Salamanca - Seville: Gateway to Africa

Seville makes me wonder if I'm still in Europe all the time. There are palm trees everywhere, many buildings are decorated in an Arabic style, and empty spaces don't get covered with grass and weeds but just remain dirt in the burning sun.
The atmosphere here is also markedly different from Pamplona and Salamanca. The place is more cosmopolitan and touristy. I even hear groups of people speaking Dutch with a Brabantic accent on benches in the parks! Also, I see some immigrants here. It is surprising how few immigrants you see in Spain that are recognizable as such. There are almost no black people, and people from Latin America or North Africa have a mediterranean look anyway and are usually very integrated into Spanish society.

I'm taking two days off from riding here to enjoy the city and prepare for the great crossing into Morocco. I'll have to get all the bike parts I think I'll need and book some accomodation for the first days there. I'm nervous about it.

But I'm still in Spain, so let's talk about that first. I managed to meet some interesting people in Salamanca after all. One was a Brazilean who said that one should not go into Morocco on his own, because it is just too poor and messy. Certainly not on a bicycle! And that guy is from Brazil himself... Happily there was also a Moroccan guy who debunked most of his stories and told me that my plan is totally awesome.
I started to see that restaurant culture in Spain is different from at home. In The Netherlands you go to a restaurant for the atmosphere, for the luxury of being served. In Spain you go to a restaurant to get fed. The restaurants are cheap, the service is quick and no-frills, and you see many people going there alone.

Before leaving Salamanca I changed the chain on my bike. Following the teachings from the wereldfietser.nl crowd, I replace the chain once before replacing the chain and the cassette together. The hostel attendant noticed me and fell totally in love with my bike. He said he'd ridden a bike from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia (in the Tierra del Fuego, the very south of South America) once. Unfortunately he'd sold the bike there before flying home.


Leaving Salamanca can be accomplished via a car-free bike path that, even though it is painted to have two lanes, is barely wide enough for just my loaded bike. Once you get out of the city, the landscape is gently bellowing pastures separated by stone walls. Britons must feel at home here as in the Basque country. Later, as we get closer to the mountains of the Sistema Central, the ground becomes rockier and it gets to look like this:

 I reached the mountains near Béjar, where I had this nice view from a crossroads:

I looked for a campsite in Hervás. No less than three campsites there, but only one was still open, and it was an awful holiday resort. So I checked in at the Albergue de la Plata, a simple private rural hostel, 15 euros for pilgrims, 20 euros for worldly travellers. Sadly no sign of the mother of a speedskating friend who is doing a pilgrimage to Santiago around there. The owner was insistent on calling each other by each other's first names.

The next day I was going to cross the Sistema Central. The Salamanca - Sevilla motorway as well as the old main road go through a gap in the mountains, but I wanted to avoid the nasty motorized traffic by taking the Puerto de Honduras, a mountain pass at no less than 1437 meters above sea level. It starts right from the hostel from where I have to climb 600 meters. For the first bit, I rode through a chestnut forest, but the oaks took over quickly. It got ever thinner towards the top. Occasionally I was cheered by walkers as I was hammering on my pedals, grinding my teeth trying to make it up there without shifting down to my inner chainwheel. A 27-year-old male should not have to use a fucking 22 on a paved road, right!?
High up I think I could notice the air getting thinner. I had gone into the clouds, and sometimes the mist turned into a slight drizzle. Happily, it was not so bad that I had to put away my phone, so I could keep a log of my speeds in the climb and descent. At the top, there is again no sign with the name of the pass and the altitude. The Spanish are such slobs. I took a picture nevertheless, but this picture from the descent is more impressive:

On the terraces that you can se there, people grow cherries. I can hardly imagine that agriculture on such difficult terrain is still profitable, and perhaps that's why they're trying so hard to push their fruit on tourists as productos tipicos that cost five times too much.
As you can see, the pass road is steep and winding here and I have some good fun blazing down like a motorcyclist with the towering wind roaring around my helmet. Unfortunately, in the last kilometers, I get stuck behind a car.

I enjoyed the Puerto de Honduras so much that I'd like to do another pass that day. The Michelin map shows a Puerto de Piornal at  1269 meters on the other side of the Valle del Jerte. After having lunch on a cherry terrace with a view, I set out to climb that one. Though it is almost 200 meters lower in altitude, I have to climb 800 meters this time to get there.
The first part to the village of Valdastillas is steep with lots of hairpins, finally forcing me to use that 22 chainwheel and/or stand up on the pedals. Sweat is flowing down my body in streams. After Valdastillas the slope gets more gentle and I can manage the rest of the climb in a comfortable seated position. In the village of Piornal, at the local fountain, I encounter a man who worked for Philips in Eindhoven for seven years. He assures me in Dutch that the water is really suitable for drinking.
From there the road gains the last 100 meters to the top of the pass very gently, vals plat, and the top is again unmarked. I am looking forward to a speedy downhill again, but a sign setting a speed limit of 40 kph with the message "Firme en mal estado" ("pavement in bad state") strips me of my illusions there. On the other side of the pass there is the Vera region, which is a popular holiday destination for the Spanish, but doesn't look so special to me. A big rainshower starts pouring down on me and I quickly find a nice wild camping spot by the EX-392 road from Jaraiz de la Vera to Navalmoral. It looks like this:

I'd anticipated to visit the Monfragüe national park the next day, but I´d gotten carried away in my mountainous adventures and now I was still 50 km away from Monfragüe. Happily the roads leading me there were nice and quiet and most of all flat, running next to an irrigation canal. I reached the park by 13:00. Crossing the mountains and having a somewhat lower altitude really changes agriculture. No more pastures now, but fields of peppers and tobacco. Olives are also appearing for real now, while I had been seeing some small personal-use olive orchards already since Pamplona.
The national park is absolutely awesome. There are quartz layers that the Tiétar and Tagus rivers have eaten their way through, creating spectacular rocks. And on these rocks the birds of prey gather like mosquitos on bare skin in a Scottish summer. I wonder if the insane numbers are only achieved by feeding them. My compact camera is not really suited for wildlife photography, but this should give an impression of how many vultures you saw there:

I also managed to spot some deer drinking from the almost-dry river Tiétar. After having lunch by the visitors' centre, I climbed the hill to the Monfragüe castle, with my cycling shoes with cleats under them:

I stopped for the night at Torrejón el Rubio, where many MTB riders using the long weekend for a multi-day trip were seeking accomodation.

After Monfragüe, there was one more sightseeing day in the plans, for the city of Trujillo. I left Torrejón before the supermarket had opened, and rode to Trujillo along the main (and only) road as quickly as possible to shop there before I got hungry. In Trujillo I could only find a small grocery shop of an elderly lady. I think my full day's shopping there was half of their income that day.
Trujillo is a small town that happens to have some impressive buildings because some conquistadores came from there and spent a portion of their fortune in their home town. There is also a really massive castle dating from Moorish times. I had a coffee on the lively Plaza Mayor, picknicked lunch by the castle walls, and then explored the narrow town alleyways, including this plaza with olive trees:

After Trujillo, I rode further via Ibahernando to a really nice camping spot on a terrace along a small forgotten single-track road.

After that day, sightseeing was over and it was time for utility riding to Sevilla, enjoying the silent remoteness of Extremadura underway. The silence and remoteness did not really materialize though. Though Extremadura is known as poor and sparsely populated, it seems that the rural economy is happily humming on and the federal government and the EU are investing heavily in regional development. Those investments usually take the form of improving road accessibility, and that in turn means that every back road is gradually being upgraded to a race track where a jumbo jet could land, complete with dislevel crossing and onramps. It makes you feel unwelcome as a cyclist and the trucks roaring by at 100 kph are tiring.
Sometimes the road works mean that a road is closed. There is a diversion signposted, but those detours are usually too big for a bike, and sometimes point to motorways that are just as illegal for bikes in Spain as they are at home. So then I have to push through the gravel and over the foundation layers of the road surface. On this picture you can see how insanely wide they make roads that have maybe one car every five minutes. I'm sure in India they would paint 4 lanes on this and there would be 6 vehicles next to each other in actual use:

Looking back, in the northern provinces of La Rioja and Burgos, the sense of a countryside left behind by modern times was much stronger than in Extremadura. There, regional development works would also turn into laughable forms of flogging a dead horse: I saw such a beautifully built-out asphalt road ending at a roundabout that had only one way to get off: the continuation of the road as an unpaved track full of bumps and holes.
In Bordeaux, in the launderette, a young man approached me, and he told me about his work as a bike mechanics' teacher and handed me a little leaflet in French. I couldn't really see what it was then, but when I took the time to figure out the French, it turns out to be a low-budget magazine about cycling, created with an old-school stencil machine, full of the joyful weirdness of an underground scene. There is a blog post referring to it here. It also includes an article about cycling in Extremadura in which they refer to the few activities of the lethargic Extremadurans as "les frissons d'une société gelée. Ou les ultimes convulsions d'un corps déja mort." I can't say I recognize that, even though the dependence on federal and EU funds might make you say that they are the shocks going through a body that's on artificial respiration.

Unexpectedly, I saw some rice fields near Villar de Rena. I didn't even know that rice grows anywhere in Europe! (though I should have been able to trivially deduce that from the existence of risotto):

 I was struck by a rainshower 10 km after Zalamea de la Serena, and quickly pitched my tent on the edge of an olive orchard against a forest, fearing that it would not get dry for the night anymore. It did clear up though, happily, so I could cook a meal by my tent.

The next day I rode from there to El Pedroso in the mountain range of the Sierra del Norte. The landscape started as the typical  Extremaduran alternation of dehesas, extensive pastures with oak trees, and fields with crops on the flatter fertile parts. After that came the Sierra del Norte, more hills than mountains but always steep, covered in deciduous forests. After lunch I passed by a sign that I was entering Andalucía - another milestone on my way south!
In El Pedroso, it was time for a shower after two nights of wild camping, and I at a bar asked if there was a place to spend the night there. Two men started to explain to me about there being two hotels, a cheap one and an expensive one. Their Spanish was incomprehensible to me though, unusually much so. They eventually offered to take me there, and we walked there together. Any attempt by me to start a friendly conversation (surprisingly possible in a language you don't speak) were thwarted by something that I figured was either an invitation to drink together or asking for a tip, and I started to feel somewhat uneasy. We eventually arrived at a hotel, and though the men assured me it was the cheap one, it looked pretty expensive. The two guys were now explicitly asking me for money, and I figured I'd give them a tip, because they'd taken me to a place where I could sleep, hadn't they?
But indeed, it was expensive as hell for Spanish terms, and because I really had to go to the toilet I didn't look further and booked there anyway. The next morning I fully used the luxurious breakfast though!
The whole affair is of course no great disaster, but it makes me wonder if I'm strong enough against this kind of thing. It will probably be the rule rather than the exception in Morocco.

The next day, on the heavy breakfast, and aided by a net 700 meter descent, I rode to Seville like a breeze. On the southern slopes of the Sierra del Norte, orchards with citrus fruits appear. In the flats of the Guadalquivir valley, I see fields with what I think is cotton:

The roads in the Guadalquivir valley are big, and I just ride as fast as I can to get it over with soon. I reach the edge of Seville at 13:15, have lunch, and check into the hostel around 15:00.

So now I'm preparing for Africa. People say different things about Morocco, but many say that some locals will harass tourists and rip them off, especially in the touristy cities and the places where Europeans enter Morocco. Will people just let you ride your bike, or will they stop you and make you crazy offering all kinds of shit, making you so tired that you'll want to leave after just half a day?
The bike at least needs a new rear tire, and I'd like to have some extra spare brake pads and water desinfectant too.

Before heading to Morocco, I'll ride to the delta of the Guadalquivir, where the Doñana national park is situated. After that, I'll ride to the ferry in two days, take it, and ride to Chefchaouen in two days. So if I don't change my plans, and everything works out, I'll be writing my next blog post from Chefchaouen, Morocco, Friday next week!

As for the route, I sadly forgot to turn on GPS tracking the first two days, notably also missing the mountain passes. The rest:


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