Beach Day...YEAH!!

After some debate yesterday about what to do today, we decided on the beach.  The other option (which I think would have been insane) was to go to the 'tomatina' festival in Bunol, a small town about 35 kilometers from Valencia.  For 1 hour from 11 in the morning until noon, people throw tomatoes at each other - like 20,000 tons of tomatoes.  I had read about it in the guidebook.  When we asked for details yesterday at the tourist Information office, the girl actually laughed and said 'Oh no, you don't want to go to that.  It is for YOUNG people.'  Well, I hadn't wanted to participate so much as see it.  They estimate that 40,000+ people attend and you really can't attend without participating.  After reading details on line about having shirts ripped off, needing to be hosed off before heading home, getting groped, not to mention the tomatos (snorkle masks are recommended), we reached the adult decision NOT to go, but it was touch and go there for a little while.

So this morning, we headed south from Valencia to experience the beaches of the Costa del Blanco.  Like the Costa del Sol a little further south, this area is a primary vacation target for many in Europe.  We had seen the beaches north of Valencia (Costa del Valencia) and were pretty unimpressed, so we figured we try south and see what we could find.

We targetted a town called Benidorm which was about 1 1/2 hours away. The drive was spectactular - mountains, hills with castles on them, fields of orange groves, vineyards, a beautiful blue Mediterranean in the distance.  As we approach the town we were shocked to see major high-rise apartment buildings - 30, 40 and 50 stories high.  Clearly lots of people wanted to go there and wanted to be near the beach, not back 10 miles from the coast.  We found parking and trekked onto the beach which was MOBBED.

We had picked this beach because it was on the list of Top Beaches in Spain, however, a little later I was reading the guide book and it named this beach as one of the top beaches in the WORLD!  It was a wonderful half-moon beach about 3 miles long with mountainous cliffs on either end.  Off-shore a little ways was a wonderful 'Gibraltar'-like rock in the middle of the water.

We rented beach chaises for 4 euros (a little over $5 for the day), set up our umbrella and ventured into the water.  The beach was very fine sand.  The water was clear with little in the way of waves.  It was extremely shallow and the bottom was large rocks which you could walk on fairly easily.  You had to go out about 50 feet maybe in order to be in waist deep water.

Okay, so far this doesn't sound all that wonderful BUT the water was fabulous - the clearest, cleanest water either of us has ever been in other than a swimming pool.  It was delightful once you got past the difficulty of getting in and out.  We were in and out for the rest of the day.  It was a wonderful beach.

One thing that was really unusual here was that there was a water skiing set-up.  It was kind of like a horizontal ski-lift that went in a large rectangle out in the water.  You would grasp onto a handle as it came by and ski down a little ramp into the water and if you were lucky enough to not wipe-out, you could ski around the whole rectangle - probably a good half a mile.  Some of the skiiers were fantasctic doing jumps and spins as they went...others wiped out quickly and were picked up by a motor boat.  We've never seen anything like it before. (No, we didn't try it.)

We happened to kind of take a wrong turn on the way home and ended up on the mountain next to the beach looking down on the beach....spectacular!

The humidty was making it very hazy by this point in the afternoon.

We took the scenic road home driving through lots of lovely resorts right on the Med.  In one spot there was this magnificent rock poking up out of the water.  We read in the guide book that it was privately owned until 1987 when the state bought it and turned it into a nature reserve.  There is a tunnel through it and lots of hiking paths...perhaps next trip.

Very cool day.