Mekka!

The first day in Mecca brings us what we expected: Enlightenment. As regligion is never easy, the winds here are also quite challenging. At Valdevaqueros Beach, the main kite beach a few kilometres north-west of Tarifa, we are almost the first. The Levante has been active there for a long time.

Long before the midday crowd arrives at 10am, my 9m² are easily enough for the first ride through Mecca. Not only does the Levante fluctuate a lot in the 15-minute average, it’s also quite bucky and slightly offshore. After just under 2 hours, I’m pretty much exhausted and go ashore. Heaven is different, but being allowed to kite in Mecca is still an honour.

The beach fills up from midday. The Mistral surf station sets up a system for a party in the evening, where even at a distance of 50 metres, the haemorrhoids in my ear canals are staging suicide. Many Spaniards seem to lie asleep directly in front of the subwoofers. If only they knew how loud a quiet sound in the ear can be when you really want nothing more than to sleep…

In the early afternoon we put in a second session, the wind is now blowing at over 25 knots, no-one is travelling more than 11m². Mini kites are dropping into the float zone with a bang, and on the beach we’re also blowing away some properly secured material. There are now up to 80 kites on the sea. It’s not empty, but full is definitely different. Everything is well spread out over 5 kilometres of beach. When we leave in the afternoon, there is a queue of cars right up to the main road to get one of the 300 paid parking spaces on the beach.

In the evening, I wander through the old town again while Dom enjoys a sunset session into the night. The old town is boiling. Still over 30° and not a single free seat in a restaurant. So mojito dinner, the bars don’t fill up until long after midnight. Compared to the 80-year-old glowing telephone cables in Tarifa’s old town centre, the internet in the third world is like a tsunami. Too many people and too few wires, while the web designer is discreetly and desperately morphing Google.