Word Of Mouse

We came off the ferry back into Spain on another Sunday afternoon, remembering to put our watches forward an hour as we did so. Of course, nowhere was open to buy food. Still, we thought, we could probably buy some at the campsite supermarket when we arrived.

Off we pedalled past large groves of orange trees, looking beautiful and lush against the dry red soil. After a couple of hours, we arrived at our campsite in Lepe. Not only did it not have a supermarket, it did not even have a campsite... yet again our map had led us astray. I attempted to ask a local who was observing us and our bike with close interest, but it turned out he could not speak... I had asked perhaps the only mute person in Lepe.

We did eventually track down a campsite, down by the beach, and a most nasty sort of doghole of a campsite it was too: expensive, dirty and almost eerily deserted. Our only food option was to bike on further into the nearby beach town of Playa de la Antilla and find something to eat there. At this point another feature of life in Southern Spain became clear. No-one here even dreams of eating anything in the evening before 9pm, and usually not until much later. Two very hungry tandem riders had to sit on the beachfront watching the sun go down, slowly, and the hour hand of the watch creep round, sloooowly...

Finally, and against all probability, 9pm came around. We bolted back for the restaurant, which had now actually turned its lights on and was full of waiters watching football. We sat down. I tried to convey to the waiter the fact that I was vegetarian, and I really thought that I had managed to do it. At least my meal, when it came, did not have ham in it (unlike a lot of Spanish food) but it did have tuna mixed in. I decided that I had done everything I could reasonably do to avoid meat, and forced it down despite its fishiness. Ali's meal didn´t arrive for a long time...

The final insult from that campsite was finding that its apology for a supermarket did not even open the following morning at the time advertised. We had to pack up and set off hungry back along the road to Lepe. We found a supermarket open there and had an emergency breakfast feeding frenzy.

Thus fortified, it was onward towards Huelva. Not a hugely long ride, it should have been a matter of an hour and a half, two at the outside. Partway along the route, the road crossed a canal, with an inviting looking service road running alongside. I stopped the bike, and we looked at each other. Little needed to be said. Down we went, off the main road and along the canalside. Nice and smooth, a bit twisty and turny, not quite as direct as the map would have had it but still very beautiful: passing through pine forest on either side. All was going very well until suddenly the canal found itself quite unable to dodge a steep hill and opted to plunge beneath it instead through a pipe. Our service road shot directly up the hill and on reaching the top turned into several dirt tracks, none of which seemed to show much inclination to descend and rejoin the canal on the far side. Below us we could see the towpath and the glinting waters of the canal as it emerged from the hillside.

The solution was obvious to minds as keen as ours. What could be simpler than to go sideways off the track and down to the canal through the bushes and trees: it did not look all that far. We wheeled Bramble over dense beds of pine needles, over a tumbledown wire fence (quite easy so far), down a steep bank (getting a bit more difficult here), through a couple of rosemary bushes (bloody tough going now, but at least we smelt nice) and eventually came to a kind of deep trench eroded in the bank. Ali here now. At this point Malc went on to ínvestigate´. As he reappeared red faced i asked him how it looked, but before he could reply also reminded him to consider that there was actually no going back... (over to Malc again) The only thing to do was to take off all the bags (getting thoroughly scratched by thistles in the process), take them one by one down the steep scramble to the towpath, then return and (wo)man-handle the bike over the trench and down to join them. All this took at least another half hour, and all our limited remaining breakfast energy.

Finally we were down and reloaded the bike, and set off again. The canal continued to twist and turn but the cycling was relatively easy. An hour later, we finally emerged onto the dual carriageway that would soar us over the river and straight into the heart of Huelva, having cut off a corner of the route and thereby saved us some distance, at least. Oh, the best laid plans... the way to the bridge was via an autoroute, forbidden to bicycles (and presumably by extension tandems too). The sole solution was to go "around the top" of the large river estuary on which Huelva stands, a detour of probably a further twenty miles (and which, coincidentally, would take us back almost to exactly the point at which we had first left the main road to join the canal, all those hours ago).

By the time we reached Gibraleon, at the apex of this loop`round to the north, we had had enough of cycling for the day and elected to find a hostal to stay in for the night. For once, that day, luck was on our side and we found what appeared to be Gibraleon´s sole hostal without difficulty: the friendly manageress waved us in, and did not bat an eyelid at the prospect of us wheeling our dusty bike down her clean corridors to the small yard at the back.