Ups and downs

Soooooo, it feels like we’ve done quite a lot since my last update. As I write this, we’re sitting in Luanco, which is a peaceful seaside village – the cathedral bell chimes in the background, over the sound of waves gently lapping at the harbour wall beneath us. We’re staying here tonight – in a cheap but nice hotel as the nearest camp ground turned out to be three kms away and Neil needs bike repairs (more below). We’ve had a slightly less fun and more gruelling couple of days, to be honest.

Northern Spain: hilly one day, hillier the next

We’ve been putting in 60-70kms a day and yesterday’s ride from San Vicente to Gijon was really rough. Of 72km, around 71.5km were uphill. We made the schoolboy error of not eating anything before we set off and then couldn’t find anywhere that we could even buy a sandwich and a coffee for about 15-hilly-km, by which time I was starting to feel seriously fatigued. We stopped for too long for lunch, cooled down, and then discovered that the hardest part of the ride was yet to come – cycling through the most serious hills yet. Gijon was okay, but didn’t really have much to recommend it, and this morning on the way out of the city Neil snapped a spoke.

On the upside, since my last entry we have visited Santillana del Mar, which is an amazingly beautiful old village of cobbled stone streets and churches.

Neil with cows, in no way demonstrating the beauty of Santillana del Mar

We passed through Comillas, a village that managed to so far overshoot picturesque as to actually become eerie, with magnificent ocean views, gothic ruins converted into a cemetery, an extraordinarily beautiful university and some delightful churches. I’m glad we didn’t meet the locals because they would no doubt have wanted us to ‘join them’, if you know what I mean.

Gothic ruins, Comillas

We had the most delicious garlic prawns in a tiny little restaurant in Santander, and the village of San Vicente was great – yet another pretty seaside town with a really good campsite and everything a camper could need. The weather in San Vicente was lovely and I think it was the warmest night we’ve spent in a tent so far. We didn’t accidentally cycle up the picos de europas, but we did get to see breathtaking views of them from the tops of the many smaller hills we rode up, which was nice.

The true majesty of these mountains is that we're not riding up the fuckers.

As always, there are more (and probably more interesting) pictures on my Flickr pages, and Neil will be setting up some Flickr pages soon as well. He has also promised to contribute his first blog entry soon...

I cracked and bought a jumper, but Neil bought an extra pair of trousers, so we’re about even. We both bought little sleeping mat thingies, which make camping more comfortable, although Neil is absolutely rubbish to share a tent with – constantly shifting about in his noisy sleeping bag. I’m thinking of drugging him in the evenings – or drugging myself, depending on the drugs available.

There is an extraordinary amount of building going on all along the coast – massive residential developments from the look of them in places all along the Cantabrian coast and now into Asturias. Even tiny little villages have got huge construction projects going on. It seems most likely that these are meant to be holiday homes as the areas don’t seem to have the industry to support a massive influx of full time residents. No indication of who is buying them either – Spanish people or foreign investors. If anyone can shed some light on what’s going on, I’d be very interested to hear about it. Both Bilbao and Santander seemed like very affluent cities, albeit in the parts where tourists roam, with very swanky shops and a very well-heeled class of both local and visitor. These regions seem to be experiencing something of a boom, but I’ve no idea where all the money is coming from – evidently Spain’s economy is much, much stronger than I thought.

Simon news alert: Look what was hanging in the hallway of the pension we stayed at in Gijon. Unfortunately, our landlady spoke not a word of English and understood only the bare minimum of my Spanish, but she seemed really nice. (I think if you click on the picture you will get a bigger image.) The text is all in English, but there is a name and phone number for local contact details so they must be linked up somehow. Very doggy country, but the first galgo we've seen was actually in Gijon - very happy he looked, too.

Introducing new Travel Trivia - fascinating 'facts' and information we have gleaned on our travels, as denoted by the presence of this icon. Here are a few to start you off!



Northern Spain slopes slightly upward from east to west. This may not be visible to the naked eye, however we know it to be an incontrovertible fact because of the ratio of up to down bits we have cycled. The best and most photogenic views in northern Spain are exactly halfway down hills. All villages are at the bottom of hills, which means that you will always have one more uphill climb to get there and the first thing you face in the morning is the climb out.


The best roads are flat roads. Those of you who don’t know the meaning of pain, as defined by cycling 7km uphill in a single stretch, might think that downhill roads are the best, but you are wrong. And have clearly never been to northern Spain. Uphill and downhill exist in a precarious balance, with uphill slightly in the ascendant (no pun intended). Every time you ride downhill, no matter how momentarily wonderful it might seem, there is a larger uphill not far away. EVEN IF YOU HAVE JUST RIDDEN UP A HUGE HILL, riding down a similarly sized hill will only mean that ANOTHER LARGER HILL is looming.


The only English language newspaper available on an up-to-date daily basis in northern Spain is the Daily Telegraph. Two theories have so far been advanced. Neil argues that this indicates something about the kind of English-speaking people most likely to live/travel in the region. I find this explanation entirely too depressing and choose to believe that it is something to do with Telegraph group having the distribution deals tied up for the area. I also find it depressing that it’s the Telegraph – any Spanish people picking up a copy to brush up their English are going to think we’re a bunch of right wing tossers and I certainly don’t want to read the bloody thing with my coffee.


The people of Ribadesella are all liars. When we arrived, we were told by the normally reliable tourist information centre that the only campsite was ‘1km’ from town. This was a lie. It was 3km from town up the longest, steepest hill of the day. There were even signs saying how far it was. When we asked at the campsite how much it was to get a taxi back from town, we were told that it was about €5 and only ‘1.5km’ away. Again this is clearly a lie as there was only one road between the two. We were also nearly run over walking to and from town because the walking path between the two ended about 500m from the bottom of the treacherous hill at the start of a particularly dangerous section of twisty road with no room to walk and steel railings on either side. Do not stay in Ribadesella – it is not very nice, the bars aren’t very good and the people lie.


My favourite Spanish word so far is hamburguesa. Say it out loud, it just sounds so damned cool. Neil had his first one last night (although not from an actual hamburgeuseria, sadly) and said it was delicious.