Walking Coast To Coast in Andalucía: Day 5

Hi Paul,
My distances and elevations vary from those in the book and the author’s gps tracks (which we used as our “map” for the walk) because mine are based on tracks I made while we were walking, using the Motion-X GPS app on my iPhone. I imagine different recording devices will have different results.

In general, we did not get lost other than a few missteps requiring short backtracking to get back on the right trail. Never more than a kilometre though.

However, there were a few times where the “trail” was all but invisible and it was necessary to follow rock cairns, some of which were not that obvious. Day 5 on my blog (Day 4 in the guidebook) to Alcaucin was tricky as we were descending towards our destination.

But Day 26 (Day 19 in the guidebook) to El Pelayo was the worst. It was an easy-going day except for one difficult kilometre as we approached El Pelayo (“Here cut left at a cairn down a path to a wire-and-post gate…” in the book). The terrain was rugged and overgrown, the cairns were hard to find or outright invisible, the book’s written instructions were not helpful and it was very difficult to stay on the author’s gps track. It took us well over an hour to bushwhack this one kilometre section. Very frustrating but we made it!

And you will too! Have fun,
David