09/07/2019: Ronda
Km travelled today/sum: 130km / 8357km
Sun shine, 31 degrees, highway and country road

When we bought the ferry tickets, we got a mail with some paperwork to print. Our host was luckily nice enough to to print it all out for us! So in the morning, we arrived at the harbour early and since we had printed everything we followed the signage for travellers with tickets. As we found out, we didn’t print the tickets, we printed the booking conformation. So when we parked the bikes to walk back, an official approached us and tried to sell us tickets for the ‘fast ferry’. We explained that we had tickets and where happy with what we had. To cut the story short, he ‘helped us’ to get our tickets and our passport papers, and in the end his friend was asking for money, because ‘they’ helped us. We had only 50 Euros and which would have been way too much, so we told them we didn’t have cash with us. Obviously prepared for this, they had a great solution at the ready “over there is a ATM, you can get money from there”. In the end I gave it to the guy who really walked us through the process and simply said to the other guy that he wasn’t much help to us and left. It is amazing, how quickly you get a helper without wanting one J. Anyway, there was no fast ferry in the first place; we had booked the fast ferry J. So we continued down the street, had to wait for our bike to get a full body scan and then we went down to our terminal. When we arrived, there was nothing, the gate was closed. There was a guy standing nearby, so I ask him and he explained that the terminal was changed to the first one…. Great! So we drove back with a couple of semi legal turns and finally arrived at our terminal really early.

We got our camping gear out and had breakfast there. Well, it was diet day, so it was pretty basic, but fun.

Two hours later, we hopped onto the ferry and waved Africa goodbye.

The crossing was really fast, we saw Gibraltar within a few minutes. I think the ferry spends most of the time around the Spanish habour, since there seems to be a speed limit. I was looking for the Iranian Oil tanker, which was meant to be stuck there due international disharmony, but I couldn’t see it.

We left the ferry, followed the highway until we reached Algeciras and filled up the bikes, had a coffee and defined a way point so we would follow mountain roads instead of the highway. Not long after, we left the highway and had beautiful windy roads with mountainous landscapes.

When we arrived in Ronda, we were looking for a supermercado, and we found Lidle. Somebody was happy about it:

We arrived at the hotel, which had a pool. After settling in our room, we had to sample the pool J

We decided that we wanted to explore Ronda because when we passed the bridge we saw amazing looking ravines… So we extended our stay for a night.