Sitting pretty at this stage.

As I gazed out over strange rounded bare hills toward Pajara I could see some examples of the modern Canaries way of hanging on to water that runs off the hills. Big diggered ponds that now were mostly empty. There must have been a lot of rain at some point recently though as the track has been washed out a number of times. In fact, unfortunately the formation of the track has sometimes created a run for the water and it has become a deep gully that is best avoided.
A lot of effort is made to hold on to as much water as possible whereas I have recently been spending a fair bit of time trying to get rid of it. Ah well, the grass is always greener, and it doesn’t get any greener than at home in Ireland.
Amazingly FUERTEVENTURA used to export a lot of grain and was known as “The bread basket of the Canaries”
Hard to believe now in this parched landscape. I’ve walked past some fine examples of how they did it back in the day.

Another reminder of home I’ve seen on the trail a few times is limekilns. Next to grain it was the biggest export from the 16th century till the 60s.
It might not interest you but I’ve got a bit of a thing about limekilns and recently drove half way across Ireland to see one working.
You may or may not find it fascinating to discover that the small rural domestic kilns were fired on gorse. No gorse around here now and the kiln I explored was full of goat carcases.
So after climbing through some dramatic mountains

I arrived at Pajara intending to move on to the next trail shelter for the night. It was not to be.
As I hiked up the barranco out of town I had a nagging feeling i was making a bad choice. I thought it was because a comfy room would be nice or because I wanted more wifi (it’s getting compulsive) but I overrided such thoughts as I wanted to push on further.
Luckily it was only about 5 km to the shelter because as I got there I was struck down suddenly, and fairly violently by what i can only describe with any decently as a “tummy upset”.
So I had to make my way back to the village as quick as i could in case of a repeat performance, to freshen up.
Lesson learnt… Listen to your inner voice.
An angel of mercy at the full Casa rural found a room for me and a taxi to get there, and as I got in the cab…it started to rain and was no night to be sleeping out in roofless shelter.
So was my intuition about the tummy upset or was it about the rain? Or was the tummy upset sent by a higher power to get me out of the rain because I hadn’t listened the first time?
We’ll never know.