May 10, 2013

Another day dawns, but this one is completely different – we have sunshine!

We set out all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and even being unable to find the road we want out of the place, (loads of new roads have been built around the town that are not on our map) doesn’t dampen our spirits. We end up doing an extra 6 kilometres that we didn’t need to but eventually we’re on our way.

The start of the road is great, real pay-back for lots of climbing yesterday, as we speed downhill for about 9 kilometres. It doesn’t last though and we start the long, slow climb back up again for about the same distance. The problem with a succession of hills is that it takes an hour or two to climb up and about 10 minutes to run down the other side and so it feels like you are climbing the whole day long. The road is a fairly busy main road but is still good for cycling as it has a nice wide hard shoulder for the bikes. We’re aiming for Chaves, a large town about 10 kilometres from the border with northern Spain. As we pass through various towns and villages along the road we see loads of places we could have stayed if we had carried on yesterday instead of taking a short day, including two camp-sites that aren’t on the map. Typical; you can bet if we had risked it and carried on we wouldn’t have been able to find anywhere.

This area seems a lot more built-up than the rest of Portugal we have travelled through. Up until now we have been in open countryside most of the time with the occasional populated area, but today we never seem to be far from houses. We do arrive in Chaves after a fairly tough day, very hot and with renewed saddle sores. We’re not complaining though as cycling on a sunny day is a hundred times better than cycling is the miserable drizzle we’ve had for the past couple of days. We spend half-an-hour looking for the camp-site, which, as always, is kilometres up an obscure track which wouldn’t look out-of-place scaling the Matterhorn. It does have WiFi, but I don’t have any battery left as I used it all last night in the tent writing up the previous two days’ journals. Hence, I’m in the shower block with my computer plugged in the hair-dryer socket updating and getting eaten by mosquitoes.  In a minute I’ll pop down to sit outside the Reception Office on a granite block shaped like a toadstool in the dark to use the WiFi connection – the only place it works apparently.