Liza and I have been on the road for eight days now and even though we still have five weeks to go, I already want to do this again. I am already planning the next bicycle tour - to Montana to visit Benton? New Zealand? Canada? Japan?
So much has happened that I¨m not sure how to get into it. I feel like it will all come out garbledygook. Liza informs me that 9 out of 10 people don´t read these things anyways - they skim them. I guess I´m the 1 in 10 then, but I´ll try to do a bulletpoint for the rest of you.
DAY ONE
We leave the Plana, Ravi, Sandy, Kaimana, Ravi´s folks, and the comforts of home and head down the hill to Denia with our bikes fully loaded. We plan on leaving at noon but wind up leaving 5PM - a tendency for delay and slow movement that we have kept to well, I´d say. We made it down the hill to Denia (about 15 minutes) before taking our first break. For Horchata. You can´t start a journey from Denia without getting an Horchata road soda. On the first day we got lots of thumbs up and smiles from passersby, lots of ay-yay-yays when we told them where we were headed. Having little idea where we were going we found ourselves on a bike road lined with fruiting orange and lemon trees! We camped outside of the town of Pego on a hillside that is in the midst of debeautification in the form of huge housing complexes that look like prisons when set against that landscape and the more traditional housing of the area. That night, perched up on our hill above the valley, we were approached by a fox who wanted our dinner and wouldn´t go away. (More on that story below if you care to hear it).
DAY TWO
We ride through Pego, stopping to pick up a map of the Valencia provence and filling up our water at the town fountain (fuente). At this point we did not understand how civilized Spain would prove to be. In every town, no matter how remote, there are public fountains that are either supplied by the municipality or from underground springs. Any bar or restaurant is more than happy to have you use their bathroom, even if you aren´t there to eat or drink. Our morning ride was slow up gentle hills inside of a river valley whose river had packed up and left years ago. It has not rained here in half a year. At all. Until this day. In Beniramma, we followed a steep hill down to their fuente to refill water. It was spectacular. Spring fed with a large 2 foot deep pool area for washing clothes. These towns have changed very little over the last few hundred years. Everyone you see is old or very young because all the young folks have packed up and left for the city. The Spanish government is experimenting with paying young couples to stay in these towns to keep them populated. And they give them housing as well. Outside of Beniramma it began to sprinkle a little - completely unexpected for us - we had packed our rain stuff at the bottoms of our packs figuring we wouldn´t need them before Belgium. We lay under a Carab tree and I passed out for two hours. When I woke up, I wasn´t feeling well. We got back on the bikes and rode several more hours until the sun started to set and we pulled off the road and headed for a ruin at the top of the hill to the right of our road. We stashed our bike in a ruin lower on the hill to keep them safe from the rain (that never came) and lugged all our stuff to the top of the hill where we could catch a better breeze since it was still around 80 degrees at 9 PM. Campmaster LJ put together a meal in the time it took me to setup the tent and soon we were mouwing down on pasta with tuna. Liza has been an unbelievable backcountry cook. Fast and delicious is her specialty. We stashed our food stuffs on the roof of the ruin to avoid another fox run-in.
DAY THREE
I woke up sick. We made our way off our hill after a light breakfast and were spotted by the farmer whose land we had camped on without permission. He paid us little mind and continued planning the day with his friend after a sideways ¨buenos dias¨ casually tossed our way. We rode out and it was hot. We got to a reservoir that even Liza wouldn´t swim in. We ate lunch in an olive grove after narrowly avoiding getting mowed down by a tour bus coming around a curve in the road. And as we reached the end of our patience with the heat, we pulled into Castello de Rugat and stumbled upon the next surprise Spain had to offer - free municipal pools in almost every town. We were able to stash our bikes in the pool´s boiler room/storage for broken things and take full on showers in the locker room before jumping into the crystal pool water (which was even warm because it was that hot). Liza turned to me at a certain point and said that everyone around us was speaking Valenciano and she couldn´t understand a word of it. That was a trip to have ridden three days on a bike and made it to a part of Spain that spoke a completely different language. As we lef tthe pool and made it further into town, I spotted huge solar arrays on the roofs of the largest buildings in town. This town was really cool - an even blend of tradition and the future. The present was left out of the equation for the most part. We went to the market store for fruits and veggies. Here in Spain you don´t pick out your own produce. You wait in line and then get waited on by the store owner. You tell her what you would like and they pick it all out for you. Then we go to the bread store for bread and pastries. They were impressed by our journey and gave us a couple of free extras. That night we rode late and found ourselves in the difficult situation of not having a great place to stay and not having much light left to find a decent place to stay. We rolled into Beniganim after sunset when only the sun´s reflected light was left. As discreetly as is possiblt when you have 40 pounds of gear strapped to your bikes we made our way to the outskirts of this industrial blue collar town where we happened upon some olive groves. We snuck in, found a cutaway spot and camped their as quietly as we could.
Wait. What happened to the bulletpoint format? I´m running out of time so I´m just going to tell the fox story and save new stories for next time including how we wound up in the home of strangers and had pasta dinner with Erica, her mother, and her two sons Jonathan and Esteban, all about the city of Alarcon, and my favorite part so far - Spain´s equivalent to the Grand Canyon that we pretty much accidentally stumbled upon.
THE FOX
We found our spot. It was up on a hill where we could catch more breeze just below a huge, ugly new housing development partially finished and possibly abandoned. There was one strip of paved road with cul de sacs on either end that we had to push our bikes to through orange fields along a rocky road. We pitched our tent, took all our stuff out, and started eating our dinner of leftovers as the sky suddenly turned a pinkish crimson. Honestly, we looked away for a moment and everything changed. Our view was deep and wide across a huge valley of orange, lemon, and olive fields to the mirror-mountains on the other side of ours. A mine stared blankly back at us from 8 km away. Just after nightfall as I was shovelling potatoes into my mouth, Liza said with headlight on, pointing a little ways down the darkening road, öh my god, Harold, what is that¨ First thing I saw was the flash of animal eyes in artificial light. Then slowly my eyes adjusted and more features became clear. It looked like a dog about 2 ft. off the ground with a long, slender body, a stout snout, and a long, bushy tail. And it was staring intently at us and step-by-step approaching us. We threw the first stone. The animal ran over to where the stone had fallen and sniffed around. Was it a fox? A coyote? Are there coyotes in Spain? CLearly it was used to people and VERY hungry. It turned from the stone and again approached. And again we threw a stone and again it ran over to smell out our offering. This animal, whatever it was, was not backing down, was not at all afraid of us, and had not gotten what it had come for. No more niceties. No more civilized attempts at negotiating the language gap between us. I picked up a nearby 2 x 4 and advanced on the animal quickly. It did not back down. I stopped. Fuck. Liza and I picked up rocks as fast as we could, throwing them at our intruder with the intention of hitting him in the darkness.All attempts to be discreet with our headlamp use to avoid being seen were gone now. It took a while to finally back him down and get him away to a safe distance. And then we were left with the question of what to do next. It was dark now and we had little idea of where we were. The descent on the rock road would be difficult. All of our stuff was already unpacked. Would he come back? Would he bring his friends with him? WHAT was it? FInally we decided to stay and were left with the remaining question of what to do with our food.We´ll keep it in the tent with us. But then if the pack of man-eating coyote/fox/chupacabras return, they´ll tear through the tent and through us to get to our stash of chocolate-filled croissants. And so it was decided that we would bury our food under rocks and the rest of our gear would be put under the watchful eyes of our trusty steeds - Le Petite Bleu and Benton Randall. The End.
