May 27, 2013

So the start of our longest day so far is not promising – black clouds and cold – unbelievable!

The one good thing is that the wind is in the same direction as it was yesterday and today we are turning from travelling southwards to eastwards so it won’t be straight in our faces. In fact, because the road twists and turns a lot we have the wind behind us for some of the time. As predicted we travel many kilometres without seeing a single soul, it is about 30 kilometres between each village along the road where, fortunately, we manage to find a bar each time to keep the fluid levels topped up. The clouds break up around mid-day and it turns into a perfect cycling day; the road has twists and turns, ups and downs, as well as some flat stretches and virtually no traffic.

We’re aiming for Fuente Obejuna, a place made famous by a classic written by Lope de Vega, published in 1619 telling of an actual historic event from 1476. As the place is famous we expect plenty of places to stay. On my map it shows a little blue tent symbolising a camp-site, however, the locals tell us that there hasn’t been a camp-site for years. It turns out that there is one hotel which when we arrive is full of students, but, fortunately, the lady who runs it is more of a Sybil Fawlty than a Basil and is very helpful. She lets us have a room in the private part of the building – phew, we didn’t want to cycle any more today. Surprisingly ,there was very little to see in the town and all the shops and bars we closed, except one. So, we did manage to get something to eat before returning to the hotel to find about 30 students sitting down for dinner – looks like we could have eaten at the hotel but I’m not sure we would have wanted to after last night’s experience of eating with the ‘old folk’.

The students turn out to be from different parts of South America, Peru, Columbia and Ecuador, studying Mining Engineering at the University of Sevilla. The area we are in is rich in copper, tin and gold apparently and the students are here for six months to study mining techniques. Breakfast is mayhem with about 30 students and us all trying to eat, pay up and leave at the same time. It looks like we were really lucky that the owner was so helpful as she could just have easily said she was full and turned us away last night.