April 18, 2013

Just a few things I had forgotten about camping:

– that the ground is very hard when the only thing between it and you is half-an-inch of foam matting

– that pitching your tent on the flight path from northern Europe to Malaga will keep you awake most of the night, as will pitching your tent a few hundred metres from the main Malaga to Madrid high-speed railway line

– pitching your tent overlooking a large inland salt lake will get you eaten alive by mosquitoes

After a restless night we were a bit slow making our getaway this morning. We face a dilemma today – we can cycle a similar distance to the last two days of around 45 kms to a camp-site or continue onwards and be committed to cycling over 80 kms to reach Moron de la Frontera. The sun is already very hot as we set off and so we decide to see how we go. The first part of the route is pretty energy sapping as it is hilly with a series of sharp ups and downs where we can’t really find our rhythm. Before we stopped for lunch the road had opened out onto longer more gradual climbs which felt a bit better, but maybe lulled us into a false sense of security because when we reached the decision time for whether to stop early or to carry on, we kept going. Needless to say, the next climb turned out to be the longest, steepest climb to date. I had to get off and push the bike more than once. We felt as though we were cooking in the sun. We stopped at a bar in the last village before Moron de la Frontera, which was 31 kms away. I interrogated the barman as to the terrain between us and our destination. Clearly ,this was a man who either had never been outside his village, had never ridden a bike or was just plain malicious. He assured me that the hills were less steep than the one we had just climbed. The next 10 kms were even worse. So much so that anybody standing at the side of the road as I passed by would have heard a diatribe about why every road in Spain has to go out of its way to bypass the valleys and wind its way to the highest point for no apparent reason.

Fortunately, the last few kilometres weren’t so bad, until we spotted Moron de la Frontera in the distance standing at the top of a hill (of course).  As we crawl into the centre of the town at 7pm a roadside thermometre shows the temperature to be 34 degrees. To add insult to injury when we watch the weather forecast later in a bar we see that we are in the hottest spot in Spain – at home the temperature is 18 degrees. Tomorrow is forecast to be even hotter here.