TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Eight - Ups and Downs
Mood:  sharp
Topic: Travelogue
Under the watchful eyes of a an elderly couple, we managed to get the stuff off the train in record time (having received a finger-wagging from the conductor NOT to hold the train up; this, in spite of the train leaving fifteen minutes late from Ronda station.) We got the bikes assembled, went to the bathroom, wheeled the bikes out of the Cortes de la Frontera station and took a long, long look up into the hills - stunted mountains, really, great slabs of limestone poking out of the hills at odd angles, and dotted yellow with lichen and broom, which was in bloom.

The secondary highway leading up into town was narrow, but it seemed like drivers were used to packed bikes slowly making their way up the hill: no one blasted by at stupid speeds. A short toot of the horn, a smile, sometimes a befuddled look - and from one woman driving a Range Rover with British plates, a round of applause.

Riding with cyclists who are better than I am makes me realize that I AM getting better, slowly but surely. Our ride takes us sixty-five kilometres across the southern end of the Parque Natural de los Alcorconales, and I only had to get off and push twice - not bad, considering that the entire day consisted of nearly 600 metres of accumulated climbing.

This is bike touring as it should be: good, resurfaced roads with lots of green hills on either side, lots of (not THAT high) mountain passes with scenic lookouts (perfect for picnics) and the occasional group of guys who have escaped from their wives to reclaim their youth, complete with litre bottles of beer and a couple of chunks of chorizo -- and a tent they readily admit they've never put up before.

We're heading towards the town of Alcala de los Gazules, but there's a hitch: Claire didn't realize how cold it was going to be down here, and doesn't want to camp. I'm pretty sure that we're going to be S.O.L. trying to find anything that's not a campsite - and, sure enough, anything on the west side of the Iberian mountain system, where the weather is better, is booked solid.

At about 6pm we roll into Alcala and hit the campsite, which, to be fair, looks about as appealing as a down-at-heels Florida trailer park where people have lived for so long that they can't be bothered to take care of the lots. Turns out that impression is not that far off the mark: the vast majority of people staying there have GBZ - Gibraltar plates. Gibraltar is only thirty miles down the road, and this is the weekend getaway for a lot of British troops stationed on the Rock, as well as for gibralte?os with kids who want to get away on a regular basis.

We go to sleep with the lilting Andalusian Spanish which is interwoven with phrases I don't understand...and punctuated with the occasional statement right out of EastEnders or Beverley Hills 90210: Crikey!Whoamgod! Duuuude!

TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Seven - Time to be Tourists!
Mood:  chatty
Topic: Travelogue
How did the idea of being a tourist get such a bad rap? Sometimes the only thing you can do is be a tourist, stop hiding your camera and just ogle in the experience of not being stuck in front of your computer. Claire makes it down to Ronda in a record six hours, and the afternoon is spent having a long, leisurely lunch in the Ronda Parador, before wandering around Ronda with the cameras and seeing how many megapixels we can cram onto the cameras.

The only disadvantage to travelling like this, shamelessly being tourists, is that we stick out like a pair of sore thumbs, especially when we went to a Semana Santa procession. One young cofrade looked at Claire and with his best Andalusian accent, made even more difficult to undertand thanks to having lost most of his baby teeth, asked her where she was from. "Inglaterra," she said. "?Y tu?" The preschooler looked at Claire, then looked at his mother and lisped, "I don't understand what she said!" There are times when all you can do is embrace your foreign-ness and be thankful you're on the OTHER side of the camera!

TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Six - Up and Away, Horizontally
Mood:  hug me
There's something wonderfully sinful about waking up in a suite for six - by yourself - and realizing that you don't have anything going on except a day of biking. Andres had a pretty crazy day, trying to organize lunch for four hundred hungry bikers who were taking part in the Encuentros Cicloturisticas organized by a biking group in Malaga. Not wanting to get in his hair, I made myself scarce somewhat early. Or tried to. Andres was off doing his stuff while I met up with, and coffee with, the newly renovated Juan Ramon Toro, the manager and owner of the Coripe Station Restaurant/Bed and Breakfast, who has been extremely successful at remaking his life: in addition to running the station, he has successfully lost at least eighty kilos - sixty in the form of an ex-wife. Success suits him; in spite of working twenty-eight hours a day (his estimate), he looks happier and healthier than when I first met him three years ago. After a couple of cups of coffee (and some flirtation that really didn't take), I headed off.

When the weather is nice, the ride over the sierra into Algamitas must be lovely. When I hit the pass, after 400 metres of climbing, it still wasn't bad, opening up to give a view of the snowy peaks of Grazalema before the rain came in...horizontally. Lunch in Algamitas was a given, as a way of avoiding the rain; but the weather was unpredictable enough that there wasn't much choice but to take the bus into Ronda.

Andalusian cities tend to get overrun during Semana Santa, but Ronda was a lovely exception probably given that the weather had crapped out so badly. I settled into the Hotel Morales, run by Juan Domingo, a friendly hiking enthusiast who has a soft spot for cycling tourists (the hotel boasts a warm, dry room for the bikes to sleep.) And then after a warm shower and to explore the city during Semana Santa. The celebrations, after all, do not rely on the tourists, which makes it better for those of us who make the effort!

TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Five - STUCK!!!
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Travelogue
They knew. The two Guardia Civil agents who were parked behind the hermitage, high above the small town of Pruna, probably knew that I'd camped wild, just by looking at my Gore-Tex pants.

I thought I would have been able to escape my camping/hiding space on the side of Mount Terril and make a clean (and I do mean clean in the original sense of the word) getaway. But shortly before six AM the staccato pip-pip-piriririp of drizzle began hitting the tent. It let up shortly before eight, giving me ten minutes to strike the tent and get the hell out. And that was the first time I hit mud.

Never camp in an olive grove if it's raining. Not just because olive trees offer precious little in the way of protection against rain, but because most of them tend to be planted in clay-y soils -- something I didn't know until I got stuck.

I did get out. I managed to scrape the four inches of mud off the wheels, out of the brakes and chainstay (hint: don't pack your bike in the rain -- push it to the nearest road-like surface and put on everything there.)

So when the Guardia Civil officer took one look at me, one look at the bike and one look at the mud drying on my trousers from the knees-down...hell, they knew. I got a knowing little smile, I didn't get a lecture, and half an hour later, I got stuck. AGAIN.

To get to the Via Verde de la Sierra, near Olvera, I thought, shit - shortcut. The main road going into the town of Olvera, where the turnoff to get back down to the Via Verde itself, involved five hundred feet of climbing and a rodeo of an extra mile and a half. So when I saw the shortcut, I thought, hell, the station is only five hundred metres from the highway if I don't go up to town...

I have to say that, once I managed to pull the bike out of the mud, the workers rebuilding the gardens of the Olvera Station-Restaurant, were quite helpful... once they stopped laughing and staring. They lent me their hose, they provided horse-hair brushes, and the everlasting questions, once they got going, were acutally quite welcome. And I learned something new about burying your bike in clay: Nothing, absolutely nothing, beats water, a nail brush with firm bristles, and a good sense of humour!

The second highlight of the day was getting to see the wonderful Andres Ordo?ez, leader of the Patrulla Verde (a group of local young people dedicated to the preservation and development of the Via Verde). I'd first met Andres four years ago, when I was writing an article about the Via Verde, and things have gone swimmingly for him since then -- to the point where they've even opened their own rural apartment for rent in the town of Coripe, a six-bedroom loft facility with full kitchen and (hurrah!!) satellite TV. (A hundred chanels with nothing on is a lot more appealing when you haven't had TV for a couple of days.)

And it's worth pointing out that noting that Coripe doesn't just have the nicest people in that part of Andalusia; they have one of the wildest and non-traditional Easter Sunday celebrations in Andalusia. Residents basically select Jerk of the Year (past candidates have included former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar - for getting Spain into Iraq - and Telefonica President Cesar Alierta - in 2002, when the town lost phone service for six weeks.) Rather than burn the Jerk in effigy, the effigy is placed at the front of the church and anyone with a firearm is welcome to have a go at the effigy.

My jaw must have dropped a lot more than I thought it did: "Doesn't the priest get, um, a bit peeved at the gunshot damage on the facade of the church?" I asked.

"Why?" asked Andres, smiling. "Every year he gets the church repainted for free!"

TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Four: When two kilometres is NOT two kilometres
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Travelogue
My vote for the best breakfast in Andalusia: English Country Foods, in the town of Sierra de Yeguas, north-west of Antequera. Run by a British couple who moved back after retirement (her parents originally came from this area), six Euros will get you a belly-filling English breakfast that will keep you going for miles.

Which is just as well, because my plans for the night are to stay in a campsite which I know lies outside of the town of Algamitas. Algamitas sits some 50 kilometres away, on the side of the Zamorano mountain pass. I've biked this way before, heading from Fuente de Piedra to El Saucejo with the gang before, but we didn't make Algamitas to go camping.

And it's just as well: the campsite, which is listed in all the campsite guides as being two kilometres west of town, DOES lie west of town...three kilometres away, and uphill. But that's not the worst of it. The entrance to the campsite is three klicks west of town. Then it's another two kilometres up to the reception area of the camping area, up 10% to 18% grades which are so steep that you have no choice but to keep pushing and keep pushing. I feel like some fourth-rate diva, dodging the cars as they come down from the campsite, muttering to myself, "This is NOT getting any good publicity on MY website!" Some 1500 metres later, I think, FORGET IT. It's 7:35 PM and if I end up pushing the bike all the way up that hill, only to find out that there's nowhere for me to stay, I will have the Mother of All Diva Meltdowns. So I do what all biking divas do: I jump on the bike, mutter several prize obscenities in the direction of the building that I think is the reception area, and head down to a copse of holm oaks that lay between the highway (well, county road, more like)and the entrance to the campsite.

Now, technically, this is illegal. Not only is the tent being placed on private property, I'm not entirely sure that I'm outside of the one kilometre limit established by law. (You can't camp wild within 1000 m of a legal campsite, but I don't know if that means one kilometre by road, in which case I'm fine, or one kilometre as the crow flies, in which case I'm breaking the law.) But I don't care. I'm angry, I'm tired and all I want to do is sleep. I scout out an area where I won't be seen on either side. I cover the bike with the poncho (still dirty from last year's pernoctation in an olive grove). I put up the tent. (Thank you, Coleman, for your love of green nylon.) And then I sit there and try not to obsess about the sounds of barking dogs, infinitely amplified by the limestone peaks immediately behind me.

I call Candy.

"You all right?" she says.

"I'm a little flipped out by the dogs barking, but I don't think anyone can see me. I'm pretty far away from any road, and the tent is behind a pile of stones. You'd have to be looking for me to really be able to see me."

"All right. But call us if anything happens, okay?"

"Will do." The worst thing that could happen, really, is that I get busted by the Guardia Civil for camping illegally. That would mean spending the night in a jail cell. Right now that doesn't sound all that bad.

And then the wind picks up, making the temperature drop by a good five or six degrees.

And then the moon disappears, bringing in the rain I'd tried so hard to avoid earlier on in the afternoon.

Damn.

Where are the cops when you need them?

TRANS-ANDALUZ, Day Three: Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Ruminations
And when it comes, it comes down HARD. Big gobby raindrops, the kind that normally precede tornadoes, bouncing five or six centimetres off the surface of the road. Thank God it's Saturday and there's not much traffic on the roads. Thank God I put on every slightly waterproof garment that I own and am more or less dry in the parts that count, and that there's no wind, so there's no risk of hypothermia. This wasn't supposed to happen. The drought risk for Andalusia was supposed to last straight through to 2008...

Anyway.

Eight-six kilometres in the pouring rain - luckily, most of it on recently repaved and remade roads, and with very little traffic, thanks to the constrant downpour. And what do you know? Renting a cabin at the campsite in Fuente de Piedra is only twenty-two Euros a night (complete with VERY hot water in the shower and very effective central heating over the bed.)

It's not a question of how wet you get the way - what matters is how hot the air is after, so you can get nice and toasty dry!

TRANS-ANDALUZ DAY TWO: Enjoy the Silence
Mood:  bright
Topic: Ruminations
Recover the human geography, I told myself before I started the trip. Yes, bad memories can be just as valid as good memories because they're all part of what makes you human. So every so often, I'll see something and think of something, and think, "Oh! This is the point where we...had lunch...saw the bunny with the red eyes.... took the photos of the sierra... slept in the olive grove..." and then think, okay, that was then. (But was that really a year ago? Has twelve months passed since that happened?)

I made a point of leaving early in the morning. I wanted to get an early start so that I wouldn't have to kill myself to get to Zuheros before dusk, and I was glad that I did; partway through the day, a ring appeared around the sun...that classic sign that rain is on its way. And I just biked and listened to nothing. Well, not NOTHING, really - the crunch of tires biting into the gravel surface; the slight breeze combing the countless olive trees that followed the route; the sound of the grackles fighting off the crows and hawks. After all the noise of the city, the apartment, after being surrounded and swallowed by noise for the previous two weeks, it was like someone smashing a helmet off my head. Just the sound of... nothing.

TRANS-ANDALUZ, DAY ONE: The hardest part isn't the riding
Mood:  accident prone
Topic: Planning!
Every time I go on a trip like this, I never get a good night's sleep the night before. Sleep usually consists of a couple of hours of tossing and turning the night before, stomach roiling like the North Sea, and it's not because of the trip per se... it's because travelling the 1.4 kilometres from my bedroom to the butt end of the Regional Expres, without a doubt, is a travail worthy of Luis Bu?uel.

Today's journey was no exception. Get out of the house at quarter after eight; stares from people all along the street. (I tell myself that they're just jealous of my spiffy new Ortlieb panniers.) There's the usual crush of cars trying to get across Plaza Tirso de Molina. In spite of them literally being bumper-to-bumper, I manage to wedge my way through and head down calle Atocha to the Atocha train station, even getting waved through by a traffic cop. Down the escalators in the rotonda (even though that's not really kosher), to the ticket check: "Do they really let you take that thing on the trains?" I'm there with fifteen minutes to spare. Over to Platform Five, then wait, and wait some more. Even though the train's supposed to leave at nine, it doesn't pull up to the platform until three minutes after, by which time the platform is filled with elderly Andalusians who, fearing that they'll miss the train, crush up to the doors and push and shove each other to get on....kind of oblivious to the bike and the fact that I only have one door when I can get on, as opposed to the ten or twelve that they could, logistically, use. Luckily, a guy my age helps me lift the bike up and direct it towards the back of the carriage, gently shooing the grandmas and grandpas out of the way: "Careful! Dirty!" (an old cry that market porters used to yell to get the oblivious out of their way.) I check my ticket. The only space that they have for bikes on this train is in the back. The ticket office has put me in the front carriage. Again.

I don't mind sitting in the back with the bike; aside from one Galician railman who's deadheading the trip down Jaen, I have the entire section to myself. The Galician and I try to swap conversation, but give up soon after; he doesn't seem to have an ear for foreign accent and his accent is so heavily tinged with galego speech that it takes me a couple of seconds to register what I think it was he said.

And so it goes all the way down to Jaen. And I pull out the camera and take some pictures of wind farms situated cheek-by-jowl with fifteenth-century windmills, the kind Don Quijote used to go after; take pictures of myself with the bike, noting how much looser the Gore-Tex pants are this year than they were last year. And then I pull out my journal and start to ponder: What did we talk about last year when we were travelling down south? All the pictures I have of us, we're all smiling and laughing and you can tell that everyone's just looking forward to being on the road. I craved silence before leaving, and I have it now; but what took the place of that silence before?

Almost gone
Mood:  happy
Topic: Planning!
Dani from Ciclos Delicias finally called last week to let me know that my new Ortlieb handlebar bag was in (only took, what, five weeks?) so I got that on today, after I picked the bike up from the old bike shop I used to work for. The Owner wasn't there. Either she wasn't there, or she was hiding. Either way, good for me; I've already told them one porky about teaching English outside of Madrid (which is really only a half-lie, when you think of it: I am teaching English -- I just didn't want them to know that I was as accessible as she might want.)
Only two more days before I go. I had a weird attack of The Lonlies in the kitchen last night as I was making soup, hanging out and generally enjoying the quiet that is so often lacking at our place. Seven days by yourself - even if they're seven days when you're going to be staying in hotels and not doing anything super-antisocial like sleeping in olive groves or something like that - is a lot of time by yourself. I just hope that I don't freak out halfway through, get the heebie-jeebies about being on my own or something like that.
Anyway, this time I can't back out. I have got THE PROJECT. And THE PROJECT dictates that I have to do it for real this time, that I can't fink out or back out. I have to do the entire route by myself.
I wonder how long it'll be before I start cursing out THE PROJECT.....?

I have been living in Madrid for FAR TOO LONG
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Rant!
Picture the scene: last Monday at 6 pm, heading home, I am rushing to try to beat a particularly fast red light on a particularly short street. I almost made it when BRAAAAAAAAAAP! Some idiot in an ice-blue Ford Focus lays on the horn. He does this as the light is turning yellow, meaning that he's basically pissed at me for preventing him from doing something illegal at a particularly dangerous intersection.
I drive. I know how irritating it is to wait. But I also know that if I sit here at this intersection with this Burberry-clad twit, at some point he's going to say something. I mean, hell, the guy's sitting at an intersection and he's white-knuckling the steering wheel. My heart is pounding, and the only thing I can think of is wrapping the bike around his neck, except that it would be a waste of a good bike. But I can't let this go unchallenged.
Then I see that, alongside the sidewalk, there's a space where I could launch myself from. I (somewhat ostentaciously) pick the bike up, smile at him, carry the bike over to the curb, wait for a moment for a space in the traffic flow....and then I turn around and blow a kiss to him, waggle my fingers goodbye, jump on the bike and RIDE LIKE HELL.
That dude either needs to drive less or drink more. Or trade the car in for a bike. I hope that he has at least one euphoric moment driving his car because, canned up in a vehicle, he's hardly living the TV-ad life of a car owner.
Oh yeah, I blew by him at the following red, too.