Word Of Mouse

So, there we were in Potes, looking at the map, and suddenly an idea started to form in our brains. The road to Fuente De, shown on the road atlas as coming to a dead end there, was revealed on the fine scale as being at the bottom of an unmetalled road up over the mountain. Wouldn't it be great to take the bike up and over this pass? Plus it would break the climb up into two days. And be a chance to ride the vaunted cable car up into the heights of the Picos from Fuente De.

A certain amount of discussion ensued about the relative natures of "dirt road" (the Spanish description on the map) and "cart track" (the corresponding English translation). We eventually decided that the only way to resolve the question was to ask someone. Enquiries in Potes were inconclusive- we found someone who said it was very steep, and someone else who vaguely remembered having been over it as a boy. What the hell, we thought: Hannibal took elephants over the Alps, so we ought to be able to take a tandem over a mountain track.

The decision having been taken, we set off the following day to ride the 23km to Fuente De, a climb of around 750m, and arrived there in mid afternoon to find a friendly and impressively bearded man running a lovely mountain campsite complete with gnome garden. We stayed there a couple of nights, entranced by the beauty of the mountains, and had the good fortune to fall into chatting with a couple of Dutch tourists, conversation which continued into the night over beer and food.

Our day walking up in the mountains of the Picos was spectacular, but our plans to hike around a loop walk had to be abandoned in the face of increasingly Welsh-looking mist and drizzle. Not having a compass, and finding the trail poorly waymarked, we turned regretfully back. Of course soon thereafter the clouds appeared to lift from our side of the mountain, but it was still the right decision to have taken. We consoled ourselves with the views from the top cable car station out over the valley of Fuente De, including in the distance the track that we would be taking the following day. We returned to base camp, and spent a happy hour constructing a harness out of an Ortlieb pannier rucksack converter, two bungee cords, string, gaffer tape and a stick. The resulting contraption, we hoped, would allow me to tow Bramble up the track, taking most of the weight while Ali could walk beside, guiding, pushing and encouraging on the handlebars.

The following day dawned: the cheap digital watch we had bought in Potes duly waking us around half past six ready for an eight oclock departure. Soon after eight, I took up the harness, and we set off for the 800m climb up the track, me out in front carthorse-like and Ali steering. The harness generally worked like a charm (although we found that we had to attach it to the handlebars, rather than the front pannier racks which tended to produce a levitation of the front wheel and consequent steering difficulties for Ali). The chief problem was lack of traction on the steeper sections: lots of small rolly stones making it very hard to exert enough pull. However we made good progress, with plenty of stops for photogenic bovines along the way, and made the top in time for lunch. A group of fit mountain bikers, appearing in a cloud of sweat half an hour or so later after what must have been a tough climb, were startled to see our road tandem leaning nonchalently against the signpost announcing the top.

From the top it was a fabulous view over the peaks of the central Picos. After lunch and a cup of tea at the highest point of our trip so far, we dismantled the harness and cautiously descended the far side (remember we were still running on our one and only spare back tyre, and tearing it would have been awkward). Once back on tarmac, we had a very welcome hour or so of mostly freewheeling out of the Picos and down to the next campsite at Boca, feeling the pain in our lower calf muscles.

Boca is the original one-horse town: one main street, a bar and not much else. According to the map it was beside a lake. After pitching the tent we rode out through the chilly evening air to look for it: it seems like the lake must at one time have reached Boca but now the level is much lower and must have been for a long while, with well established trees and bushes growing on what was once the lake bed.

The next day, we left the campsite at Boca (which was spartan but had immaculately clean sanitarios and plenty of hot water - these things are important), made a pit stop in Riano for breakfast (where we successfully ordered things without meat in) and cycled a long 67 mile day down to Leon. The hills gradually disappeared to the sides, the landscape flattened out and became increasingly arid. Despite this, it was still touch and go as to whether we would make it up the last hill to the Leon campsite: and in a touch of cruelness, the first sign to the campsite which promised that it was just 200m from the junction was closely followed by another saying it was actually 2km. We collapsed into the campsite, finding we were pitched next to another English couple on tour to Santiago on a pair of solo bikes including another Thorn. The husband came over and took a good look at our tandem. (Bramble, we find, is of major interest to three distinct population demographics: old buffers sitting outside pavement cafes, who never fail to yell out encouragement as we cycle past; men (almost always men) of a certain age, who given the opportunity come over and quiz us closely about intimate nerdy technical details - numbers of gears, the merits of hydraulic braking systems and the like; and lastly, small girls around six years old, who care not at all about gear ratios but favour us with wide-eyed stares as we pass).

Leon was well worth the visit. A major stop on many of the Caminos de Santiago, its trump card is a truly magnificent cathedral, very dark inside which shows off to advantage the luminously beautiful stained glass windows. We spent the morning doing the tourist thing, then reluctantly got down to the serious business of tracking down a new back tyre worthy of the name. Two of the three bike shops we tried were duds, but we struck gold in the last one. The owner spoke almost as much English as I do Spanish, which is to say almost none, but luckily we could both speak bike. I emerged triumphantly clutching a Finnish-made tyre rated to 72 psi: the highest pressure rating I have ever seen on a bike tyre. We celebrated with an couple of indifferent and expensive pizzas before swapping tyres, taking the opportunity to fit new rear brake blocks at the same time. (The old ones were not worn out but had almost no braking effect: when we took them off the rubber appeared very hard and shiny. Perhaps we cooked them coming down a hill).

We left Leon in the late afternoon for a hot and tiring and rather dull 40 mile ride to the next campsite. The only high point of this ride, metaphorically speaking, was caused by getting lost among the tangle of industrial estates south of Leon: as we passed through a small village, a middle aged lady in a floral blue dress saw us peering hopelessly at our inadequate map and came over to help. Other people saw what was happening and came over to help too, including a man on a moped and a group of teenage girls. We asked in our best Spanish which was the way to the next town on the map, which produced several minutes of fast, earnest discussion before the moped rider gave voice to the concensus opinion. During this discussion, the telephone rang at least twice in the house of the first lady, who scampered off to answer it each time and managed to return almost immediately: we imagined her saying "Go away! I'll call you back! there are a couple of crazy Eeenglish outside!". We followed his advice as best we could (which at least got us past the autoroute and the railway). The first lady (whom Ali suspected might just possibly be the village gossip)absolutely would not let us leave until she had filled at least one of our bottles, preferably as many more as she could lay hands on, with fresh mineral water from a bottle: this was very welcome!

The next day was another toughie, 67 miles on to Puebla de Sanabria. (We have decided that days in excess of 50 miles are called mustoes in honour of the heroic Ann Mustoe, a 52-year-old widow who realized her dream of cycling round the world and wrote about the 12000 mile journey in her book, modestly entitled A Bike Ride, which is well worth reading). Beyond La Baneza the countryside started to take on more and more of a desert-like appearance, despite frequent evidence of human activity: we saw almost no one, and the road headed straight as an arrow across the flat scrubby plains, mile after mile without bends, towards distant blue mountains that moved imperceptibly closer as the day wore on. We joined the N525 at Rio Negro: this road now runs parallel to a much newer autoroute, the A52, and consequently has next to no traffic on it. It rose up and down in a series of shallow hills and valleys, still straight: at one point we could see the next ten miles of our road stretched out before us in a line to the horizon, shimmering in the heat. I always had a fantasy about crossing the deserts of western America on a motorbike - despite the fact that all my knowledge of what this must be like comes from cinema, I imagine that northwestern Spain must look quite similar.