To the border of Portugal

Different patterns in my travel emerge. Like on previous travels I use cities or other symbolic stops as my horizons and targets. I often beforehand divide my route into different parts based on them. Madrid was special in the way that it was, when leaving that town, the last big stop and horizon before Morocco. But the latter one is not a specific stop. It is for me mentally a vague big place where I’ll take a ferry to, but nothing more. Maybe Tanger is quite concrete, but no-one is waiting for me there and I haven’t really decided yet what I shall do once arrived. Parallel to the pattern of my cycling/stopping behaviour, is also a sense that it is always a bit hard for me to leave. Especially the day before and the day where I start pushing my pedals again, I often don’t feel very happy or enthusiastic. I remember when I left home and how weird I felt. But the same goes for leaving l’impasse du Mage or Grenoble. But never has it been harder now than leaving Madrid. The week spent with my university friends (even though they are so much more than just our common link of the UGent) and then with Rosa, a good friend of my fathers’, was so nice and comforting. I remembered how thrilling it can be to live in a city: going to bars, good food, museums and exhibitions, meeting people, discovering weird places and thank goodness, cinemas! Safe to say, I wish it could have lasted longer. But this is a bicycle travel, no city trip. And it was difficult to leave, nonetheless. A big fear, or something that I have been taking a lot into account at least, is me losing the motivation to continue. I feel like this time I have been close to that feeling when biking away through Madrid’s suburbs. I was suddenly again confronted with loneliness, that only became clear when I saw my friends on the other side of the street at the youth hostel when arriving in the capital. Throughout the week, I looked back on all those days travelling alone and felt the contrast, how happy I was to be in such nice company. It hit me hard to see them go away to the bus station and came as strongly back when cycling away from Rosa’s apartment. But I knew somewhere that this feeling, numb, aimless and sad, would go away, but I was surprised that for one day and a half, it didn’t. 

Surprise of ripping my bag and the later result of repair

Somehow I was able to handle quite well the first setback of this new part of my travel: ripping my old brown Ortlieb bag to shreds on a sharp bit of a crash barrier. I’ve been checking all of them since that accident and literally not a single shard is to be seen. What a bad luck to crash on the only crash barrier shard of Spain! I secured the different shreds of the bag together with a few safety pins and then biked to the nearest Decathlon thinking to buy a new bag. But not finding any suitable model, I stumbled on some kind of blue-coloured fabric repairing tape. It worked quite well, as can be seen on the picture. It is even supposed to be water repellent, but we’ll see about that. I’m not expecting much rain in the areas I’ll be biking to (just touched the ground to not jinx myself). I handled all this rather indifferently and cycled further, back towards the Guadarrama mountains I had come from the week before.

Looking back, it was a beautiful camping spot

When I woke up the next morning, close to an actually beautiful lake, I was worried to still feel this kind of numbed out. I even started to think about my options for if I decided to return home. But I was close to the Escorial and the Valley of the Fallen, a Fascist/Francoist monument to the victims of the Civil War that used forced labour to get constructed, and also house thousands of remains of rebels, that often got exhumed from their previous resting places without the consent of their family. I knew that somewhere my future self would have wanted to see this places so that already was some sort of motivation. Of course it was a goddamn Monday so the Escorial palace would be closed, but at least I could admire it from the outside. It was truly imposing to see. When I ate my lunch in a park close by, I stumbled on Raul (or rather the other way around), a surfer and world traveler, who lived there. He always spoke with “people on the Way” as he said, beautiful, poetic spanglish, and was very admiring and asked many questions. Somehow this interaction formed a complete switch in my mood. We laughed a bit and I asked him about his travels. It was like stumbling onto a small stream in a desert and then seeing how is slowly grew into a mighty stream. Another thing that helped when leaving El Escorial, was listening to podcasts. With this newfound sense of enjoyment and eagerness to continue, I started cycling to get over the Guadarrama pass and into the direction of Salamanca. Having crossed the mountains, I arrived back into the vast, endless spaces that Spain seems to be so full of. 

I took a road between El Espinar to Avila that was in this valley that was so enormous and empty, with perfectly straight barbed wire fences that almost disappeared in the distance up the valley’s flanks. Then, leaving that valley, came a particular rocky terrain, with huge blocks of granite that stuck out of the ground, the latter having eroded away. Populated with all these holm oak and other arid vegetation, it forms a hostile, impressive and thus beautiful landscape. It is only weird how many of the terrain is private (or at least thoroughly fenced).

Camping between boulders near Avila

With some difficulty I camped in this landscape close to Avila, that I discovered the next morning. The old medieval walls are really impressive, as is the cathedral made of this bloody-meat stone. I was going to Salamanca that day as Rosa had brought me into contact with the son of a friend that lived there. I biked all day through the same rock chaoses, as described before. At some places the rocks made way to tall, old holm oaks sparsely distributed over the dry grass of meadows, simulating what for me resembled to the Savannahs of Africa or South America. Podcasts continued to be a continuous presence and I discovered a format I really like: the “Long Reads” of the Guardian. I like the vast range of topics it brings and just a voice reading this long, well-written articles. Another podcast worth mentioning, “Kunst, Kunst en nog eens Kunst” (unfortunately only in Dutch), is about Flemish artists in the broad sense that in long talks of at least one and a half hour get the time to really go in dept about their lives and art. I appreciate the time they get and also the slightly amateurish (but then also disarming) interview style of the often very well prepared host.

Those podcasts brought me swiftly to the oldest university city of Spain. I got hosted amazingly by Axel, who teleworked as a software developer for an international company. He is passionate about darts and after an excellent home made tortilla we went to a nice bar where we also met one of his childhood friends Adri. Trying out interesting beers and also one round of darts set the mood for a very pleasant stay in Salamanca. Axel, who also studied economics, was very nice to talk to and this even lead to some deep conversations about economic history. The next day I took the time to visit the city that reminded me a lot of Bologna, my Erasmus destination. I combined the picturesque city centre, already quite full of tourists, with a visit to the Ars Domus 2002 museum, that was almost completely empty, but housed some very interesting modern art. Especially the temporary exhibition about contemporary Cuban art was impressive.

Cheeky self-portraits in Salamanca

That evening I joined Axel and Ari for their weekly darts competition, but not before having a delicious tapas diner and trying out some of the local dishes like Jeta (not vegetarian unfortunately). I think I got a bit more appreciation for darts, even as it still kind of affirmed all of it’s clichés of a macho, beer, cafe oriented sport.

Literally empty, finding in the middle
of nowhere this abandoned real
estate project, as if everyone had vanished

The next morning, I left again, eager to explore the northwest of Spain. I again cycled through alternations of this Savannahs and rock chaoses. I also managed to find a Warmshowers host who would accept me in Lisbon, which created a new concrete horizon to my travels. I was surprised to find again empty spaces so close to the border with Portugal. The next day, I crossed the Duero river I already had seen as a big stream near Soria (and now had cut out a deep canyon) and cycled a short time through Portugal, only to come back in Spain after that. Apart from the delicious “pastels de nata” I saw that the small roads were in poor shape and the small villages that lay next to them were in a significantly more precarious state than in Spain. I was slowly leaving the rather flat, undulating plains north of Salamanca behind and arrived in the mountains of the North. 

The Duero river as border between Portugal and Spain, arriving in new hilly terrain and the climb in the Sierra de la Cabrera

This meant again long climbs, which the podcasts helped me overcome. The sierras of Culebra and La Cabrera were the next two big obstacles, both on rather bad roads, but with vast, amazing wildness. Traces of more or less recent forest fires alternated with heathlands that were grazed by cows or sheep and intact pine forests. When cleaning my chain, I noticed that my experiment of not changing the cassette when replacing the chain had given rather poor results. The wear on the new chain had gone much faster. After less than 1000 kilometres it had already been worn down to 75%. I ventured deeper into the Cabrera mountains, having crossed a 18540m pass that I kind of wasn’t used to anymore. But quickly I readapted to cycling through mountains, I had to: the next day I crossed a mountain, part of the Montes de Leon, that took me back to 1950m (still nothing compared to that damn 2400m Andorra pass and I also started out quite high). 

Desolate mountains

The bare flanks, only low shrubs, the curvy valley bassins, rocks, the patches of snow and the resulting desolation were impressive as was the view on the other high mountains. The roads up there were capricious and steep. The grey weather even provided some snowflakes which made me even more disconnect from the busy worlds of Madrid and Salamanca. But I felt strong and curious, determined to tame the heights and the cold wind. After that high climb I arrived in Ponferrada, from where the mountain I had been only an hour before seemed impossibly high and far away. From that city I was determined to follow the Sil river to Ourense, as had been suggested by Miguel, my Warmshower host from Zaragossa. 

Las Medulas

A particular area of interest on the way was Las Medulas, one of the biggest gold mine of the Roman Empire, where 1600 tonnes of the precious material had been mined throughout the antiquity. For that, the Roman engineers used a technique called ruina montium, or the ravaging of the mountains. This was a technique where water was used to erode enormous parts of the mountain flanks through dug out tunnels to expose veins of gold and later to also carry the gold to sluices were it could sink and be collected. The effects of this landscape-changing technique are still visible and together with the reddish earth of the exposed and eroded flanks and extremely old chestnut trees it creates a truly beautiful site that is justly incorporated on the UNESCO list. It is even possible, with some mountain-bike skills, to explore the site by bike and it was certainly a highlight of my journey in Spain. 

Arriving spring and the Sil canyon

Afterwards following the beautiful Sil river through the mountains really enthused me to continue and enjoy the next parts of my travels. It was weird to remember the disinterested feeling when leaving Madrid. The next day showed the full extent of Sil’s beauty, with lush, lichen-covered forest, the same century-old chestnut trees, terrace cultivations and rocky canyons. Another surprising thing was that suddenly a lot of plants were flowering. Spring was arriving and colours came back to the often grey-brown nature. It gave a joyous feeling, as spring should, and made me arrive just in time in Ourense to enjoy for five minutes its thermal hot springs (some of them have a free entrance), before closing time. Just lying in that hot water, aaaah… I stocked up on food in the local Lidl and biked away into the night. The next day I measured my chain again, and it had been completely worn out, which prompted me to buy in the nearest bike shop a new cassette and chain, which I replaced at once. That way, I’m hopefully prepared for Portugal (I’m 30kms from the border) and Morocco, having 2500 worry-free kilometres before me.