Long Day in Iberia…

Early morning mist as I head out onto the runway of Gibraltar Airport, to Spain and beyond...

My enjoyable stay in Gibraltar with John, Loredana and Jenny had come to an end… The open road was no longer whispering, but calling out loudly…! I had over 10 000km to cover in order to get up to Norway and back down into central Europe before the Northern winter would begin making itself felt, and by my reckoning, I had about six weeks to do it in…

A fond farewell from John Loudon, on the outskirts of San Roque...

After saying goodbye to Loredana, John and I got all my kit downstairs and loaded onto the Big Fella, and then together, rode out of Queens Quay and through the early morning traffic to the nearest service station, where I filled up. John had very kindly offered to ride with me to the outskirts of San Roque, and there we pulled off into a small lay-by and said our final goodbyes… I found it difficult to adequately express my gratitude for all the kindness he and Loredana had shown me during my stay with them… “Thank you” just didn’t seem enough to me… I had arrived there as a complete stranger, and left as a firm friend, feeling as though we had known each other for ages…

"Come on...! Come with us...! It'll be huge fun, and you get to sleep outside, like camping for people... And guys and chicks come to drool over you...!!"... The Big Fella urges Tiger to get on the road with him...

After many a handshake, and promises to stay in touch, we mounted up and headed back onto the highway… I watched John swing into a roundabout and head back to Gibraltar, while I headed on towards the turnoff to Jerez that would take me on to Seville and further to the north and west, and the Portuguese border. Traffic was light and I made good time riding up the A381, which runs directly through the Parque Natural de Los Alcornocales, home to the last remaining Iberian Lynxes in Spain. The road wound its way through a range of hills and down into the valleys between them, twisting and turning, but wide enough to maintain good speed through it all.

The bridge over the Guadalquivir River in Seville...

I had decided to stay away from the all the major cities, and had set my Garmin up to avoid all toll roads, having been “stung” by three of them in a 60 km stretch between Marbella and Gibraltar a few days before… I knew that you could zoom through Europe using all the major highways linking the larger cities, but this would keep me out of the countryside and the smaller towns and villages that I wanted to ride through. Getting in and back out of the bigger towns and cities was also proving a major headache for me, as I wasted far too much time finding my way through the mazes of streets and alleys, one way roads and roundabouts, and had too many arguments with Gi-Gi… (The Garmin Girl…!!)

I managed to skirt Seville, but got close enough to cross the massive suspension bridge over the Rio Guadalquivir (Remember Chris de Burgh’s “Spanish Train” …? The opening line goes:

“There’s a Spanish Train that runs between Guadalquivir and old Seville…

And in the dead of night the whistle blows, and people fear…

She’s running…still…!

Then they hush their children back to sleep,

Lock their doors and upstairs they creep,

Because it is said that the souls of the dead fill that train,

Ten thousand deep….”

Yeah… of course you do…!!)

Under bright blue skies, we set our sights for Portugal...

All along my route out of Spain, posters were displayed for the upcoming Bullfighting Extravaganza at the end of July...

From the highway, I could clearly see the huge Seville Cathedral, where Christopher Columbus lies buried… I gave some thought to him and his exploration of the New World… He left Spain in 1492, from the port of Huelva, near Cadiz, just 90km to the West of where I was now riding, almost 520 years later…! I got that “funny feeling” in my chest, just thinking about the history of this area… I would have liked to “pop in” and say “Howzit!” to the old fella, but I had bigger fish to fry today, and needed to get a few hundred kilometres under my belt before the sun got too hot… Seville is known as the “Frying Pan of Spain”, and it is not uncommon to have temperatures of over 40° Celsius here…

Nearly there...!!

The area north west of Seville is farming country, and in fact so is most of Spain… Massive plantation of Olive Trees lined the road for kilometres, and in between these were stands of Cork Oak, the trees that give up their bark so our wine bottles can be properly sealed…! Cattle and sheep grazed under these trees, and all around was peace and tranquility… The pace of life is definitely slower here… In many of the smaller villages I rode through, groups of men sat sipping wine or beer in the shade of the shop-fronts I assume they were meant to be tending… Many a glass stopped between table and mouth, as the men stopped to watch me ride past…

I stopped at Rosal de la Frontera to refuel, just shy of the Portuguese border. The service station was in the middle of nowhere by European standards, not another building or structure in sight… The place looked and felt deserted, but as I pulled up, a young man rushed out and actually filled the Big Fella’s tank for me…!! I knew there had to be at least one pump jockey in Europe, and I found him on the Spanish border…!!

Just inside Portugal, at the village of Vila Verde de Ficalho, Gi-Gi instructed us to turn onto a narrow little farm road… I know that I had programmed her to avoid all the main roads that might have tolls on them, but this was ridiculous…!! The road was tarred, but very narrow, just wide enough for one car… The growl from the Big Fella, coupled with Dire Straits booming in my ears, meant that there was no way I would hear another car coming from ahead of me… On a few occasions, we were forced to ride onto the grassy verge to avoid being flattened by oncoming maniacs in small vans… We stopped under the branches of a large oak tree, and had some words with our navigator, while I consulted my map… The Big Fella was all for getting back onto a wider road, but I was enjoying the scenery and decided to press on…

A Cork Oak, stripped of it's valuable bark... I expected the trees to be much bigger, but this is about the average size I found...

This part of Portugal, close to the Spanish border, seems to be lost in time… The hills are dotted with abandoned farmhouses and parts of stone boundary walls. The villages are tiny, and hardly qualify to be termed a “village”… But what a great place to ride…!! We passed through the little town of Pias and then got onto a better and wider road which took us into Moura. Here, Gi-Gi filed us, taking us right into the very centre of the old town, and then asking us to turn down a non-existent road… While we sat muttering to ourselves, a guy on a big Suzuki rode up and parked next to me… The baffle had been removed, and the noise in the small village square was deafening… The Big Fella thought the Portuguese Army had ambushed us, and was all for getting the hell away…

“Are you lost?” the guy said in heavily accented English…

“No, but the cow in this little box is…!” I said pointing to the GPS… “Do you know where the road to Evora is?” I asked…

“Si..! Follow me, I will take you to it… My name is Eduardo, by the way…”

I followed my new friend through a maze of alleyways, his bike making so much noise, that I could not hear Mark Knopfler’s guitar solo on “Telegraph Road”… He left me at the main junction leading out of town, and advised me to take the road up over the dam wall to the north of Moura…

“This is the biggest artificial lake in Europe… You will like the place very much…” were his final words to me…

He was right… The Barragem de Alqueva was indeed a huge dam, the water from which was used to irrigate millions of Olive Trees. It filled valleys for kilometres on end, and in some place had made island no larger than a football field, where groves of Olive Trees stood in perfect lines… Imagine having to take a boat out to harvest your Olives…?

It was almost midday, and I was still a long way from Guarda, the town I had set my sights on for today’s ride. It was almost 800kms from Gibraltar, and I wanted to get there by early evening. From Evora, we got onto the E802, a national highway that took us to Portalegre and on to Castello Blanco, where I stopped for a drink on the side of the road, and watched while huge slabs of Marble or Alabaster were moved into piles by an old fashioned derrick crane…

Tearing up the E802 on our way to Castello Blanco, and far away from the bigger cities like Lisbon...

I arrived in Guarda after 5.00pm, and began looking for a hotel with internet… The first few I stopped at were far too expensive, so I moved on to a third, where the clerk refused to make any attempt to speak English, and blabbered away in what might have been Portuguese, but could have been Chinese for all I understood… Apart from Eduardo from Moura, not a single person I spoke to tried to understand what I was saying… As soon as I opened my mouth and spoke a few words of English, they would shake their heads and walk away… This attitude got me a little frosted, so opening my wallet wide enough for the clerk to see the wad of Euros I had in it, I gave him my biggest smile and said,

“No problemo…!! I’ll take my money back to Spain, where they try and speak a little English…!!” I know I was being a bit harsh, but I was tired, and frosted after my long day, and now it was about to get a few hours longer…

I turned on my heel, and a few minutes later, I was zooming out of Guarda, heading back to the Spanish border and the city of Salamanca, 160 kms away… The sun was still high, but I had been on the road for more than eleven hours since leaving Gibraltar, and my back and knees were aching… At the town of Villa Formosa on the Spanish border, I stopped to give Portugal one more chance… The hotel Lorenzo was even more expensive than those in the far bigger city of Guarda…! A mind-bending €80.00 for what seemed to be a two star hotel…!! No way, JosÄ—…!! I walked back to the bike, cursing myself for wasting time here, when I had already made up my mind earlier to ride into Spain… A guy in the parking area came over to see the bike, and in passable English, advised me to press on to Salamanca, where there was a far larger choice of hotels and hostels…

"Don't look now, but there's a big bastard bull behind us...!"

The sky was still blue, but the shadows were getting longer... At about 9.00pm, we zoomed past this sign at 150 kmh...

I got onto the Autovia Castilla, and lit the afterburners… We roared down the highway at 150 km/h, heading northeast, passing anything and everything we came across… The sun was setting and darkness was only a few minutes away when we rode into the outskirts of Salamanca, and began our search for a bed… The first place was full, the second place I stopped at assumed I was Rockefeller, and by now it was dark, and after 985 km, and 13 hours on the road, I was “well knackered”, as they say in the classics…

A police patrol car rode up alongside me as I was puttering down a quiet road, massaging my back and shoulders… The driver indicated that I should pull over, and wondering what was up, I entered a small parking area, and sat the bike while he and his colleague came over to the bike…

Sanctuary in Salamanca... The Hostal Misol...

“Ola Senhor! Babble, babble, babble Sud Africa…?” he said pointing to the flag on the windshield…

“Si… Sud Africa…! I don’t speak enough Spanish to have a conversation with you China, and I need to find a hotel before I fall over and sleep right here…!” I said…

“How much you want pay..?” he asked…

Ahh… Some English at last… “About €25.00…” I said hopefully…

His eyebrows took a hike up into his hairline while he digested this seemingly impossible offer… After a few minutes consultation with his mate, he pointed to their car and said…”You follow…!”

We rode into the very heart of Salamanca, and in a quiet street just up from the main traffic circle, he stopped outside a Hostel and pointed to the flight of steps leading through the archway…

“Maybe €25.00 here…!” he said… And then without another word, they rode off… I shouted my thanks to them, dragged myself off the bike and up the steps, and agreed to pay the €30.00 the clerk asked for… They also had Wi-Fi in the reception area, and after a hot shower in the tiny bathroom in my room, I tried once again to see if I could access my website…

No dice…!! The bloody hacker had done a better job than the last one in Burundi, and my laptop was not having anything to do with the GBWT site… I sent another mail to Allan to advise him of the hassles I was having, and then climbed the four flights of stairs to my room, fell onto the bed and thought about the next 800km I had to ride the next day…

I had missed the running of the bulls in Pamplona by one week, so decided to make a dash for Andorra, instead of spending the night there. By riding another 180km today, I was that much closer to Andorra, and rather than tootle through Spain, I felt that another big day on the road, would save me a day further up on the long haul to Norway…

With this in mind, my system shut down and I was asleep before my aching back and shoulders could raise any objections to my plans…

©GBWT 2010