We live!

And the sad news is that thanks to dwindling funds and the onset of wintery-ness, we are on our way home. (Rats eating a hole in our tent to steal our food may also have contributed.) Within the next week we’ll be boarding a ferry from the Hook of Holland and heading for Blighty, where we’ll brave the British roads for the ride from Harwich to Neil’s house. With a bit of luck, I’ll be showing up at Stew’s party, so if you weren’t decided on going (although I’m sure you all were) then I assume that you are going now. Here is a picture giving some indication of how happy I'll be to see you all:

We’re currently in the Netherlands, where we’ve been wandering around for the last couple of weeks. It will no doubt surprise many of you to learn that Amsterdam is a particularly good place to chill out at the end of a long journey. As is Rotterdam, for that matter. Verdict is out on Den Haag as we’ve only spent one night here, but as we treated ourselves to a hotel last night, it’s all seeming very pleasant so far.

The wintery-ness we are fleeing - although undeniably very beautiful, this field in the Netherlands where we camped for a night was also bollocking cold.

A thousand apologies for the complete lack of updates on the blog or indeed responses to emails and texts. On the mobile phone front, I seem to be locked in a battle to the death with T-Mobile who have utterly cocked up my phone account. I will quite likely be texting everyone when I get back with a new number, but for the time being I am just about keeping enough credit on my old number so please use that if you need to get in touch. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get the airport in my iBook repaired and the widgety USB thingo they flogged me in Barcelona has barely worked at all. Internet access has become increasingly expensive and difficult to find – I am not exaggerating and I am not referring to the likes of Slovakia and Hungary, where it was both reasonably priced and plentiful. Amsterdam, for example, had a number of closed down internet shops, with only a few remaining in the centre (that we could find, anyway) and wi-fi access is almost non-existent outside of pricey pay-as-you-go or subscription services. This has largely been the cause of the tail off in blog entries, although a lack of time and the cumulative discouraging effect of seeing how long it’s been since your last entry haven’t helped.

Neil joins the cows of Amsterdam in a moment of quiet reflection - note warding-off-cold outfit, including team hat.

So, in short, we’ve had a brilliant time. We’ve rivered our butts off across several countries, following the Danube, the Inn, the Rhein, the Ayr, the Moselle and others whose names I have forgotten. We’ll be ending just shy of 10,000km cycled, having toured ten countries in about 7 months. Everywhere has been great in its own way and I can’t wait to chat to y’all about millions of things. As I have allowed my blog to wither, I shall have to give everyone personal updates, which is more fun anyway. Perhaps I will invite you all to a slide night...

The sunshine and football of Stuttgart - it all seems so long ago

Anyway, I’ll be trying to put this up in the next couple of days, otherwise we could be home before anyone reads it. With great regret, we’ve accepted that we can’t really afford to do South America straight away, so special apologies to Sarah who I will now not be meeting up with in a mystical location in Peru – I pledge to spend time reflecting on my own shortcomings as a travel budgeter and experiencing physically painful envy pangs while you are having an awesome time on the trail. This same funding issue means that we’ll be back in London as soon as possible, looking for jobs and a place to live. I assume that beer will be about £9 a pint and accommodation non-existent, so that’s something to look forward to!

Does London have the feet of Chaka Khan? No. No it doesn't.

I’ll do my best to get around to emailing everyone over the next couple of weeks. The next few days will be spent saying a proper farewell to an awesome time of travel – I can’t really believe it’s over and that I won’t have to cycle every day with everything I own on the back of my bike and sleep in a tent. I’ve forgotten why anybody decided houses were such a great idea in the first place and I don’t even want to think about what having more than one change of clothes means. This has been the most satisfying, challenging, really fuck-off fun way I have ever travelled and I shall be evangelising cycle touring to all of you. Probably forever. So there’s something for you to look forward to! A few final days of hedonistic living await. Look out for us on the roads of England soon…

Best. Car. Ever. (Yes, I am randomly including this picture just because it is one of the coolest cars I've ever seen.)

Oh, and depending when this goes up: happy birthday Mum!

Slovenia says hello

Friday, 03 August
Map & pin: Venice; Trieste; (across Slovenia); Umag (Croatia); Pula; Moscenicka Draga; Postojna (Slovenia); Ljubljana.

I am writing this trapped in Bob at a campsite in Ljubljana – we are facing a morning of forced ententment due to the dreaded rain. However, this gives me a chance to catch up on everything admin so that when we get out and online I’ll hopefully be able to bring the blog up to date, etc. We have coffee, cheese, bread and a packet of crackers shaped like fish, so we should be able to survive for some time. In a tent somewhere nearby, someone is playing guitar, badly (this is a proper campsite), and if they start singing kumbaya we shall set about them with our pocket knives, rain or no rain. [Some time later: oh how we long for the bad guitar-playing dude. Now we are being assaulted by the hideous sound of some kind of family singing group that appear to have set up camp next to us. The noise is indescribably bad, and although Neil and I howl at them like dogs from the confines of our tent, they will not desist. I fear that however inclement the conditions, we cannot endure much longer and will either have to kill them (really bloody brutally and violently, really) or just go out and get wet. Discussions are currently being held on which of these options is preferable.]

There has been much excitement since my last update – we’ve had our first serious faller and I very, very much regret to report that it was me. We’ve been in and out and back into Slovenia and across Croatia, but staying with the chapter approach, I shall begin by going back to Venice.

Once the novelty wears off

There is no doubting that Venice is very beautiful – it is. And it is simply packed to the rafters with awesome art and artefacts of great cultural value, etc. But I can’t help but feel somehow a little underwhelmed by it all at the end of the day. We spent a full day looking around, taking water taxis up and down the canals and out to one of the islands in the lagoon, and we saw some awesome stuff. Architecturally, there are so many stand out buildings it’s hard to know which ones really stood out, so to speak. The basilica is breathtaking inside and out, with fabulous mosaics and an extraordinarily long queue which you can jump almost completely if you do what you are supposed to do which is take your bag to the little cloakroom across the square and then go more or less straight in – the long queue is actually where they are checking bags but most people don’t seem to realise this.

The treasures are where it was all at for me, however. The Guggenheim collection is awesome. It includes Magritte’s Empire of Light, which is one of those pictures that remind you that paintings are objects not images. It’s an image I’ve seen many a time in reproduction, but when I walked into the room where it hung it simply took my breath away. It’s huge – it’s a big canvas but its presence far exceeds its size. It has immense depth. I wanted to step into the dark and look out from the other side, and it seems at once perfectly realistic and inexplicably surreal and sinister. I could honestly have stood and looked at it for an hour. Just amazing. Aside from this, the gallery does contain a Guggenheim of gems (for surely this must now be the collective noun for such exquisite collections of modern art): Picasso (La Baignade is way better in real life than I expected and there were some amazing cartoons/drawings called The Dream and Lie of Franco of which I shall seek out further info); Kandinsky (Upward, no less); de Chirico; Chagall; Pollock; Miro. There was also an exhibition of Italian futurists including some really striking work by Umberto Boccioni, of whom ignorant me had never even heard. The Acadamie is jam packed full of Titians, Tintorettos, Veroneses and others, but then so is nearly every church and public building you fork out a good few euros to enter. Then there was the glass. Had we not been on bicis we would definitely have left town a good €200 lighter but bearing an exquisite black Murano wine glass – although to call it a wine glass is to fail miserably to convey this combination of something that compels you to use it but simultaneously demands that you appreciate it as a supreme work of art. That was the item that nearly broke me, but in truth, I could have bought a houselot of the stuff. I could even have bought a glass ornament and I know how rubbish they are.

Overall though, I came away feeling that once the novelty of Venice – you know, canals instead of streets, boats instead of cars – wears off, it’s another very significant Italian city but possibly a little over-rated. It’s gob-smackingly expensive and really crowded. I feel like I’m probably being a little harsh because it is very beautiful and has amazing things to see. I’m certainly glad I’ve been there, but I’m not in a massive hurry to go back (well, except to pick up that glass…). Very good campsite once again – a 30-40 minute, €1 bus ride from the city, reasonable price (for the region) good camp shop (sells ice) and nice helpful people.

The tests of Trieste, including following the way of the tram/funicular

Longest single cycle yet, from Venice to Trieste: just over 164km. More or less deliberate, as we decided about 30km in that we’d push on and do the whole thing in a single day. And, as the story usually goes, it was all pretty great until the last 20km. Spot of motorway negotiation to get around Venice then miles of plain sailing with flat country and a slight headwind developing around the 80km mark. Then, as we neared Trieste, hills loomed. Not big nasty fuck-off hills, quite benign pretty earth lumps, really. Anywhere from 0 to 60km, they were the kind of hills you love; the kind you’re thankful for from 60-120km even. But at over 150km, they are just unnecessary and cruel. We followed the signs to avoid the motorway and find our campsite (Lonely Planet-listed, I might add), ran out of water and were forced to buy some (I HATE buying water) and after around 10km of constant climbing in near dark we finally found our campsite. Shut. Fucking shut. Much swearing ensued. However, in a clever but also kind piece of marketing there was a sign just over the road indicating the presence of another campsite only 3km away. Okay, it was up a ridiculously steep hill, but it was a brilliant campsite. We arrived and started pitching our tent just as the mother of all storms broke, pounding us with freezing cold rain and threatening us with lightning as we managed to nail Bob to the ground and get inside, cold and wet with all our things.

From then on, however, Trieste was quite a delight. From the foot of our own personal campsite hill, was our own personal tram/funicular railway stop. Best public transport ever. For €1.10 return, you get on a tram that snakes it’s way back and forth across the top third of the hill from Opicina down towards Trieste. Then it attaches itself to a little funicular railway car that tows it up/down the steep part of the hill, detaches itself at the bottom and trundles on its tramlines right into the heart of town. Over a hundred years old and truly cool – I’d recommend going to Trieste just to ride on it. But wait – there’s more! The whole city is really lovely, with lots of open spaces, wide streets and a very laid-back feel to the bars and restaurants. There’s nothing to rival the big treasures of many Italian cities, but the cathedral has wonderful mosaics and old, old frescoes and the amphitheatre is quite round and intact-ish.

On our last night in Italy, we treated ourselves to an extravagant dinner. Three courses and wine – the whole nine yards. I had delicious local seafood, it was all beautiful, we dined outside near the water and the service was great. Sadly, we missed the last bus home and as we had only come into the town via the tram/funicular we had no idea of any other way home. So we were forced to walk the tracks, roughly 5km and some of it near vertical, in the dark, which nearly killed us, but afforded us spectacular views of the city and harbour lights. And my dinner made me violently ill! (Which, coincidentally, is no mean feat because I have a damn strong constitution – it takes a hell of a lot to make me sick.) But at the end of the day I’d really enjoyed the dinner, so on balance it was all worth it. The camping was the cheapest in Italy by a mile and a brilliantly located, peaceful, basic but well-equipped site. Our only disappointment was that we failed to find the biggest cave in Europe (note the use of the ‘est’ there – gotta love an est!) which was supposedly quite near to us but obviously very well-concealed (entirely reasonable as it is a cave after all) because we rode around for half a day and couldn’t find it. We did have a nice cycle through the hills between Trieste and Slovenia, though, and came across a very isolated and strange memorial which I shall investigate and enlighten all about at some future time. Double thumbs up for Trieste!

You want to go to Yugoslav?

In fact the next morning it seemed we might never leave Trieste, so it’s lucky I liked it so much. The day’s cycle started the way every day’s cycle would start in Angela’s cycle touring utopia – a 10km sail down a cool, mostly empty, windy mountain road into Trieste and along the harbour. How soon the dream was over. In a word, motorways. Millions of ‘em. At the end of every road. We spent ages trying to get out of the city and none of our maps were any help. We backtracked and sidetracked, we even went on the forbidden road at one point, despite all the Italian driver finger waving and honking, and even when we got back onto the permitted roads, they inevitably ended, every time, in motorway. We were teetering on the edge of the cliff of despair, staring at a roundabout that indicated the border with Slovenia was just ahead – down the motorway – when a little old woman tottered up to us on the road. ‘You want to go to Yugoslav?’ she asked. ‘Please,’ we begged. ‘You go back that way, down that road,’ and she pointed, helpfully, at the motorway. We thanked her through the tears and continued to sit dejectedly on our cycles. But then a miracle – the little old lady came weaving back up the middle of the road, heedless of the traffic veering around her, and pointed to the roundabout ahead. ‘But on bicycles, you can go that way,’ she added, turned and walked away before we could even thank her again. So we did – we went that way and around the corner, 200m down the road was the Slovenian border. It was over, and once again, we had escaped.

Once over the border, Slovenia began what has been an unending and successful quest to impress. The border crossing dude pointed us to a DEDICATED CYCLE PATH, the D-8 in case you’re interested, which more or less took us the whole way across Slovenia to the Croatian border. It had effective sign-posting, only occasional forays onto the road, and even had its own cycle-dedicated tunnels through hills. It, in a word, rocked. Go Slovenia, you fine, fine country. If I were to make a constructive criticism it would concern the lack of water – maybe you could go all Italian and throw a drinking fountain/tap or two in along the way. So soon enough we were into Croatia, with which I am so far less enamoured. Border crossing was again a piece of cake. The Istria region, through which we were riding, has some of the most rubbish roads we have encountered. They are narrow, they have no shoulder – absolutely none at all. The white line is the side of the road and beyond that is anything from sheer drop to dead hedghog, giant rocks to thorny bushes. The drivers give you no space and do not even contemplate slowing down to let oncoming traffic pass if there is not enough space. The traffic is horrendous. From when we crossed the border and were forced to share the road once again with vile, evil cars, it was endlessly heavy – at times bumper to bumper – unless we were being inexplicably stopped in the middle of nowhere by traffic police and made to wait in the sweltering sun for an unspecified period of time before being ushered off on our way again. The scenery was dull and drab, the road being off the coast and winding through low scrub only occasionally interrupted by a pig turning on a spit over a fire by the roadside (I shit you not). Eventually, we arrived at Umag, which seemed a pretty enough town, but we’d had enough. We had a couple of beers in the town centre and then headed for the ‘cheaper’ campsite (the quote marks give it away, don’t they) another 5km or so from the town.

It was a rubbish campsite. It is called Camping Finida – remember that name, for you shall avoid it like Milton Keynes. We arrived at reception, checked the prices (a little expensive, but not exhorbitant, according to the published price list) and picked one of the 4 pitches that we were told remained (apart from some vague reference to ‘or this bit over here’). We asked to pay up front as we were leaving early in the morning, but were told that wasn’t allowed and we could check out from 7.30am. Our pitch was rubbish – about a Bob and a foot long, between two trees, next to the bins and the toilets. The site had shit facilities. For example, the site had a total of 13 showers for about 2,000 people – and I am once again not exaggerating. There was a small market/shop, which was quite good, and a very average bar that didn’t even have a television despite the semi-finals of the Croatia Open being played *that very day* just up the road in Umag – they had rather pathetically flung a few tennis balls around a table as some feeble attempt at a themed display, no doubt. So we had a beer, made ourselves dinner and went to bed.

Imagine my surprise, on reaching reception at 7.30 the next morning, to be presented with a bill for €34.30. Apparently, Neil discovered upon reading the insanely small, tiny ant writing (by which I refer to the ancient art of writing on the head of ant grains of rice, as practiced by tiny ants, not writing the size of tiny ants, in case there was some confusion) that there is a 20% surcharge for a stay of less than 5 days. Further, we had been charged for the most expensive plot – that for a car with caravan, or campervan, with electricity, water and satellite tv (they actually had little sockets under the electricity plugs where you could plug your tv in, which, I begrudgingly admit, is quite cool) despite the fact that a)we were but two cyclists with a tiny tent and b) you couldn’t possibly have fitted anything but us on the fucking piece of ground we had. This was the most expensive campsite we have stayed at. Anywhere. More expensive than Milan. More expensive than the Italian lakes. And it was rubbish.

The day’s riding was much like yesterday, only worse. Hotter, more tedious, no coastline, not even any little villages to break the monotony. Oh, on referring to my diary, I note that we saw a donkey, which was apparently the highlight. Istria sucks, frankly. We arrived in Pula which looked more promising. The campsite was at least honest enough to tell us that they had a two night minimum stay and at €26 it was expensive but not life-threateningly so. We stayed two nights, and to be fair, it was a very nice campsite. Right on the headland southwest of the town, with direct access to the coast. The campsite surrounds the site of an old fort and is in pleasant woodland (that’s standard campsite description language, right there). The facilities were really good, as was the bar, shop and restaurant. We rode into the town and had a look at the sights – a very impressive amphitheatre and some roman ruins. Bought a dress and some socks to supplement my meagre wardrobe (very cheap clothes in Croatia). We returned to the campsite just in time for the psycho windstorm from hell! It was great (right up until the next day, when we had to ride into it and I wanted to cry) and was later accompanied by rain. We cowered in Bob for the rest of the day, fearing that a giant pine cone might dash out our brains at any second.

Finally, on the run from Pula to Moscenicka Draga, Croatia got nice. All right, it got very nice. The first part of the day’s ride was so horrible that I did not think we would make it. Endless hills, endless bloody hills (I will draw you a picture of the shape of Istria when I have some time and you will see) and gale force winds coming straight at us. And tedious, tedious landscape with nothing to look at, nothing to distract from the unutterable boredom of the road and the wind and the hills. Then, we climbed a mountain, turned a corner and it was all lovely. We hit the coast and the scenery was spectacular – glittering blue ocean, dense green forests running down mountains right to the coast, occasional villages with proper Croatian-style spires and other picturesque architecture. Much of the riding was still hard, but at least you felt like there was some reward. It may not be coincidental that at this point, we were nearing the edge of the Istrian region, and indeed passing into the next region (the name of which escapes me, I’m afraid). The campsite that night was cheap (under €20) and ideally located. We met some nice German tourers who tried to help Neil with his bike (another broken spoke) and gave us a tip on a good road to take in Slovenia. I do not wish to be down on Croatia, for I have seen but a tiny portion of it. I could not, however, in all good faith recommend Istria. It was really, really expensive, which is certainly not what I expected of Croatia, the riding conditions were awful and there was little to see along the way. I am sure that the rest of the country has much more to offer, and I am still very excited about Zagreb, to which we will be nipping over from Slovenia in a few days time!

After the fall

This is a hastily added entry to explain the fall, which would otherwise leave you all up in the air. Basically, on the way into Postojna, my rear wheel got stuck in a groove in the road and it all went horribly wrong. I lost control and went face down on the road. I hasten to add, for parental concern reasons that I largely do wear my helmet but was not at this point. So, in a word, large head lump and a few grazes, nothing else. I was a bit bemused, shall we say, but Neil was there, speaking constantly of the field of penguins that he could only see (note to all - don't put Neil on concussion watch for your loved ones or yourself). However I am all tixkety boo. now. howentsily, I'm hokYH. help....

Having shaken off the effects of the crash, I am particularly galled to have no visible, photographable effects. My head lump was ace, but really needed to be felt rather than seen and my graze was frankly abysmal on world injury standards. Still. I'd like to quote here to show the seriousness of the fall. Neil, what was it like? "I didn't see a thing, but I dragged your bike off the road." Thanks mate.

Sipping a spritz in Venice

Map & Pin: Casteggio, Lake Iseo, Monte Isola, Lake Garda, Verona, Vicenza, Venice.

I'm in a delightful cafe in the backstreets of Venice, sipping an aperitif and taking the opportunity to bring you all up to date.
So much for promises of more regular blog updates – the latest problem has been electricity, rather than simple wi-fi access, so I’m going to desist from making any further hollow promises about more regular coverage. We’re not actually staying in Venice, but just on the mainland at a campsite, in fact. Everywhere between Genova and here has been brilliant. Mostly. Because I am so rubbish at getting regular posts to appear on the blog, I have broken this latest update into chapters for ease of reading or so that you might avoid those bits which seem potentially unappealing or dull (so it’s a lottery – try to guess by the headings).

I love Milan, but that’s not why I’m still here

Rather surprisingly, Milan had a very good campsite, up near the San Siro, for about €25 a night. For Italy, this represents reasonably good value – everything is more expensive here, from accommodation to booze, food, museum entrances and even our rare forays onto public transport. I liked Milan more than I expected to, which of course says more about my pathetic pre-formed opinions than anything else. It does have a fuckload of cobbles, though. Really, really annoying ones – about an 8.5 on the cobble-twat-o-meter. The city’s cathedral is an absolute beaut, though, and the city generally, even well out into the suburbs, is well designed, nicely executed and clearly cared for with all due love and attention. The San Siro is stunning (from the outside) and the giant Da Vinci horse is awesome. We only spent a day in the city, which isn’t anything like enough to do it justice, but a return visit would be welcome, albeit after I have sold Neil into slavery to fund a long weekend with a decent hotel and meals. We met a nice local cyclist and a friendly fellow tourer from South Africa, as well as having an excellent Italian barman at the campsite to offset the bunch of Irish twats giving all of Britain a bad name.

Unfortunately (have you noticed that there is almost always an ‘unfortunately’ in these things?) all the joy of Milan was almost undone by the absolute motherfucking debacle of trying to get out of the place. FOUR HOURS AND THIRY KILOMETRES. I swear to you on the name of all that is unholy that I am not exaggerating one minute or millimetre for comic/tragic effect. We spent four hours and rode thirty kilometres before I broke down and begged to be allowed to go to visit an internet café and consult the google map oracle to discover the secret of our true path. Which we did. Having eventually escaped the city, we then rode another 70-odd kms in baking heat to collapse at a campsite on the shore of Lake Iseo.

Italian Lakes – the depths and shallows

Our first night I wouldn’t even have known there was a lake there, to be frank. I drank a bottle of Becks, ate our emergency pasta meal (four cheese packet pasta for €1 – highly recommended) and went to sleep. The next day we moved on to Monte Isola (island), which was nothing short of superb. Big claim coming up – it was the best campsite yet and I think it unlikely to be surpassed on this trip. For those of you who don’t know, Monte Isola is the largest lake island in Europe (obviously everyone I am acquainted with will know that, but there could be other readers who found the site googling for a description of the drivers of Vigo, or somesuch, for whom such trifling titbits of information are a godsend). Cars are banned (although scooters are sadly still allowed but in fairness I think you’d only get them off their Italian drivers by prizing them from their cold dead hands – a not unattractive option) and we were ferried over with our cycles in a small boat. There is only one campsite on the island and it is almost completely full of permanent cabin/van sites, but as we were only staying one night, the owner gave us the perfect site right on the very edge of the lake and looking out over ??? – a monastery built on a tiny rock island in the water. Mountains parade across your horizon while ducks and ducklings provide a peaceful diversion from the potentially pleasant monotony of a mesmerising liquid gold sunset reflected in the mirror of the lake. Occasionally, fish break the surface to taunt small fat fisherman chugging quietly by in little wooden boats, oars trailing in the water as the outboard throws up a gentle wake to add the kiss of lapping waves to the evening soundtrack.

It’s disgusting and there should be a law against it. There were loads of families there and the children could swim in the shallow edge of the lake until about eight o’clock in the evening. A kindly Dutch couple dropped by to give us some tealights and couple of glass lamps that they were going to throw out but thought we might like to use. Interestingly, as the kiwis move ever closer to the leper colony of Angela’s utopia, the Dutch are steadily climbing the charts. In truth, the more Dutch people I meet, the more Dutch people I like, which bodes well for cycling in Holland.

We cycled around the island in the afternoon, about 10km in all, and then chilled for the rest of the day, swimming in the lake before enjoying a camp dinner of salad and these really crap-looking but strangely delicious spinach and mozzarella pancake things. The campsite was about €25 a night – go stay there, it is a soul-cleansingly beautiful and peaceful place.

In the lakes there is no ‘unfortunately’ but there is Lake Garda, which is just about everything that Lake Iseo and Monte Isola are not. To begin with, we planned our most ambitious day’s climbing to get from one lake to the other – a 700+m peak straight out of the town in a climb covering about 10km. In truth, we may have done more difficult climbs, but we haven’t * meant* to. The other 60km-odd was going to be a gentle downhill slope from the top of the mountain to Lake Garda. It’s got a vaguely pantomime feel about it, hasn’t it? I’m sure you’re wryly chuckling already and resisting the urge to shout ‘it’s in front of you’. The path we had chosen did in fact include not one but two 700+m mountains. We thought we rocked when we’d finished the first one. We * were* the kings of the mountain as we soared down the other side through magnificent mountain landscapes, stopping for our pre-prepared celebratory nice big lunch in a strange and ugly industrial estate that sprang out of nowhere like a wart on the countryside. Then, oddly, the road began to climb. And climb. And fucking climb at gradients easily twice as steep as anything we’d already done. We were traversing like cross country skiers in reverse through 35+c heat and I was feeling as sick as a bastard. Never have I regretted the lunch of triumph so much. Things were so bad that I had to buy and drink cold water before the top of the hill while Neil had an ice cream (the bastard – I swear, he doesn’t eat, he just makes food ‘disappear’).

Finally, we reached the top and coasted through a massive downhill, complete with extremely cool (in both senses) tunnels, and was it worth it? Was it fuck. When we reached the bottom, two motorcycle cops escorted us and made us take a shortcut around a tunnel. I’ll be honest, they were slightly scary – it really felt like they had been waiting for us, even though they assured us that the short cut was ‘for our own good’ and ‘safer’. And they waited at the other end to make sure we came out. Later, we arrived in Salo (in my head, Nick Cave is narrating this now over eerie carnival music) where there were NO campsites, despite little tent marks on our map, and the world’s unfriendliest tourist info office person who resented us for interrupting her cigarette break, begrudgingly gave us only sketchy information and told us we could ride on a path that was not for cycles thus turning the local population against us.

The first Lake Garda campsite we tried was full – yet gleefully told us that even if it wasn’t, they would have charged us €36 for the night. The next one… well, it wasn’t full. It was around a long, windy, hilly road (that was an alternative to another direct, largely flat road that we would have taken had the road signs promising ‘other campsites’ not directed us otherwise) and was going to be about €27 a night. Still, we were knackered and agreed begrudgingly to pay the price for a site with car, caravan and two people. I mean, although it wasn’t on the lake, it did at least have a pool – which I eagerly approached to refresh my much-abused body. Only to discover, and I cannot possibly prepare you for this, that in order to use it, you needed to wear a bathing cap. You will probably be shocked to learn that this is not something I packed. In fact, it’s not something I have possessed since I was a child pawn in the games of sick adults that thought squashing school children’s heads into rubber sheathes and forcing them to thrash their way up and down water filled pens was character building/entertaining (delete as you feel applicable). I don’t think it is too much to say that I felt bereft. They all had them, didn’t they – the children and adults already using the pool. I was left with no option but to trudge off down the road hoping to eventually find my way to the lake for a swim. Which I did. And it was good. In fairness, the Italian-speaking campsite owner did charge us a reduced rate in the end – I think she’d just been shocked that two skanky, bici-riding, non-bathing cap types had unexpectedly washed up at her door.

Lake Garda is over-developed, over-expensive and over-used. My advice would be to pick another lake or go in winter: maybe it’s nice then. I’d go for the majesty of Iseo and Monte Isola, even though it’s smaller, over the shallow attractions of Garda every time.

V for all very nice really

Since the day of hell climbing, it’s all been terribly pleasant. From Garda we headed to Verona, with which I fell shamelessly in love, enticed by every bauble and trinket on offer. It’s so terribly, terribly picturesque; so full of character and antiquity; so in love with itself that you can’t help but love it. It out-Milan’s Milan in the ‘god aren’t we all horrifically stylish’ stakes, but why shouldn’t it? The opera was in town, although tickets were but a dream, and the Roman amphitheatre was dressed for the Barber of Seville. Everywhere Verona is arresting: the frescoes, the sculptures, the towers, crypts and altars – every inch of stone in the old town of Verona carries its weight in creating a flawed yet perfect place that is the past now. I can’t think of anywhere that so effectively combines respect and admiration for the old with every day life.

And, the Verona Card, people, is a bargain. You’ll go places, and they guide books they will tell you to purchase the ‘day this’ or the ‘museum that’ or the ‘adventurer bollocks whatnot’ and they will claim that they give you good discounts on access to important things that you actually want to see when in fact all you get is entry to the exhibition of 14th century monks’ toenail clippings and the great knots of Europe maritime display. The Verona Card actually gives you entry to everything you want to see for €8 in one day. I sightseed like a demon and I didn’t finish the card – you know what it’s like, you get a card with bits to get crossed off and you have to go for it. And you get bus travel thrown in (although the centre of the old city is a pedestrian zone and most of the ‘sights’ are there, so I’m not sure where you’d go).

On top of all that, the campsite we stayed at was possibly the second best campsite so far – on the hill below the castle looking over the old town. Steps straight down the hill to Pietr Ponte and into the town in 10 minutes, lovely shared terraces with tables for cooking, eating, drinking and chatting, lots of tent pitches shaded by grape-laden vines, magnificent views, friendly staff and reasonably prices (although slightly warm) beer. In short, if you’re in the region, go to Verona. If you go to Verona and you like museums and churches, buy the Verona Card and definitely stay at the castle campground.

I've no idea what Vicenza is like because we just rode through it really. We stayed at the crappest campsite on the side of a motorway with absolutely nothing in or around it, went on a failed mision to find ice and ended up finding a good pub where we sat around for too long drinking pints of Tennants (there has clearly been some serious Scottish infiltration in this area) and 'chatting' to the locals, including the people running the bar who were off to a beer fest in Earl's Court.

Venice so far has been very good indeed, but I don't have time for an in depth update yet. My ice is melting and I'll probably need to take to the canals again soon to make sure I get home in time to cook dinner - we've got camp light problems again, and Venice is waaaaaaaay to expensive to dine out in. I'll try to get some pictures up on Flickr if my connection holds up and will hopefully update from Trieste in a couple of days when we have made a final decision on the rather compelling 'coast of Croatia v across Slovenia' question.

Ciao for now (even older blog update below...)

12 July 2007

Today was the type of day to remind you why this whole cycling thing didn’t seem the stupidest idea ever. Started with a 10km-odd climb out of Genova – challenging but not crushing, which is just how we like ‘em. The riding was beautiful, along a windy mountain road beside a small trickling stream crossed by crumbling stone bridges with the occasional picturesque village breaking the ‘monotony’ of the beautiful green countryside between. We were almost always in sight of a fantastic railway line, the kind that makes you wonder how people ever fell out of love with train travel: lots of long tunnels and narrow sections of rail climbing across ravines on tall, elegant stone arches.

Then, what seems like it must be a miracle. From the top of the mountain pass, which was about 25km from the start of our cycle, the next 80km seemed, ever so slightly, to be downhill. That is of course not possible. There was a great descent straight away, of course – about 10km straight down (I clocked 48kph on the gentle slope at the bottom, according to the speed gun thing on the side of the road). We stopped for caffe freddos and then headed off again. And the rest is history. I’m sat at the Hotel Albergo D’Angelo about 50km south of Milan (Neil has just been ‘chatting’ – pointing and miming – with the manager and he informs me that both Pantani and the Juventus team have stayed here) having cycled more than 100km and feeling grand. I hasten to add that we are not staying in this delightful 4-star hotel. We are sleeping rough near the railway tracks up the road, but we need to wait until it’s a bit darker to bed down inconspicuously, so we’re having a beer here.

The countryside makes a refreshing change after so much Spain. It’s green, with actual rivers and lots of dare-I-say-it stereotypically beautiful Italian churches and town halls.

Back online and in Italy

Map & Pin: Aguilas; Bolnuevo; Los Alcazares; Santa Pola; Benidorm; Altea; Gandia; Pinedo (Valencia); Benicassim; Benicarlo; Tarragona; El Masnou (Barcelona); GENOA

So, if you’re reading this, it probably means iB is back in action, though still effectively broken. Despite pathetic miscommunication on both sides, I managed to get the Mac agent in Barcelona to take a look at it – something on the mother board is broken and would cost around €250 to fix. But they did sell me a wireless USB adaptor that I can just plug in and use. When I get back to London I’ll go to the Mac store and see about a longterm solution, but for now it is definitely better than nothing.

I'm in an internet cafe in the fine city of Genoa, using my iBook with his super new wireless USB thingy. It appears to work a treat as long as the signal is good and strong and completely above board (don't ask me how, but I think it knows when you're trying to piggyback on some other person's unsecured network). I do seriously hope things will be slightly better now in terms of regular updates even if I have to stick my hand in my pocket occasionally to pay for it.

Below are two recent, posts (although the most recent one isn't complete). I've just separated them by the date they were last added to, which bears little or no resemblance to when events took place. We arrived in Genoa on the ferry from Barcelona yesterday - it's a wonderful place, but more on that when I've had time to write it. I've put some new pictures up on Flickr but they are in a very bizarre order and not up to date either. I promise to attempt to clean things up very soon and get all up to date. We're heading out of Genoa tomorrow and off towards Milan, which should be 2-3 days cycle depending on the availability of campsites. We should be in Venice in a couple of weeks and into Croatia shortly afterwards. The weather here is still outrageously good but I'm also pleased to hear things have improved in the UK.

More shortly (hopefully slightly less of a lie than usual).

10 July 2007

Aaaaaaaand it’s goodbye Spain and hello Italy. I’m writing this on a ferry about halfway between Barcelona and Genoa. The first challenge of each country transition is to work out which language you should be mangling. I sometimes think this is actually made more difficult by too much similarity – although with the added bonus that you are vastly more likely to be understood as you gibbering at the café counter. Like the budget travellers we are, our bags were packed with food for the ferry but we did partake of a very disappointing but expensive breakfast this morning. They served us INSTANT COFFEE. On a ferry between SPAIN and ITALY we were served instant coffee. I shall be following this blog entry with a stern letter to the management of this allegedly Italian ferry company ensuring we’re all clear on what’s gone wrong here and how it can be put right.

Which brings me to my post-departure review of Spain. Thinking about the country overall, I’ve found it difficult but necessary to try to pin down what my expectations were and how they relate to what I’ve actually seen. As I think I’ve mentioned before, standard Spain-visiting practice seems to be the clockwise tour – the reverse of what we’ve done and not on bikes if you’ve got an ounce of sense. I don’t really know why – maybe the preponderance of heavily (read over) developed south and east coast resorts have the reputation that makes them the highlight, maybe the ‘interruption’ of Portugal puts people off the anti-clockwise coastal path, maybe the ‘traditional’ travellers’ route was to draw a straight line down from France to Barcelona. Whatever the reason this is the way the majority of travel books will order their routes and itineraries and it is the direction most of the travellers we’ve encountered have been going. And I think it is the wrong order to do things.

My favourite bits of Spain, that have really blown me away, have been the north coast, particularly towards the north east corner, and certain sections of the south coast and the cities just inland of it. My least favourite bits of Spain have been almost the entire east coast from Mojacar to just south of Barcelona. It’s hideous. It’s soul destroyingly depressing. For example, I challenge the brave traveller – perhaps the kind that routinely goes on those holidays where they make you eat live animals and locally aborted foetuses and whatnot for the challenge of it all – to visit a little spot called Santa Pola, just south (and in many ways practice for Benidorm). We arrived after a hot but largely uneventful day’s cycling: clear blue skies and heavy traffic; views of crane after crane, development after development, occasionally interrupted by the surreal colours of the salt pans stretching away on either side of low roads like images imported from imagined martian landscapes.

On the map, Santa Pola is roughly a grade 2 dot. On the road you soon develop a complex system of map dot grading, getting a feel for how to interpret each and every mark so as to accurately anticipate aspects of what each speck truly represents. A grade 2 would * normally* indicate a town/village (rather than a city) with a healthy but not large town centre, possibly up to two supermarkets, one of which would be part of a chain, at least three bakeries, several bars and restaurants, a medium-sized church/cathedral, at least two centrally located and utterly inexplicable statues (with at least one located on a roundabout that is comically too large/small depending on context), etc. There will be one tourist information office that will be closed when you arrive, no matter what time that is, but will probably open later.

Santa Pola was not a grade 2 dot town – even its dot was deceptive. It sprawled massively, for a start. We arrived during siesta (which can be an inauspicious start in all but the most picturesque and friendly of places) and spent around 15 minutes riding through … well… hell, really. Imagine some kind of evil mastermind, a super villain with some unfathomable but clearly sick and devastating agenda for world destruction, had erected a metropolis here-to-for only imagined by the most unprincipled, uncaring, unscrupulous and unimaginative architects considered unemployable by all but the type of vile, greedy, selfish developers whose existence heralds not just the end of all built-landscape beauty but possibly of the very world itself and you will be one millipede’s step closer to picturing Santa Pola: possibly the ‘greatest’ mecca of soulless, merit-free, excessively saccharine, inappropriate, uninspiring, ill-conceived, undifferentiated, teeth-grindingly butt-fucking-ugly non-architecturally, non-designed non-development ever. Until you get to Benidorm.

On the upside, there’s the following, written while I was in Benidorm so that it would not be forgotten:
I’m recording this now so that all my bad impressions of the Costa Blanca have some context at least. Tonight we spent the evening in a bar with ‘rock n roll’ entertainment. The first guy, an asian Elvis impersonator, was good, but the second guy was awesome. This was a short, balding Spanish man so utterly confident of his own sexiness that it became a fact instantly beyond question. The man worked a crowd like you wouldn’t believe. It WAS Wembley. All the time.


05 July 2007

I know this kind of graphic detail can be disturbing, so some of you may want to look away now. We're holed up in Barcelona at present and could be for a few more days at least – well just outside Barcelona really, at a campsite in El Masnou, a beachside resort about 16kms to the north. It is a very groovy place, in fact, with a refreshing number of campers under the age of 50 from all over the place. There’s even a huge group of what are probably schoolkids who are surprisingly not that irritating – certainly nowhere nears as irritating as the group of Germans camping near us who have clearly purchased the ‘Worst German Camp Songs, Ever’ album, the golden sounds of which include traditional German drinking music, several chipmunk tracks and a highly emotional rendition of Kumbaya (sp). The repeated loud playing of this album led to entirely reasonably and much appreciated guerrilla music attacks by a bunch of Spanish lads with a decent car stereo and some far more palatable tunes, but give the Germans their due – they were drowned out but they were never broken.

It took a few days to get the Mac looked at but today we’re off to sort out the ferry to Genoa and should hopefully be heading to Italy by the weekend. I can’t even remember the last time I updated the blog, so I’m not going to give a blow by blow description of the last couple of weeks. Valencia was excellent. A beautiful green city with the old river bed that runs through it converted into walking and cycling paths, football pitches and all manner of other useful shared public space and parks. The cathedral was a bit average inside, while imposing and impressive outside, but the old silk market is a spectacular building; a massive hall with, high vaulted ceilings supported by huge twisting stone columns. Opposite is the city’s largest and currently used market, which presents a different but still beautiful mercantile space. Given that everybody’s so bloody in to capitalism these days, why is it that contemporary shrines to consumption are such fucking awful, joyless, ugly pits. If shopping centres must be built, (which, of course, they needn’t) couldn’t somebody put some effort in to at least making them a pleasure to look at if not to visit? Another old market building in the city has been converted into a space for swanky bars and restaurants, providing the perfect shady, breezy venue for a cold drink on a very hot Valencian day – and showing us all the way forward: let’s build some architecturally stunning shopping centres and then turn them into bars. Be clear, people: shopping is not a leisure pursuit, drinking is.

And in another of those remarkable water sports coincidences, our arrival in the city was greeted by a bunch of outrageously rich people with boats. That’s right, sailing fans, we were in town for the start of the 32nd America’s Cup. Unfortunately, as we have neither masses of money nor a very big boat, we didn’t really fit in but we dutifully had a poke around the America’s Cup port before being overwhelmed by American smugness in the race descriptions accompanying the model display and fleeing back to our campsite… which was unfortunately jam packed with Kiwis in town to watch the America’s cup. In the unlikely event that anyone doesn’t know, (I mean come on, it’s the * America’s Cup*) this year’s race is between holders Switzerland and challengers NZ. Given that Switzerland is a landlocked country, I think this marks a pretty spectacular achievement, but everyone else seemed to be going for NZ. I also find myself forced to reassess my previously very favourable opinion of Kiwis, and the movement is all downhill. The ones staying at the campsite, including a retired NZ Airlines engineer who was also a fellow cycle tourist, were unfailingly boastful, patronising and made no attempt at any point to speak any Spanish whatsoever but were no doubt clearly understood by the Spanish people they were yelling at all the time. Hearing them repeatedly bragging about how all the sailors on both boats were kiwis and how if they didn’t win it would only be because they didn’t have as much money as the other team (all of which is no doubt true, but that’s hardly the point) had the effect of greatly increasing my admiration of the landlocked, pocket knife-wielding Swiss who I hope, by now, have won.

Oooo - some spare witterings

Richard and Stew get shiny new postcards for reading my blog and answering the Delia style 'where are ya'. JP has already had online praise and I know it will just go to his head if I send him anything further. My laptop is still not wi-fi fixed and I am beginning to despair of getting anything before Barcelona.

Some interesting side information, as I've got a few minutes. People get fatter the further south you go in Spain. Must have to do with the affluence of the tourists, I suppose. DWP are still paying me, and although I do clearly deserve it, I thought you mere taxpayers might like to know that I've asked them to stop. I've been watching the GCN job alerts and there are at least two jobs I haven't seen advertised yet - you know who you are, people, get a move on.

I have lost loads of weight. You would think this would be just a brilliant thing, but with only one pair of trousers, I have also developed a truly offensive case of builder's crack - don't be afraid to check the Flickr account - we photoshop it out if it becomes a problem. Which, of course, is a gentle reminder that you should have a look at my Flickr pages every now and then - if you are able to answer a few simple questions by the time we get back, you won't be required to attend the slide night...

Final admin bit - my sim card has died. I am using a new number which I will email to everyone in the very near future. Stoatie has a new tattoo, according to a text that I very belatedly received (no reason why it got caught up, but it took a long while to get to me, according to the date it was sent). A picture would be very nice indeed!

Miss you all - more from the road soon!

15 June 2007

Map & pin: Granada; Carchuna; Adra; Almeria; Tabernas; Mojacar.

Again it’s been way too long between blog updates, but we are currently trapped for a few days in Mojacar effecting repairs (of which more below), so it’s a good opportunity to at least run through the highlights of a very busy and excellent week or so. Granada was every bit as good as expected – we spent a full day sightseeing and only managed to take in about half a dozen different places. The sightseeing pinnacle was definitely the Alhambra/Generalife – a Moorish castle, gardens and other assorted stuff perched on the top of the hill overlooking the city. Everything about the place combines elegance, beauty and style with extraordinary peace and tranquillity. The gardens all centre around running water and despite the intense heat of the sun, everywhere feels cool and relaxed. From the top of the towers you can see the Sierra Nevadas, the city, the groves of olive trees stretching away into the distance – truly awesome place.

Other particularly good bits included an exhibition by a painter called JP Morales (when I have an internet connection I will try to give you some more info, but look out for his extremely surreal and often tiny oils), the cathedral with a most impressive organ (tee hee) and the street parade we caught – some kind of festival going on in the city.

We also got on the piss with some fellow travellers at the campsite – Dan and Darcy who are doing a similar trip to ours but on motorbikes. A good laugh and hopefully we might catch up with them in Valencia or Barcelona – obviously they are travelling much faster than us but staying longer in many places and taking more time out for side trips.

The ride down from Granada was way easier than expected, which is always nice. Fantastic scenery, though. As we approached the coast, the road followed the bottom of a ravine winding for several kilometres through massive cliffs and mountains. It was breathtaking stuff – the rock seemed so old and strong, the cyclist so transient and tiny. Such was the scale of the thing that there seemed no point in taking pictures – they could not possibly convey the feeling of the place. Then, just as you felt you might be crushed, the cliffs receded, sky reappeared and out we popped onto the coast again. V cool.

Carchuna – don’t bother. Nothing there except a very expensive campsite and an average (by, admittedly, the very high standards around here) beach. Here and Adra are part of what is referred to as the ‘exotic coast’. The guidebook informed me that here many exotic and tropical fruits are grown. Fabulous, I thought, all those beautiful fruit trees, what an appealing prospect. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In fact, the entire area is pretty much endless greenhouses – ugly, dusty, dry and baking in the sun. On the upside, we did get the bonus of cooking with food found by the side of the road, which is always nice. At the campsite in Almeria we met an American guy who is studying the impact of the greenhouse agriculture on the region, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for his damning criticism of it sometime soon.

Since we hit Adra, I’ve been swimming every day, which is of course another bonus. This has been accompanied by a sharp increase in bugs – flies and mozzies operating on a rotational shift basis in each campsite. We’ve bought two types of mozzie repellent, but Neil still manages to look like a leper and we’ve had to start sleeping with the screens closed on the tent, which is very warm. The campsites in Adra and Almeria were right on the beach – less than 100m from tent door to lovely, lovely salt water. Tabernas was in the middle of nowhere and the only water we saw either fell from the sky or was sprayed up on us, disguised as filthy mud, by passing trucks. But then it is Europe’s only desert. Frankly, I’m becoming increasingly dubious about some of these claims – I’ve seen Europe’s biggest cathedral in at least four different places and the country around Tabernas, while very interesting, didn’t look much like a desert to my exacting Australian eyes.

Anyway, Tabernas was very nearly the scene of some tears. According to our guidebook, and to flyers Neil had been collecting, it was the site where many spaghetti westerns were filmed, including a number of the Sergio Leone classics, and studio/sets/shrines to Clint-type places could be visited and enjoyed. Based purely on the name, we selected one Texas Hollywood – it was rubbish. It was so bad, it actually went out the other side and became funny. We cycled through the desert on rocky, dusty roads to pay €15-odd each to look at an old film set, have a ride in a horse-drawn cart and watch a ‘wild west show’ conducted entirely in Spanish which consisted of three men playing cards and fighting in a bar. After going through the rollercoaster of emotions from extreme excitement to utter horror, anger and hostility, we arrived at a kind of mild hysteria which allowed us to appreciate how utterly we’d just been conned and genuinely laugh at a world that produces tourists as gullible as us. And Indiana Jones was filmed there too (no, I don’t know which one – I only glanced at the film stills in the bar)!

Anyway, all of this brings us to the here and now, which is trapped in Mojacar while Neil’s bike is repaired. The original snapped spoke was repaired in a rather slapdash manner, so that eventually the buckle returned and on the way down from Tabernas to the coast a further two spokes snapped and we had to limp into town and seek help. The ride down had been going fantastically well to that point. Great roads with little or no traffic, a light drizzle of rain so that it didn’t get too hot, lightning striking the mountains, Spain’s unfriendliest town (Sorbas – clear inspiration for The Hills Have Eyes), and a period of prolonged filth which left me and everything I own coated completely in mud. Still, it could have been a lot worse and at least it turned out we had alighted in just the right spot! We are staying in a wonderfully quiet and pretty campsite just outside Mojacar town itself, with almond trees all around us to assist in our mission to eat as much food we find on the ground as possible. The woman that runs the campsite is doing us a cheap rate, that has got cheaper the longer we stayed, and two old English brothers that are staying at the site have been immensely helpful. They found us a bike repair shop through a friend who lives locally and drove Neil into the next town to drop his wheel off. Unfortunately, it has taken three days to repair and Neil is off to collect it this afternoon. The brothers are, it goes without saying, utterly mad. A favourite saying, for example, seems to be that the world is run by women and socialists – not the one I’m living in, unfortunately – but have so far seemed largely harmless. We shall buy them some beers to thank them for their help before we head off tomorrow morning. Meantime, I’ve been enjoying a wonderful relax. The campsite has a pool that we’ve had pretty much to ourselves. On Wednesday I walked down to the seafront a couple of kilometres away and found an English bar that put the State of Origin on for me (yay you toadies). Neil joined me after his trip to the bike shop and we spent the rest of the day getting pissed, topped off by a wonderful vege dinner on a rooftop restaurant in Mojacar. There appears to be a massive expat community here but the place itself has very little to recommend it. Still, there’s a communal fridge at the campsite, so we’ve been able to keep cool food that we’ve been avoiding because of the heat and we’ve spent a few days laying about eating and drinking much like big fat Mediterranean cats.

05 June 2007

Map and pin: Conil de la Frontera; Punta Paloma; Algeciras (Gibraltar); Granada.

Last few days have been mad and packed full of really interesting stuff. First of all, we cycled about 55km to Punta Paloma – a very windy 55km. It is worth noting that there are a number of warning signs that cyclists might like to be aware indicate less than ideal cycling conditions ahead. These include massive wind farms, wind sock signs on the side of the road, hotel names like ‘Hotel Hurricane’ and millions of kite surfers. Yes, wind freaks, we’d arrived at the so called ‘wind coast’, world headquarters of wind surfing and kite surfing. It goes without saying that we had no idea we were approaching this and arrived at Punta Paloma gobsmacked to see the sky filled with giant kites and the palm trees horizontal. We set up camp and then wandered down to the beach to soak up the spectacle – and got our second delightful surprise: Africa. From the beach you could see the north coast of Africa rising up on the other side. How cool – I didn’t know it was so close. We had a couple of beers and a nice dinner. Sunday has become our main eating out night as the day in Spain is like Sundays when you were a kid – nothing (except restaurants/bars) is open.

The wind howled all night long and we set off the next morning nothing short of fearful, into what seemed like a strong wind. We were right to be afraid, and it wasn’t a strong wind – that was still to come. Turns out we were riding through the winds that blow between Spain and Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar and although we only did 30-odd km for the day it was absolutely killer. The wind, combined with mountains, was so strong that we had to push the bikes on a number of occasions not because it was too steep but because we were in serious danger of being blown off the road. It was amazing. Just when I was about to despair, having taken over an hour and a half to do less than 10km, we arrived at a bar near the summit of the highest mountain and had a quick beer. Then, bless the spirits of wind, it was all down hill to Algeciras.

We’d planned to camp there, but on arrival we were told that the nearest campsite was back where we’d stayed the night before and quickly changed our mind. Instead, we stayed in a really cheap pension and took the bus to Gibraltar for the evening. What a bizarre place. For the first time since we left England, someone actually checked out passports. Once you’re in, it is genuinely like you are back in England. All the signs are in English, the stores are English, the currency is pounds and pence, the pubs (and the pub food) are English. To be honest, it all seemed a bit run-down and sad. We met a local artist, though, who told us quite a bit about the island and what it was like to live there. We had a pub dinner and a few pints – bought a 50g pouch of tobacco (no, I haven’t quite given up smoking, it would seem) for £1.02!!!!! – bought some wine gums for Neil and wandered around for a while before taking the bus back to Algeciras. It was just €45 for a day trip by ferry to Tanger, and we were sorely tempted to nip over to Africa while we had the chance (just so we’d been) but decided against it. You can’t do everything and the costs for every extra day mount up – we’re already exceeding our budget on a regular basis and have pretty much concluded that we won’t be doing much further travel once we’ve finished this trip, but we’ll see how we go.

Algeciras seemed a very odd place – obviously a major port for travel/trade between Europe and north Africa, which was reflected in a very mixed population, fantastic variety in the food at the local markets and signs in several languages. It’s also home to a massive industrial area and it appeared from the flow of traffic that many locals work on Gibraltar.

Today, we trained it up to Granada – and thank fuck for that because just looking at the mountains through the window made me tired. Met a fellow Aussie traveller – retiree from Adelaide – who was excellent company and we exchanged travel tips. The campsite in Granada is really close to the city, which is brilliant, and we’re here for two nights before heading back down to the coast. According to the map, we’ve got to go over a couple of 1000+m mountains on the way back, so as well as sightseeing we’ve been building up our strength. Granada looks beautiful so far and tomorrow we’ve got a packed itinerary to get through, so I better go have a beer and get camp dinner sorted. My iBook is still not working on wireless, so I’m not sure when this will get posted but if we’ve got some spare time and a free wi-fi connection I’ll see what I can do.

02 June 2007

We appear to be beginning the descent into noisy campsite hell – I write this to the accompaniment of screaming children, loud Spanish pop music, barking dogs, scooters and even the occasional bray of a donkey, although I have no idea where the hell the donkey came from and I did take a walk around the campsite when we arrived. The donkey and the dogs can be quite soothing, but the overall effect is anything but. Last night we had several desperately shouty Spanish families, lead by chief shouter Willy Wanker (so named because he appeared to have his own oompah loompah – sorry, but even I wasn’t brazen enough to take a picture of them six foot away and shouting to each other) who forced me to have a 1am tantrum. I was reduced to shouting random abuse and slamming the pots of our tiny cookset together – the only thing I had that could make noise in any way competitive with several adult shouters, a troupe of monkey children playing with a giant tennis ball and loud Spanish television. At least they made the monkey children stop.
In fairness, you expect Friday and Saturday night at a campsite to be noisy and noise doesn’t generally bother me – let’s face it, I’m damned noisy myself. I think I was particularly pissed off because this was a deeply militant campsite where reception had impressed on me, through the use of words, gestures and pictures, the evil of using any kind of portable music player: antisocial behaviour far more hideous than shouting, playing ball games and watching loud television outside your caravan at 1am. It is probably also worth noting that people who stay in caravans cannot possibly know just how little noise a tent filters out – it’s like wearing ear trumpets as ear plugs.

But enough preliminary moaning, on to the main moan of the day: I have been robbed in the most annoying and disappointing way possible. You expect, travelling like this, that you will get stuff nicked – frankly I figure it’s inevitable. However. Today, while I was at the beach (yes, yes, I am aware that noting I was off swimming in the clear blue Spanish sea at the time is likely to lessen any sympathy I might be due) someone stole my repair kit from my bike. Spare tube, puncture repair kit and a set of allen keys (no idea how you spell that, so apologies if it’s wrong) – not the bag they actually live in, which is strapped under the seat, mind, just the three essential repair items. Total value: £10 maybe. The bike, it goes without saying, was chained up with my fuck off giant bike chain and lock. Okay, so I realise it’s not heart medicine or grandmother’s wedding ring or something, but that’s hardly the point. These three things could *only possibly be of use* to a cyclist. What kind of scumbag bastard cyclist steals another cyclist’s repair kit? Nothing else taken: Ernie and my bike computer still there, Neil’s quick release wheels untouched. Just the three cheap, essential items a cyclist – AND ONLY A CYCLIST – would need if they got a flat tyre.

Obviously, there is no point wishing a flat tyre on him/her as they now have at least one brand new puncture repair kit, and a snapped chain or similar seems a smidgen light as punishment goes. In truth, I hope they accidentally ride into a seemingly empty field and get gored by an angry bull that was only last week, much to the thief’s disappointment, spared by the crowd at the local bullfight because it had fought courageously – poetically leaving him/her to expire slowly from a puncture that no stolen repair kit can mend. Or something similar.

On top of this irritating theft, I discovered that I had lost my travel shampoo (bloody brilliant little shampoo cake from Lush – not tested on animals – with its own little travel tin). Neil, on being told that I couldn’t find it, made things infinitely better by responding: “Oh yes, you’ll have left that at the last campsite - I thought I saw that outside the showers but didn’t think it was yours.” Grrr indeed. There is a horse neighing now, as well.

Where at we are at

I've just added two posts below - one a long update that I've been writing on and off for the last couple of weeks, the other a list of everywhere we have stayed so far.

We're back in Spain and visiting particularly ace places at the moment - Sevilla for a couple of days, Jerez yesterday and today we are in Cadiz. Unfortunately, I have still not got my iBook problems sorted (airport card screwed) so posting is likely to remain intermittent for some time. I have also just uploaded some new pictures on to my Flickr page but as I am using Neil's laptop, which is sadly not my iBook (but works and therefore could be temporarily said to be in some small way at least as good, if possibly just for now not *better* than my iBook) which does not have the same Flickr uploader set up on it, the pictures have no caption information and probably no titles either. Sorry - I'll fix it when I can.

Bloody hell, this is hard work. Fortunately, El Puerto de Santa Maria, where we are currently camping, is a major shipping port for sherry, made both there and just up the road in Jerez, so when I finish this blog entry, and drink the rest of this beer, and catch the ferry across the bay, I'll be able to wind down with a nice glass of sherry. Lucky - it's so important these days to avoid stress.

I will continue to try to tidy things up and add some pictures to these posts. As a quick aside, friends of Owl-boy may be interested to know that he is the Dave of Portugal. Yup, you can't swing a cat without hitting a Joao in the country - the little buggers are everywhere, not to mention sainted all over the shop. Certainly made me giggle a lot.

Best post this now before I use all of Neil's battery and become even more unpopular...

PS JP, you rock for reading and posting a comment. The rest of you probably suck, but I'm willing to entertain unlikely excuses for why you might not be reading/commenting (possibly lack of content might even be one of them).

The rest of Portugal, in brief

26 May 2007
It’s our last night in Portugal, so before summing up I’ll quickly run through the last week in brief:

May 20 – Sagres to Lagos – this was a deeply, deeply unpleasant cycle. Thank your lucky stars I’m writing this a week later or previously inconceivable levels of obscenity and bile would currently be filling these pages. The first 10kms was straight into the most ridiculously strong wind imaginable. I shit you not, the road was lined with shredded wind socks. SHREDDED. This was a wind so strong, that if I stopped pedalling * down* a hill, it would blow me and my bike back up the hill. It was relentless and painful and best never spoken of again. Before we set off on this ride, we visited the end of the world (the lighthouse at Sao Vicente), which was excellent, and the castle at Sagres, which was shit. We stayed in Lagos for three days – it turned out to have a thriving Aussie traveller scene so we did way too much drinking and not a lot else. Apart from Aussies, the place was jam packed full of poms. Mainly old ones. The town had a cool museum but not much else. Prices are starting to rise.

May 23 – Lagos to Albufeira – what a shit hole. Apparently, this is where people go when they visit the Algarve. It could have been anywhere in the world that crappy English tourists descend on en-masse. No character, no nothing. Really expensive and yet tasteless and dull. We watched the Champions League final, but the Liverpool fans weren’t interested in being offended by our cheering and taunting. Afterwards, I met a bunch of people from Leeds; one family in the process of emigrating to Australia. The father is a huge rugby league fan (moving to Melbourne, I might add – someone hasn’t done their homework…) and spent most of the night telling us how his son, a decidedly unhard-looking 10 year old was going to be the greatest rugby league player in the world and will one day play for Australia. I expect it will all end in tears when he turns out to have a passion for nuclear physics or poetry. I was supposed to remember his name but I’ve forgotten it already. The Algarve is rubbish.

May 24 – Albufeira to Olhao – actually, the Algarve has been somewhat redeemed by Olhao and Faro, both of which are really pleasant, interesting places full, largely, of Portuguese tourists. We stayed in Olhao due to an absence of campsite in Faro. We took the train with our bikes between the two, which was really fun – travelling in our own little baggage compartment with the doors open and leaping about like mad things to get our bikes and stuff off when we got to our stop. I have concluded that the reason these places have not been destroyed by hideous English and other foreign tourism is because they have no beaches. Lagoon/wetlands cover the coastline (apparently supplying 90% of Portugal’s mussels and oysters – how’s that for a useless fact) producing waterfronts that look out over stretches of shallow water filled with fishing boats. Does make for delicious seafood, though, so we had dinner along the front just to make sure everything was up to scratch. It was. As US/UK films are screened in Portugal in English with subtitles, we also took the opportunity to catch Pirates and Spidey 3. I will probably bang on about both at some later point, but suffice to say for now that the former was better than expected, the latter not as good – Bruce Campbell probably saved it, though, from a more harsh assessment.

Today – so now we’re in Vila Real de Santo Antonio, our last stop in Portugal before another ferry whisks us back to Spain in the morning. As luck would have it, we’ve arrived on the weekend of the international speed boat championships, which we will shortly be going to watch. I know. You’re thinking: you sly dog Angela, I’ll bet you planned the whole trip so you could be in VRdSA on this particular weekend. But I swear to you, it’s pure coincidence. I mean, of course I dared to hope…

I’ve been thinking about my overall impression of Portugal, and I think my feelings are pretty damn positive on the country as a whole. Most of the Algarve was really, really shit and I would not recommend anyone even consider it for a holiday. Other than that, though (and Sines, don’t go to Sines), it’s been fun. The north in particular was beautiful and interesting; the people were helpful and friendly; the food and drink is great. I enjoyed both Porto and Lisbon, though I think the latter needs a week-long visit of its own to get better acquainted. Some places there was a tedious tendency for people to rip you off, or at least try, which does piss you off after a while. But then I grew up in a tourist town, so I have some sense at least of what locals probably think of us. Highlights (in no particular order): Porto; Viana do Costelo; Lisbon; Zambujeira do Mar; the end of the world; Sao Jacinto (Aviero).
Lowlights: the Algarve, generally; Sines; the place with no name in the middle of nowhere; Madalena.
Best campsite: near Lourical
Worst campsite: the place with no name in the middle of nowhere

In other completely unrelated news, my airport card in my laptop has completely packed it in, meaning that I am off wireless until I can find someone to install a new one. And I’ve lost a filling. I now need to find an English-speaking dentist. I hasten to add that this has nothing to do with any perceived difference in quality/competency/etc between a dentist who speaks English and one who speaks Portuguese/Spanish/etc. I am shit scared of the dentist and I need the dentist to know that so he/she can be extra, extra careful – I also need to explain very clearly that while there may be other cavities, etc, in there, or other dental matters which need addressing, I only want the filling that has fallen out replaced. I am hoping that the bit of the Spanish coast where all the expat English gather will have someone who can help me.

So, it would seem that my worst fears have been confirmed, regarding the airport card. In a bar with free wi-fi, iBee fell over repeatedly, but now that I’m back at the campsite, everything seems to be okay. Neil is already snoring in the tent, which at least conserves light, one of our major concerns. Barbelith has come through with some addresses of places I might try for Mac assistance at least. Bless you all, you brains trust of compassionate people. I can’t begin to explain how utterly fearful being ibee less would make me, but hopefully, this ill can be dealt with. At least I feel now that it’s not just complete death that he is facing, but a specific problem which might easily and comfortably be solved. I look forward not just to a good day’s cycling and seeing tomorrow, but hopefully a cure for whatever ails iBee.

19 May 2007
We’re in Sagres, which appears, disappointingly, not to be the home of the beer we have been so enjoying during most of our stay in Portugal. In fact, it doesn’t appear to be the home of much at all. Except for a large ant population that descended upon our tent, and Neil’s panniers in particular, during our absence and has left him in a foul mood for the evening’s tent time.

Bob, our tent, has had his first injury. Nothing too serious – from the safety of Neil’s bag, the phone monkey and a pair of clippers, conspired to burn a hole in Bob – although in truth the incident could have been serious, so all’s well that ends well. We were lying in the tent in Zambujeira do Mar (of which more in a moment) when a strange smell assailed us. I thought it must be gas, but it continued to get stronger. Then, reaching for a cotton bud from his bag, Neil discovered that the smell was coming from the foot of the tent and comedic panic ensued as we threw everything from the tent in a bid to not die in the world’s smallest hostel (tent) fire. Turned out that the phone monkey/nail clipper combo had burned a hole through Neil’s bag, his sleeping mat, the tent and the ground sheet. However patching has been carried out and hopefully Bob will soldier on and wear his scars with pride.

Oddly, this incident came at the end of a near perfect day – the 70-odd-km to Z-d-M had been relatively easy and we had actually taken a mystery road, when pretty much completely lost, that turned out to be that most magical of things – a shortcut that worked. We emerged onto the road we should have been on all along with a scant 5km to go to the campsite. Which was lovely. And easy to find. And close to the town. Which was lovely. And full of little restaurants and bars. We walked around the headland that overlooks magnificent rocky coastline and down onto the town’s main beach for a quick dip. The water was crisp but wonderful and there was just enough swell to make for a pleasant and refreshing swim. There was a small shop in the town able to supply us with the essentials and the beer was cheap. Overall a beautiful place and I would recommend it as one of the nicest spots I’ve seen in Portugal.

Today’ ride was a little more like hard work, although only about 10km further than yesterday. The road wound inland for a bit, which is the universal signal for HILLS. There was quite a lot of uphill work but it was pretty gradual so bearable in the end. Sagres itself is a bit of a nothing – a small town with lots of bars but no tourists at present so oddly forlorn. We watched the end of the FA Cup final, by chance (sucked in Man Utd and all your irritating fans), in a rather expensive bar, but then made up for it by having a delicious and v cheap omelette dinner in a small snack bar in the main square. Tomorrow, we shall visit the end of the world – Cabo Sao Vincente – and the fort of Sagres before pushing on to Lagos which our rubbish guide book claims has the best museum in Portugal. It should at least have a store where Neil can buy some new gloves and a spoke tool to straighten the buckle out of his wheel. Hopefully we can also buy a battery charger so that we might have light after the sun goes down, a revolutionary idea which might just change the way we live and aid our development somehow…

16 May 2007
The stench of oil and a plague of flying spiders – ah, Sines, how to describe thee. I’ll gloss over it for a moment and go back to our departure from Lisbon. After some small confusion over the departure point, we found the appropriate ferry and were on our way to costa da caparica, well except for the usual motorway avoidance issues and a 10km trip becomes 20km. A relatively sleepy spot, in the middle of nowhere, given that it’s terribly close to Lisbon. Still, there were a couple of nice bars and apart from the infestation of cats, the campsite was okay. Then it was on to the place with no name. I shall not speak of this, because I believe Neil is preparing an entry on that particular hellish-ness. Suffice it to say, we cycled over 100km for the first time in a single day and not by intention.

Genuine travel tip of actual value to anyone visiting Portugal or Spain!! I know that, largely, little of real lasting value has come from these pages so far, but if you still choose to visit Vigo and Ribadasella at least take away this – on a Sunday, many major tourist attractions are free before 2pm in Portugal and all day in Spain. So make a note – closed on Monday, free on Sunday between 10am and 2pm/all day. And it helps to pretend you are actually catholic, if you’ve the stomach for it, when you visit cathedrals, because you can easily queue jump by looking suitably pious. A look, which it probably goes without saying, we didn’t achieve.

Anyhoo, despite Sines being uniformly unpleasant, and I do mean unremitting, the campsite has been passable and has allowed me to clean all of my clothes. Oddly enough, I’ve become quite precious about hand washing. I mean, before now, I would have said that if you know it’s been cleaned, who cares what it looks like – right? Well, actually, handwashing makes me care. I realise attitudes may differ (and I accept that the answer to the last question for many people may have been different – its probably just me who doesn’t care if they look like shit), but handwashing is actually really hard work. When I spend half an hour scrubbing shit out of my clothes, I want the buggers to look clean. It’s not enough to know they * are * clean, I want that clean clothes non-scummy look. Who knew travelling would make me so vain. Sadly, I haven’t achieved that with today’s batch of washing, but I live in hope.

Things wrong with the world today – episode 1: you can’t buy anything small anymore. When you want just one, or at most two rolls of toilet paper, do you thing you can buy that? No. Can I get a tiny bottle of olive oil? Or of washing detergent? Jam? Shampoo? The concept of under-consumption is the anathema of modern retailing it would appear and we are reduced to ‘reprovisioning’ from hotel rooms, but that’s another story.

The big questions: who, and based on what information, decided that people who use campsites don’t want or need toilet seats? I mean, I know I’m your typical southern nancy city type, but still, if you’re going to provide toilets, is it really outrageous to think you might go the extra mile and give me a seat? Actually, I didn’t even think of it as the extra mile before now – I mean, I understand supplying your own toilet paper, but your own seat??

Neil was going to the supermarket on his bike for wine and other sundries. He’s been gone some time and had drunk several beers before leaving. I better save this and start combing the streets for road kill…

Join the dots

Okay, map and pin people – and I know you’re out there – here’s something I should have done from the start, but with a completed country under our belt now seems as good a time as any to catch up. From now on I’ll try to include updates when I add stuff to the blog, but here is the list of places we’ve stayed (in order) so far:

Bilbao
Castro Urdiales
Laredo
Santona
Loredo
Santander
San Vicente
Ribadesella
Gijon
Luanco
Cudillero
Luarca
Barreiros
Ortiguera
Valdovino
A Coruna
Santiago
Pontevedra
Samil (Vigo)
A Guarda
Viana do Castelo
Porto
Madalena
Sao Jacinto (Avierro)
Figueira de Foz
Coimbra
Lourical
Nazare
Peniche
Santa Cruz
Lisbon
Costa da Caparica
??
Sines
Zambujeira do Mar
Sagres
Lagos
Alufeira
Olhao
Vila Real de Santo Antonio
Isla Christina
Punta Umbria
Sevilla
El Puerto de Santa Maria

Ola from Lisbon. I've finally caved in and paid the €5 for wi-fi access, thus this long overdue update. Lisbon rocks. We arrived yesterday and spent today looking around the city. Despite yet more mad Portuguese drivers, the city is fantastic. A great mix of people, wonderful buildings, a proper city feel - I think it's my favourite place so far and I could probably live here.

A quick update on where we've been since my last entry below. We spent a night in Coimbra - it turned out to be the week of graduation celebrations, with pissed up students all over the city all night. It was ace.

From there we visited some roman ruins before staying in our best campsite yet. Once again, it was nowhere near the place it *claimed* to be located in, but my righteous anger was thwarted when the guy turned out to be too lovely to be snidey to and the campsite was in a beautiful woodland with chickens roaming free and a little town with one bar up the road.

Then it was on to Nazare - although, this was via a fuck-off detour once again caused by motorways. Damn you, motorists and roadbuilders, is it too much to ask that we have a couple of roads that cycles can go on?? We turned up in Leiria, having carefully planned our route (well, Neil had) only to discover that we couldn't take a road south and had to go out to the coast to camp for a couple of nights instead of going straight down. However, Nazare was typically seasidey and quite nice. And it had a funicular railway, so there's that. From there, we took a bus to Alcobaca and Batalha to see the cathedrals there - two of the top sites in Portugal, apparently. They were both magnificent - the former better inside, the latter more impressive out.

However, both were trumped for eerie beauty by Obidos, which we visited on our way to Peniche. A walled city which is perfectly preserved, capped by a castle and baking hot in the Portuguese sun. We wandered around for a couple of hours before Neil died from the heat and had to be revived. What to say about Peniche? The campsite was just over €3 a night - about it really. In complete opposition to all normal (and I use that word under advisement) Portuguese practice, everything shut at 5pm, including the prison that I was hoping to visit - it's a museum now, disappointingly.

Our stay in Peniche was followed by what shall hence forth be known as Fuck Off Thursday - single worst day for shitty stupid stuff so far. Started with a flat tyre due to a split valve before we even left the campsite - mine, of course. Then, when we had got about 17km up the road, we discovered that I did not have Solio! This required a 35km-odd round trip by Angela back to the campsite, where Solio was happily sitting on the ground soaking up the sun. After this, we toddled on to Santa Cruz where the day was capped with the discovery that I had managed to lose my only long sleeve shirt. Nice. We met a very groovy Portuguese man in Santa Cruz, however, who cheered me up no end by chatting to us for ages and telling us all about the area. The campsite was close to town the coast was beautiful and it turned out to be less evil a day than it had so far been shaping up.

I've posted a bunch of pictures on Flickr, but I don't have time to put them up on the blog at the moment, as I've only paid for an hour of internet and I'm almost out of time. Interesting side note - it is outrageously expensive to call Australia from Portugal. I get 9 minutes for €5 if I buy a phone card!

A further update soon is promised, but I must post this now in case I encounter any problems. Plus, there is Lisbon nightlife to be tasted, you know. Apologies in advance if there are any errors in this - I will re-read when I have time and correct, so don't bother emailing, you bastards.


4 May 2007
We’re still in Portugal, which is probably why I haven’t yet posted this: still no wi-fi access. I have bought a CD-RW which I will transfer the blog entries to and visit some kind of ‘internet café’ – how primitive. Tonight we’re in Figueira de Foz – we’ve seen sod all of it, to be honest, because Neil somehow misjudged the distance from Avierro to here by about 20km (under, it goes without saying) and we were absolutely knackered when we arrived. Set up camp, went to the supermarket for supplies, ate noodles and now we are chilling for the evening. Seems a nice enough spot, although the campsite charges for hot showers, which seems a bit rugged.

Spent a couple of nights just outside Avierro and took the ferry over the first day for a look around and today to head on south. Treated ourselves to a proper lunch out yesterday, and what a delightful treat it was. Superb seafood – I had whole grilled fish and Neil had squid and prawns grilled ‘on the spit’, as they say (in what is no doubt an appalling mis-translation on the menu). Neil is struggling a little in the seafood department because he won’t eat whole fishes, and apparently it has nothing to do with the eyes watching him. Made a nice change from cheese sandwiches, which is the most common lunch dish we have.

Not today, mind you – today we bought half a kilo of strawberries for 90c (euro) from a roadside stand. These were the ‘middle’ quality and were ridiculously delicious. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t opt for the luxury €2.25 a kilo grade or we would have exploded with strawberry goodness. Went to the porcelain factory and museum at Vista Alegre in the morning, which you’ll just have to take my word was very interesting – oldest porcelain maker in Portugal, you know, and world-renowned. A small but exquisite porcelain gift will be winging its way to Mum by the time this is posted – in fact, in an awesome stroke of good fortune, it may even appear to have been bought for mother’s day (if that is this Sunday in Australia, as it is in Portugal, and not about two months ago as it was in the UK).

We’ve set our old incredibly crap lamp free and invested in a new one, which is much brighter, lighter, more compact and sticks to the tent using magnets. Cool. Sunshine is still a bit intermittent to charge all our solar rechargers, but we’re just about getting by. I’m really loving Portugal, despite the weather being less upbeat than expected. The people are excellent, friendly and helpful everywhere we go. If I could just take their cars away, it would be a very pleasant country indeed – but more of that another time no doubt.

Tomorrow we head inland to Coimbra, and my fingers will be firmly crossed for a reasonably flat run – it’s not that far, but today was pretty taxing so a slightly gentler ride would be appreciated. Must conserve iBook battery. More soon.

1 May 2007
Wi-fi access so far in Portugal hasn’t been a patch on that in Spain, as you’ve probably guessed. All over Spain there were unsecured networks, free in bars and hotels, accessible all over the place. You just had to find a decent hotel with a square or a bar/café nearby and Bob’s your uncle. In Portugal, on the other hand, there appears to be a wi-fi service that has done deals with major chains of hotels, etc, and charges you exorbitant rates (€5 an hour) for access in lots of different places. Still, we’ll go hover outside some swanky hotel and see if we can’t hijack somebody else’s service.

Another valuable lesson has been learned. Despite my reservations, we decided to make a run for it straight to Porto on Saturday. About 65kms of great cycling was followed by 5kms of steep hills on really busy roads and then the usual disaster of trying to get into a major city – the road we have been using all day magically turns into a motorway (which bikes can’t go on) and we are left with no indication of how to proceed. Neil managed to ‘overlook’ a map in the book that would have helped us get in and we ended up spending another 15kms finally getting to a pension in the city. The new rule is that we stay no more than 40kms from any major city we intend to visit (I might add that this happens every fucking time – no-one gives a shit how you get into a city if you are not in a car). Admittedly, I already knew we should do this but backed down for some strange reason when Neil seemed all enthused for doing the journey in one day. Never again.

Anyhoo, Porto was wonderful – what a beautiful city. On first arrival, particularly on bikes, one is struck by the ridiculously hilly setting, but once you’ve got rid of your bikes, had a shower and a beer, it becomes apparent that this is actually a wonderful thing and adds to the charm of the place. Drank some great port, did some sightseeing, relaxed by the side of the river – it was all good and I highly recommend the place to anyone. It does seem very spread out, though, with little bars and restaurants scattered all over the place. Also, we struggled to find much in the way of nightlife although I’m willing to believe we just didn’t know where to look. According to one guide map, ‘young people’ head out to Foz for bars and clubs, but as I’d already seen that area on the way in, I couldn’t be asked to go out there exploring. On our second night we did some port tasting and had dinner on the wine cellar side of the river – it chucked it down rain on the way home, but fortunately we were quite pissed by then and didn’t really care. Bizarrely, we ran into the slightly creepy Germans who we had spent the night chatting with at the last campsite. What are the chances?

Today we are just around the coast in Madalena – camping for two nights so that we can wash and dry some clothes. The weather is terrible – it rained all night and most of this morning and the wind is really cold. If you can stay in the sun and out of the wind, it is okay, but I suspect we will probably be facing constant showers on and off for most of the day. Add to that the fact that we are out of gas for cooking and you’ve got a pretty sorry looking camp night two ahead. Still, tomorrow we’ll be off again and heading down towards Aveiro, hopefully along a nice flat coast road. Salad and cheese for dinner will be fine, but absence of hot drinks for 24 hours could cause serious problems. I’ll probably just eat coffee or something. Maybe if I stand a pot of water in what little sun there is for long enough…

27 April 20007
Bloody hell – was that two days ago? We’re in Portugal! Country 2 – although Spain is only in temporary abeyance, of course. Pontevedra to Samil (Vigo) was a bit of a bloody nightmare, to be honest. We made the 1,000km mark, it pissed down rain and was freezing cold. We ended up in Vigo around lunch time, the entire place was packed full of cunts driving like maniacs (you might think something like that would be difficult to distinguish, but then you’ve clearly never seen the drivers of Vigo). We had lunch in Vigo. Vigo sucks. I have absolutely no basis for saying that except that I had a really shit couple of hours getting into and out of the place. And they drive like cunts. It is probably a really nice city (there were certain indications of this that I was able to ignore through the caked on filth from the road, constant rain and freezing wind, and the drivers). However, in all good faith I cannot recommend it.

Samil, on the other hand, is ace. Basically, go straight through Vigo (trying not to get killed by the drivers – I think we’re all clear on what they are by now) as quickly as possible and get to the beach on the other side. When we arrived the sun came out, birds sang in the trees, the flowers opened – it was all a bit Disney, frankly. But hey, when you’ve been rained on and sprayed in shit by trucks for the last 50km, you’re genuinely susceptible to that crap, you know? Such a nice campsite man, as well. Beautiful beach but a depressingly large McDonalds – still haven’t seen that many of them, to be honest, so when you encounter one in anything other than a city centre, the resentment surfaces.
Pleasant walk along the beach followed by a couple of beers, camp dinner (I believe that night was packet soup with added fresh vegetables – mmmmm, delicious), then off to find a pub that had the champions league semi on. Nothing on the front appeared to be showing it, so we struck off a small country lane that alleged the presence of a bar. We were despairing when finally it appeared on the side road, the only warning a car park with no cars in. Turned out to be a fabulous, old-men-in-jumpers pub (I will detail my old men in jumpers approach to Spanish bars at a later point when time permits). Watched the football accompanied by many wonderful snacks and Spanish beer and then staggered back down the hill to the tent.

The cycling has only got better since we broke the 1,000km mark – from Samil to A Guarda was fantastic – all rolling coasts and gentle hills. The road hugged the coastline giving magnificent views of hills, rocks and proper, proper sea. Wind behind us all the way, lunch on a headland with rock pools full of crabs and shellfish, the landscape littered with lighthouses and seaside convents. Then we reached A Guarda, which seemed so beautiful, nestled between two mountains looking across to Portugal. Sadly, things came a bit unstuck thanks to misinformation in the guidebook – Officino de Tourismo Galicia, I’m looking at you. Basically, the campsite claimed to be open all year round and it was shut. The only other campsite nearby – about 5kms, allegedly – turned out to be imaginary, as far as we could tell. We certainly never found the fucker. What we did find, however, was a windy mountainous road that ran straight into a vicious headwind. Once again, the hardest cycling of the day was actually done trying to find somewhere to stay.

I was all for just camping next to the campsite (why should anyone in the town benefit financially from the misinformation provided by the tourist info office, I ask??) but Neil wanted to get a pension for the night. Still a bit soft, when it comes to camping I’m afraid. A Guarda itself was okay – there is a watchtower on the hill in the town (which was completely impregnable, so obviously very effective as a watchtower, though slightly less so as a tourist attraction). The main attractions are the ruins of a roman village and a cathedral which are both up a mountain overlooking Spain and Portugal. Very cool and we had the whole place to ourselves to wander around.

With nary a glance from anyone at something so flimsy as a passport, we took the ferry from A Guarda to Caminha – for the outrageous fee of 75cents each with bicicletas, I might add – and we’re in Portugal. Instantly, the drivers make those of Vigo seem like advertisements for road safety. I sense a public service announcement looming on these blog pages in the coming weeks. Still, the road itself was wonderfully flat, ridiculously bumpy and had a wide hard shoulder which you could ride on with lots of space if little comfort. Our first stop was in Viana do Castelo, which is a lot bigger than I expected and also quite impressive. Double thumbs up for an excellent tourist office with a great tourist office dude – fluent English, really friendly and offered some suggestions on things we might like to do – a great bookshop with a solid collection of English-Portuguese phrase books and dictionaries and even (gasp) an English language guide to Portugal, and the cheapest beer we’ve had so far.

Our campsite is actually out on a headland, separated from the town by a working port so we had to take the ferry home from town after sightseeing - €1.50 each with bicicletas, twice the price of country-hopping, for the love of Thor. V cheap campsite, though, so we made some of the excessive fare price back that way. Took the bicicletas up to the massive Templo de St Luzia via a funicular railway and then cycled back down the hill. Sadly, what should have been a fun freewheel was somewhat marred by cobbled-bastarding-roads, as they are commonly known. Neil gets a particularl pain-face on when we have to ride over them for extended periods of time – I’ll try to get a picture. Overall, my first Portuguese stop has been very pleasant. Sat around chatting at the campsite with an only slightly creepy German couple (very nice really, just the references to frolics with Portuguese ‘young people’ that made me watch for hammer-shaped shadows on the tent during the night). The local people generally seem really nice and look at me only slightly askance when I start speaking poor Spanish, swear loudly in English when I realise I’m using the wrong language, then start spouting random vaguely Portuguese-sounding words – as I have done in most transactions or conversations of any kind so far. It’s morning now (Saturday 28 April) and we’re trying to decide whether to make a run straight through to Porto or camp for a couple of nights before we get there. We spend two nights in each decent-sized city and now (through painful experience) try to avoid our full day in town falling on a Monday when everything of interest is shut. It’s not that far, but we also look like filthy Dickensian urchins, smeared from head to foot, and on all our clothes, with soot-like black grease so a camping stop would give us an opportunity to clean up somewhat. Oh well, you get used to the grease after a while…


25 April 2007
RAIN. Six kilometres from the 1000km mark, two days from the Portuguese border and it is absolutely pissing it down. Bastard. We’re holed up in a room in Pontevedra watching the rain come down but in roughly an hour we’ll be packing our bikes and getting nice and drippy. Fortunately, it’s only 30km to Vigo and our next campsite, so hopefully we can make the journey without going mad. Yes, I did say campsite. Won’t that be fun.

Nice town Pontevedra, although its charm is somewhat dampened by the aforementioned rain. Lots of historic buildings and a cathedral built in the shape of a clam, roughly. We had a delicious dinner last night and a bit too much to drink, which should both prepare us nicely for today’s cycling.

Public service notice: cats and hedgehogs of Spain – stay away from the roads. It is * not * safe. You are dying in your droves. I know the other side of the road can seem exotic, romantic even, but it’s not worth it. I implore you to believe me – the grass is * not* greener on the other side. The best, most friendly, exciting and fulfilling cat/hedgehog environment is on the side of the road * you are already on*. Crossing kills: stay where you are.

The most disappointing word in Spanish so far is ferreteria. Rather than a place where ferrets run wild, filled with tiny ferret-sized furnishings and fittings and equipped with many many brightly coloured pipes, wheels and other fun things for ferrets to do, it is in fact a hardware shop. Poor form.