So we had finally made it in to Sunny Spain. 30 km on from the mountains the next night was to be our worst yet. We tried to cook pasta on a portable cooker that Felix had brought under a village bus shelter, we ran out of gas half way through cooking, but as it was the last of our food we decided we had to eat it. We mixed it with pesto and started to eat, it was completely inedible and we had to throw it away, which considering we hadn´t eaten that day was a testament to how bad it was. We decided to camp on the village green that we were on as we had no more energy to try and attempt to find anywhere else. It was bitterly cold and all the heat that was not taken from me by the frozen air above me as I laid trying to sleep in the tent was robbed from me by the ground beneath. I ended up getting about 1 hour sleep that night and I had to get out of the tent a few times in the night as it was getting weighed down. The snow had followed us.
We started out the next day by hitching a ride to the local town to get more food. We cursed the town for the coldness and the wind and anticipated another bad day of cycling. However when we got back to the bikes the sun was out and pulling all the snow and wetness from the road ahead of us. As we billowed through these steamy tunnels the wind died and we realized we had finally made it to sunny Spain. We took our time meandering through little foot paths and little villages and at one point following a little path into the middle of no where and having to cycle through a disused sewage pipe to get back on to the road we were on. We found an idyllic hillside to set up camp on and we cooked our first camp fire meal of pasta, local butter, wild rosemary and thyme, it was amazing. It´s fair to say that earlier that day my optimism levels were at an all time low, but 20 km away I found my self with a full pannier of food next to a roaring fire and they were fully replenished. We stayed there for a few days and then set out on our continued journey south. The head winds were so bad that we decided to get a train the rest of the way to Madrid.
On the train the scenery was so beautiful that we regretted our decision about 100kms outside of Madrid and we got off at a sweet little town with cobbled streets and wild dogs sunning about the place. We felt on top of the world as we were bungeeing up and down the mountains towards Madrid. Madrid was beautiful down to the tiniest detail, amazing parks, great streets the best city I think I´ve been to. The first 2 hours that I was in Madrid I came across an old friend from London, Kwami. It was such a surprise, I had stopped the group he was in to ask directions and we saw each other and were pretty much lost for words. Although we didnt really have a way to get in contact again so we didnt see each other again in Madrid. We eventually found a hostel, after many hours of searching and instantly went to sleep till about 11pm when we got up ready to hit the bars. We found a good bar that was playing house and settled down there for a few hours. We turned in at 4 still worn out from the cycle.
The walk home brought us our first nasty experience with The Prostitutes. In the day the streets were lined with them and they seemed harmless enough but at night they turned vicious. We were walking along a road with little idea of where we were when some prostitutes walked up to . Sweet talking their way up to us I thought a simple no would be enough to escape them. But then they grabbed me as one tried to pull me into an alley. I managed to shake them off but we got to the end of the road and realised it was our road and they were standing outside of our hostel door. So we had to try and fight our way through them a second time. The next day we explored more of Madrid and its soulful places. It made me fall more in love with Madrid. There was music in the streets and everyone was meandering along talking, laughing. There was a scent in the air that had become quintessential of Spain, a not a care in the world smell exuded from all passers by.
On the second night in Madrid we went to dump our stuff in the park so we could find it later when we decided to sleep. We went back to the center of town and locked our bikes and went looking for clubs. We walked around and got huddled into a few crappy bars by street hustlers. Eventually we came across lucy as one of these street hustlers who told us of a good Balkan Ska club. We made our way over to it and we weren´t let down. As we left at 6 the club was still filling up. We found our bikes (for Madrid being notorious for pick pockets and bike thieves we werent seeing much action) and headed back to the park. We woke at 1ish to find the dirtiest looks Ive ever seen raining down on us. For Madrid being such a nice place they dont half treat their self proclaimed tramps badly. I received similarly dirty looks when I sat down on the floor to eat something the day before.
We went to the train station to get yet another train to Caceres so we could get to this farm quickly. The train didnt leave till the next day so we headed back into town to find somewhere to sleep. We found some cuban political exiles sitting in one of the squares staging a protest. Apparently Spain has decided Cuba is a free country so is deporting all the political asylum seekers back to Cuba. So we joined them and slept with them on the streets for that night. They were really nice people and instantly welcomed us in to their family. Giving us food, blankets and cardboard to sleep on for the night. I stayed up with one talking for about an hour or so and it turns out he had been locked up for 7 years for writing an article denouncing the Castros. So Eric this is for you. Fuck Castro.
In the morning one of them - a doctor - fixed Felix´s bike which had broken the day before. We caught our train out to Caceres and with it out of the hot, beautiful sunshine of Madrid. To the border of portugal we sped.
Saturday 26 May 2012
The first taste of spain
In 1909 my great grandfather made the thousand plus mile journey from Vienna to London on foot. Along the way he wrote alot of postcards home, when he got back to london he collected these postcards into a book called "The Diary Of A Tramp". Its 2012 and its time for travelling, this blog will be my postcards home. I havent really got much of an idea of what im going to do out there or how long im going to be out there for but im going to try and have fun and learn as many things as I can. For those of you reading this blog who don't know im going to be cycling around Spain to see all there is to see.
As I got on the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander on a Tuesday a brief "what the fuck am I doing" feeling flickered over me, but it passed quickly as I remembered exactly what I was doing. I met some lovely people on the ferry; Felix who it turned out was doing pretty much the same thing as me, Lee a guy heading down to Orgiva in a converted Horse box who gave me and Felix 50 euros and Sam an english teacher in Zaragoza. Me and Felix decided to travel together to a permacultural farm in portugal. We landed in santander in the evening and decided to rough it for that night, for packing I had worked on the basis that Spain was a hot country all of the time. It turns out I was wrong.
I had come horribly underprepared, all I brought was a sleeping bag, bike tools, not enough clothes and swimming trunks. As we cycled west out of santander that first night, it was an amazing first taste of spain, still nice and warm in the evening and surrounded by smells of orange and lemon blossoms cycling in and out of quiet - apart from the constant barking of dogs everytime we rode near - villages looking for somewhere to sleep. We started up a big hill and it started pissing it down, about half an hour in and we realised it was set in for the night. We found a little wooded bit of the side of a hill and prepared for our first night. Luckily Felix had a waterproof sheet which he chucked over me and he had a self adapted survival bag so we were kind of ok untill about 3 in the morning when the sheet must of blown off of me and I woke absolutly soaked.
That first night as it turned out was to set the premise for our first couple of weeks, the amount of emotional highs and lows that we went through each day in our never ending search for warmth, food and shelter were ridiculous. Going from being rained on constantly to seeing amazing spanish villages and towns spralled out in front of us in the sun was both breath taking and emotionally wearing. Despite the never ending rain we stayed optimistic, I remember having heard that rainfall and clouds get stopped by mountains so we headed south towards the mountains of cantabria and what I thought would be sunny Spain. We reached the foot hills of the mountains on our fourth day of sleeping in hostels and roughing it with our newly bought tent, and by this time we had given up on hoping for sunshine or thinking that anything that we owned would ever get dry.
We started cycling up the mountain in yet more rain, it felt like we had the whole of Europes rain at our backs and in our faces constantly. But this was the day we would pass into proper Spain so we took the mountain with full force. We cycled for hours and hours, each bend in the road signalling a downward turn only for me to sprint to it and see that it dipped down only to straighten out even steeper than before. After a couple of hours of pretty much constant cycling we found a pub, they gave us a free plate of chips each and let us dry our clothes by the fire. This was the first of many, many examples of Spanish genorosity that we would encounter. We kept on cycling for a few more hours and just when I was thinking we would have to camp for the night in the mountains the temperature dropped and the light drizzle that was coming down in sheets around us suddenly pulled up, like someone had pressed the pause button on life and we saw snow start to cover everything. At first we celebrated, it was the most beautiful snow that I had ever seen and looking out over the mountains with this snow falling was an unforgettable experience, but as we continued higher and higher we started to see it fall heavier and heavier. 4 inches came in about 15 minuites making it hard for us to cycle. We stopped for me to put socks over my hands and a bite to eat to keep our ever diminishing energy levels up. Felix had heard that there were wolves up in these mountains and at one time we had planned to search for them but with hypothermia around the corner we decided against it. We kept on cycling and cycling for what seemed forever untill finally we saw it level out. The joy in our hearts was enough to melt all the snow around us at that point. We uncovered a snow sheeted sign and found that it marked the top. 1260 meters of mountain and we had finally done it. We jumped up and down like maniacs.
We never even thought about the downhill ride. We didnt think it could possibly be worse coming down. The wind tore away at our joy of having reached the top, the snow bit into our already frost bitten hands and the snow being parted by our front tyres waterlogged our shoes and made our toes numb. But it wasnt too long till the first town. A twenty minuite ride took us to a little snow oasis of a town called Soto. Strongly recommended to stay in if anyone feels like snow boarding or skiing next winter. There was a god send of a little pub that reminded me of a swedish inn. They sold us really cheap and nice hot choclate and really cheap nice cider and the manager didnt seem to mind us dumping our wet clothes all over the place. The feeling that we had when we had finally dried off by the fire was an indescribable mixture of complete exhaustion and happiness of having finally made it into actual Spain. Even though it had been a hard first 4 days I think we both a lot happier for travelling.
As I got on the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander on a Tuesday a brief "what the fuck am I doing" feeling flickered over me, but it passed quickly as I remembered exactly what I was doing. I met some lovely people on the ferry; Felix who it turned out was doing pretty much the same thing as me, Lee a guy heading down to Orgiva in a converted Horse box who gave me and Felix 50 euros and Sam an english teacher in Zaragoza. Me and Felix decided to travel together to a permacultural farm in portugal. We landed in santander in the evening and decided to rough it for that night, for packing I had worked on the basis that Spain was a hot country all of the time. It turns out I was wrong.
I had come horribly underprepared, all I brought was a sleeping bag, bike tools, not enough clothes and swimming trunks. As we cycled west out of santander that first night, it was an amazing first taste of spain, still nice and warm in the evening and surrounded by smells of orange and lemon blossoms cycling in and out of quiet - apart from the constant barking of dogs everytime we rode near - villages looking for somewhere to sleep. We started up a big hill and it started pissing it down, about half an hour in and we realised it was set in for the night. We found a little wooded bit of the side of a hill and prepared for our first night. Luckily Felix had a waterproof sheet which he chucked over me and he had a self adapted survival bag so we were kind of ok untill about 3 in the morning when the sheet must of blown off of me and I woke absolutly soaked.
That first night as it turned out was to set the premise for our first couple of weeks, the amount of emotional highs and lows that we went through each day in our never ending search for warmth, food and shelter were ridiculous. Going from being rained on constantly to seeing amazing spanish villages and towns spralled out in front of us in the sun was both breath taking and emotionally wearing. Despite the never ending rain we stayed optimistic, I remember having heard that rainfall and clouds get stopped by mountains so we headed south towards the mountains of cantabria and what I thought would be sunny Spain. We reached the foot hills of the mountains on our fourth day of sleeping in hostels and roughing it with our newly bought tent, and by this time we had given up on hoping for sunshine or thinking that anything that we owned would ever get dry.
We started cycling up the mountain in yet more rain, it felt like we had the whole of Europes rain at our backs and in our faces constantly. But this was the day we would pass into proper Spain so we took the mountain with full force. We cycled for hours and hours, each bend in the road signalling a downward turn only for me to sprint to it and see that it dipped down only to straighten out even steeper than before. After a couple of hours of pretty much constant cycling we found a pub, they gave us a free plate of chips each and let us dry our clothes by the fire. This was the first of many, many examples of Spanish genorosity that we would encounter. We kept on cycling for a few more hours and just when I was thinking we would have to camp for the night in the mountains the temperature dropped and the light drizzle that was coming down in sheets around us suddenly pulled up, like someone had pressed the pause button on life and we saw snow start to cover everything. At first we celebrated, it was the most beautiful snow that I had ever seen and looking out over the mountains with this snow falling was an unforgettable experience, but as we continued higher and higher we started to see it fall heavier and heavier. 4 inches came in about 15 minuites making it hard for us to cycle. We stopped for me to put socks over my hands and a bite to eat to keep our ever diminishing energy levels up. Felix had heard that there were wolves up in these mountains and at one time we had planned to search for them but with hypothermia around the corner we decided against it. We kept on cycling and cycling for what seemed forever untill finally we saw it level out. The joy in our hearts was enough to melt all the snow around us at that point. We uncovered a snow sheeted sign and found that it marked the top. 1260 meters of mountain and we had finally done it. We jumped up and down like maniacs.
We never even thought about the downhill ride. We didnt think it could possibly be worse coming down. The wind tore away at our joy of having reached the top, the snow bit into our already frost bitten hands and the snow being parted by our front tyres waterlogged our shoes and made our toes numb. But it wasnt too long till the first town. A twenty minuite ride took us to a little snow oasis of a town called Soto. Strongly recommended to stay in if anyone feels like snow boarding or skiing next winter. There was a god send of a little pub that reminded me of a swedish inn. They sold us really cheap and nice hot choclate and really cheap nice cider and the manager didnt seem to mind us dumping our wet clothes all over the place. The feeling that we had when we had finally dried off by the fire was an indescribable mixture of complete exhaustion and happiness of having finally made it into actual Spain. Even though it had been a hard first 4 days I think we both a lot happier for travelling.
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