19 July 2014 (hot and sunny) 67km

Another view of last night's sunset

Had a brilliant night’s sleep in our freecamp by the beach and woke at 6.30am as the sun was warming the tent up.  Had breakfast of muesli, yoghurt, bananas and milk and a cup of tea and packed up most of our belongings in the tent.  We also took the flysheet off and shook it to get rid of excess moisture and pegged it out again upside down to get rid of the condensation.  Then we went for a lovely dip in the glassy ocean before packing up the tent and filling up the water bottles.  While we were filling the bottles at the public toilets, we got chatting to a Swedish man and his French wife who we noticed were talking to their kids in French, Swedish and English!  They recommended we stay on the coast and being another corker of a day, we didn’t need much persuading.  

He also mentioned a canal route from near Gothenberg to the other side of the country so we thought that sounded worth checking out.  Had a lovely ride on mostly traffic free roads along the coast, winding our way through one village after another and the odd little shady pocket of forest. 

After 20km the cycle track left the coast and joined the lesser used farm roads of the area to take us to Torekov, a busy little seaside village which had some sort of fete going on.  Got our lunch supplies at a supermarket there and found a shaded spot on some grass under a tree where we got out our trusty groundsheet/picnic blanket out and made some lunch.

Torekov

The tide was out by now and this area of the sea did not look inviting with plenty of green slime about so we endeavoured to follow the coastal route to catch the seabreezes.  However, lack of signposting made this a bit of a mission and by now it was just far too hot for all this pfaffing round so we just joined the main road to our next destination – Bastad.  

Bastad

About 5km out we encountered a huge bastad of a hill, but managed to overcome that, only to find on the other side, a little boy wandering around on his own (little bastad).  We had a huge downhill ride into Bastad which was very welcome and cooled us down after our continual slow climbing since leaving Torekov 10kms before.  Apparently it’s a very famous tennis town and they had the Swedish open on there today with the women playing.  The men had been last week and included Federer and John McInroe.  Pete swears he saw Andre Agassi walk past him carrying a Hugo Boss suit (showy bastad) on his way down to the tennis stadium (where all the rich bastads were hanging out) while I was in the Tourist Bureau.

Bastad church

Had a very welcome ice-cream in the shade but had been put off the idea of a swim here due to the copious amounts of jellyfish.  Cycled down to the marina for a quick look and on the way out of town came across another cyclist who had a puncture – poor bastad.  So far, it had been a right bastad of an afternoon, but now we were headed for a town with the boring name of Jesus Christ – what can you do with that?.....only kidding.  So we cycled further round the coast on the well-used cycle path through some forested areas.  We cycled over a bridge and the river below us looked wide and dark so figured it must be quite deep.  That’s one problem we have here when searching for somewhere to swim – often you have to wade a long way out to get deep enough to swim.  So we walked down the lovely white sandy beach to check out the river but it was actually reddish brown and not very deep at all.  I think it is the colour leeching from the blackish kelp.  Whatever it is, it doesn’t look too inviting so we made our way to the sea instead.  This was still reddish brown but we were desperate to cool off so in we went.

Continued up the coast on cycle paths and little roads with hardly any traffic so it was very enjoyable, especially now we were cool. 

There were lots of little forest areas too so this helped keep us cool.  Found a supermarket in Skummeslovsstrand and got what we needed for dinner and breakfast and then went and asked at the local campground how much for the night.  One hundred and eighty Swedish kroner we were told which compared with Denmark is not too bad and works out to $36NZ, but unfortunately they didn’t have internet so we figured we’d push on to the next campground.  This was only 7km up the road in a place called Melbystrand.  This was a lot of cycling in beachy suburbs and it was very nice looking at all the houses which remind us a lot of the Coromandel.  Just as we were about to turn the last corner to the campground, Pete notices a bunch of mobile homes on a patch of grass.  So I go and ask a couple of campers if it is alright to camp there and they say yes it is.  So we figure we’ll save ourselves some money and freecamp again.  Set the tent up in the shade and wrote the blog before cooking dinner.  Had a little wander down to the beach to look at the sunset before bed at 10.30pm.