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Published: August 14th 2007
Spain: final leg
beween Tarifa and Algecirus: start of the final climb with wind wind wind and more wind]
Well what'dya know old Korn dog is gonna let me write a new blog.. here's hoping it doesn't get lost in another server failure. Bugger about that.
So after hitching over the Pirennesnes and doing a little sunbathing in Barcelona we caught an overnight train to Seville where we bought some bikes and began to make good on our planned cycle adventure. Finding bikes in Seville turned out to be a little less straight forward than we had hoped mind. First out hostel room flooded and started raining water down onto the people in the street'-Who didn't mind I'd say as Seville was experiencing a heat wave at the time with temps approaching 40 Celsius even in the shade. With this heat of course Kees decides we should go for a run. It was our hottest run ever. One way to earn your Tapas and Cruzcampo I suppose. Anyway we searched for ages before we found a good bike shop and kitted ourselves out. Heading out of town with the sun already beginning to set. Now that's time management. The result was following the 130km/h motorway for a good 15ks and then setting up camp in what
appeared to be an old artists outdoor studio besides and old disused piece of motorway at around 2am. Hadn't begun to spot the regular squashed snakes on the road back then so the long grass had seemed quite inviting..
The next day welcomed us to bike touring with shaded river side riding, cool irrigation sprinklers to shower in, corn by side of the road and fresh tomatoes fallen straight of the back of the produce truck, all this was lucky as the 3 flat tyres we got might otherwise have hampered the day. Eventually we arrived in a little watermelon farm oasis town called Chipiona where we camped for the night.
Then it was on to on Conil, which was a cruise along some of Spain's beautiful beach strewn coast with a few, unavoidable, horrid bloody motorways. Little Conil it turned out was amping up for a big weekend of Beach concerts and we almost didn't get a spot at the campground with all the students and surfers.
Conil to Tarifa was hills and head winds, so of no surprise was the prolifora of wind and kite surfers and our green energy friends the wind farms. Fruit
stalls on the side of roads provided much needed sustenance especially when you head the wrong way out of a town and end up doing a massive hilly loop back to where you started from. My bad?
So that only left an easy day, 20km, to Algeciras. No worries we thought right? Wrong. The hills and wind were so steep and strong that we both had to, very begrudgingly of course, get off the bikes and push on several occasions. And then another flat tyre for me bringing our total to 2:2. However the last 8kms was down hill all the way, anyone remember that book? Plenty of ferries to the African continent to choose from. But chaotic, we missed the first one due to it being overbooked apparently, nice one, and then found ourselves on a nice slow ferry, not quite the cat we had in mind. Think old interislander. When we finally emerged from the on board passport control the view from up top of Morocco approaching was quite stunning. As we crossed the strait and into GMT we had our first chance to relax in quite some time: destination = Tangier!
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Britti
non-member comment
If I was a customs officer---I wouldn't let that amish guy into my country. He looks like trouble!