there are a few retirees over-wintering from different countries, there are also young people with battered vans and surf boards on the roof; this mixed community suits us well.

The beach is just outside the campsite and is a vast expanse of sand, stretching the kilometre of so south to Tarifa and as far as the eye can see to the north. It is bordered by green fields of brown cows, sand dunes and woods of Umbrella Pines. This coastline is now protected as the Parque Natural del Estrecho (the Straits) and further development is unlikely with this designation.

There is no shortage of activities to keep us occupied in the area. We have cycled north to Bolonia, to see the Roman town that has been excavated there; we have wandered around the pretty streets of Tarifa and we have paddled in the Atlantic Ocean and watched amazed as a group of White Storks follow a chaotic flight pattern.

She might be in Tangier, she left here last early Spring is living there I hear

Since Dylan sang about Tangier in the '70s, its been on the list of places to visit. However, our only other connection with Morocco is through the Western Sahara Campaign; every month for a number of years they sent us a list of four addresses and we diligently wrote to each one asking for the same three men to be freed from prison. The crime of these men was to seek self-determination for Western Sahara. We considered not going in solidarity with this campaign, but felt this small boycott would have little impact.

We opted for the guided tour with our ferry tickets; largely because this option was strangely cheaper than just the return ferry and included a guide, a bus tour of newer Tangier and lunch. We are not generally tour group sort of people, but at this time of year our group was our excellent guide, who answered all our questions about this very foreign country, us and an American father and son, who proved to be very good company.

We have been travelling through Moorish occupied Spain for some weeks and so the architecture of the narrow streets of the old town of Tangier were in many ways familiar. That said, this evidently was not Europe, the Straits of Gibraltar may seem narrow, but they separate two different worlds and all our senses were overwhelmed by new sights, sounds and smells; the call to prayer from the mosques, women washing clothes in the streets, the wood-fired bakery, the constant requests to buy souvenirs, ornate remnants of Colonial Morocco, young men hanging on to the back of lorries hoping to get a lift to Spain, children chanting as they played in the school yard and the beautifully tiled doorways leading in to the huge prayer spaces in the mosques.

The disadvantage of being on a guided tour is that you are taken from spending opportunity to spending opportunity; the out-of-place camels who had been bought north for the tourists, the three storey carpet shop, where the pressure was off us once the Americans had agreed to buy and the sweet smelling spices shop with a multi-lingual shop-keeper who went through the origins and uses of different spices and oils.

People say we monkey around

We don't quite know what to make of Gibraltar, but it diverted us for a few hours. We have caught glimpses of the bulk of the rock over the past week and were intrigued to see what lay around it. Walking down Gibraltar's Main Street felt like being in a UK high street; with M&S, BHS and Next, familiar fake victorian street furniture, red Royal Mail postboxes and pounds and pence. We treated ourselves to chips and curry sauce and bought M&S teabags.

We took the cable car up to the top of the rock to see the Barbary Macaques that live here; no one is sure if they were introduced or are a remnant of the African population. However, unlike the Macaques in Morocco and Algeria, where habitat loss has reduced populations, the Macaques in Gibraltar are thriving, with 230 living in six groups. As a tourist it is illegal to feed the Macaques, they eat leaves, olives and roots and are given supplementary food and veterinary care by The Gibraltar Ornithology and Natural History Society, who also monitor and control the population with contraceptives, as they have no natural predators on the rock. There is controversy surrounding the Macaques; some disruptive individuals have been culled in recent years, much more severe than a ASBO.

We have moved on to Tarifa; leaving the calm Mediterranean behind, we are now facing the Atlantic breezes and surfer dudes. The campsite here claims to be the most southerly site in Europe and it is certainly our most southerly point on this trip.

On the way here we drove past the wind farms of Tarifa. The chip shop owner in Gibraltar said that all Tarifa's power comes from wind. We've not managed to confirm this on the world-wide-web, but there are claims that Europe's largest windfarm is above Tarifa and that it produces enough power for a small town, like Tarifa, so in theory it is perhaps true.