May 20, 2016

Today turns out to be a day of extremes.  When we set off in the morning the temperature is already 27 degrees – crikey, it’s going to be hot.  This is the day of our long run – it is roughly 100 kilometres to Sanlucar de Barrameda through deserted wetlands (three times I have written fenland and three times it has changed it to Finland, arrhhh).

The road out of town is a version of cycling hell – a fairly narrow main road with huge lorries travelling in both directions.  It feels extremely dangerous and we can’t understand why there are so many, until we reach the biggest industrial estate ever.  Fortunately, once past the industrial estate everything calms down again and we’re travelling on a small, quiet road into an area of flood land.  The only people we see (for the whole day) are snail hunters.  The Spanish are as keen on eating snails (caracoles) as the French and now is the right time of the year.

The road is running alongside the river through an area criss-crossed with drainage ditches.  It is all completely flat, with most of the land used as paddy fields for growing rice.  Here and there are stretches of open water.  On one small lagoon we spotted a flock of flamingos, spoonbills, glossy ibis, black winged stilts and avocets, amoungst other birds.  As we pass the paddy fields they are full of egrets and squacco herons.  This part of the day was the cycling heaven bit.

It didn’t last, after about 20 kilometres of cycling in total, the road suddenly ended to be replaced with a hard-packed earth track full of ruts and covered with gravel.  Amazingly, this is a proper road, shown on the road map and with proper road signs and a road number.  Surely it can’t go all the way to Sanlucar de Barrameda, can it?

At 70 kilometres and several hours later we throw in the towel and have to divert away from the river to Lebrija, a town about 10 kilometres away.  The temperature is now 38 degrees, the hottest day of the year so far according to the evening news.  Once we arrive, exhausted, we are turned away by the first two hotels we come to as they are full.  We do eventually, an hour later, find ourselves a brand new, super swanky hotel.  So new that the WiFi is not yet up and running, which is probably just as well – I haven’t got the energy to write a post anyway.

Tomorrow we will complete the run to Sanlucar de Barrameda where we will take a day off and, hopefully, go on a boat trip into the Doñana nature reserve.