Up and Down. definitely down at the end!

The ever present drone of the autovia following me breaking the illusion of being solitary, below the sky - along the edge of land and sea - crawling along the rolling coves, cliffs, inlets and beaches.

***

Up and down. Down and then up! All the way along the GR92 it was testing my patience: and the sun was getting a little intense too. Finally stopped for the morning - it's one! 

Will eat well before attempting the next leg of the journey: Deltebre... Give me Entrecot, extra rare, but first Croquetas Jamon. 

It's extremely warm, already, for June and it's testing me absolutely. It's a coastal path, but it takes it to the extreme! I had to remove my boots with 7.5 kilometres left until L'Ampolla, as the strain was showing on the old war wounded foot, and on went the sandals which have given me blisters...

I feel like a maniac as I down a Entrecot, fried egg, frites and a large salad. I was going to hang on, but someone lit up behind me so I am on my way again! €21 Les Palmeres...

***

T'was insane of me to leave L'Ampolla around one, but I did. I walked passed one signpost for Deltebre and thought of hitchhiking although it seemed not to be going direct to the final destination. I continued after the campsite at the end of the town, with its twin nightclub, and began walking towards the river with the sun belting down. I walked quite a while, attempting to hitch with the seldom traffic on the minor road. As I'd almost given up, and thought what's another couple of hours in this heat, someone on his way home from work brought me all the way to els Muntells - which it turns out is a few kilometres off the route I am making tomorrow... And now I feel as though I am in an Ernest Hemingway short story: the one where he's waiting for a train, the one train a day, in a dusty flat monotonous plain: I think he was in the south of Spain in the short story (one of the very first pieces I read as part of A Level English Literature). Here I am with a Camino to join for a few days.

The left side of my face and neck it a little rouged from walking consistently with the sun to my left. Tomorrow I head west so I hope I am burnt at the back and right side too...

From the Costa Dorada, with its phoney Spanish aspect, onto the Delta with its miles and miles of flat agriculture: rice. The third highest production of rice in Spain, so the driver told me, after an area near Seville and another nearer to the Portuguese border further north... I always wondered where all the rice for Paella came from! The final piece in the jigsaw? Tonight must be a rice dish!

I could just carry on down the coast and head for Valencia? Am I missing something... How do the locals cope with these biting black flies? Oh the Anglo-Saxon blood! It's forever being sought by vulgar Iberian thugs!