slowpuncture

Here's some of the bikes that we've seen around Longueira and Almograve. The old style motorbikes are becoming a rare sight now compared to how common they used to be. You also see quite a few chaps cycle slowly into town to sit down with their friends over an espresso or two. The bikes are works of art - all sorts of bits and pieces welded or bungeed on :) in one place we stopped, we saw a bike towing a trailer which was made out of a selection of front forks welded onto a metal cage. Job done! And, none of the push-bikers we've seen have worn helmets, maybe that's why we get a few funny looks when we're cycling around!

OK we haven't blogged for a while - we've actually finished stage one of our trip and are on chill mode in the Alentejo region of Portugal! Let's start to catch you up with what we did after Porto. This is a spot we camped at just outside a tiny seaside town called Torreira. Believe it or not all, the body of water you can see here is a massive inland estuary which stretches for miles and miles. The town you can see on the opposite shore is Aveiro, apparently Portugal's Venice! We were hoping to catch the ferry from Sao Jacinto to Barra across the tiny mouth of the estuary before camping that night, but we didn't get as far as we thought so this is our beautiful little spot. Seb's watching the sunrise over the mountains there. On the way up to the ferry we saw an absolute heap of training cyclists who were bombing it up and down this lovely long flat and straight road. Got a lot of shouts of encouragement from them which was nice! There were also a lot of fishermen and at every house there was a little sign up saying what sort of fish they had available for sale. The next day we cycled most of the 80 km to Figuera Da Foz with a broken spoke on Seb's bike. Unsurprisingly we didn't stop to take photos that day, even though we were cycling through a national park of pine forest in sand dunes! Luckily we found a bike shop that was open the next morning so we were sorted and ready to go by 10. Amazing!

Porto: Days - - (part 2) So we didn't do too much sightseeing in Porto - there were plenty of walking tours, port cellar tours, boat tours, bus tours, tram tours .. Any kind of tour! But we didn't do any and instead elected to wander around. We stumbled across all sorts of interesting streets and alleys, with hand washing stands outside and dogs everywhere. Even dead in the centre of the city, only a few minutes walk from really posh shops and swanky restaurants and hotels we would find what would appear to be incredibly poor areas with houses and streets in desperate disrepair. We did however take the advice of the tourist information and visit a photography museum, which was housed in a building which used to be the city prison. There were some very good, but distressing exhibitions of conflict and war photographers downstairs, but upstairs there was the most extraordinary collection of cameras - from the earliest box cameras to miniatures, and stereoscopics to spy cameras. Amazing! We did buy a bottle of port wine to take with us for the next few days cycling and got our pilgrim credencials stamped at the cathedral. We saw some fantastic azulejos in the train station and on houses and restaurants across the city. We visited the most fantastic bookshop called the Lello Bookshop where we weren't allowed to take photos but you should DEFINITELY google as it looks like a set from Harry Potter - and saw the Majestic Cafe, where you can get a 'Majestic' breakfast which, for €20, involves just about everything, up to and including a breakfast steak and glass of champagne. Needless to say we stuck with our all inclusive all you can eat breakfast. In a piece of happy coincidence we bumped into Zach again and Michael - a Polish guy we met in Fisterra. We gave ourselves one extra day to just chill out and get ready for the final push onward - make a route, and figure out a less stressful way out of the city!

Days - - Porto (part 1) Well the ride into Porto was probably the scariest bit of cycling we've done! Our simple national road merged with another similar road and before we realised we were on the side of a very busy and fast 3 lane highway! After peeling off that road at a petrol station we picked our way through lots of small inner city roads until we reached the centre of Porto! Already decked out for Christmas, Porto felt quite full on at first - especially after having a quiet few days since Vigo. We found the tourist information centre and they told us about a modern boutique style hostel called the Tattva near the beautiful old train station in the middle of the city. We didn't take any photos of the hostel (sillys!) but it was pretty cool - although the dorms were tiny you could hide yourself away in your bunk bed with a curtain like in the railway carriage scene in 'Some Like It Hot' - complete with light, fan and plug sockets. This privacy was especially welcome the first night where the guy in the bunk above Kate stumbled back in at 3am, somehow managed to get into his bunk and THEN proceeded to throw up. Delightful. One more bonus of the Tattva was the included breakfast, so after after 4 bowls of chocolate flakes, 5 bowls of cornflakes, 3 ham and cheese rolls, 5 rolls with jam and Portuguese quince marmalade, some more rolls with chocolate spread, lots of coffee and orange juice and a few fairy cakes we were about ready for the day (this level of breakfast would continue for the next 3 days!). Apart from a very big main promenade Porto is incredibly dense with old streets that are easy to get lost in and fascinating to walk around. Famous for exporting port wine the city is unsurprisingly full of bars and wine merchants - the record bottle we found cost 899 euros! The riverside is beautiful and packed full of restaurants and bars inside its very old harbour side buildings. We also stumbled across the food market and loaded up on fruit!

Days 23 - --: Down the Galician coast into Portugal We woke up and got on the bikes very early at A Guarda to try and get the ferry across to Caminha. Unfortunately after waiting for about 40 minutes we realised that the ferry was not running, but Kate did take a cracking photo of the river as the sunlight was behind the hills on the other side. Without the ferry it meant we had an extra 25km round trip to a bridge further inland but this went fairly quickly even though it was pretty cold! Getting the bridge across was much nicer as it meant we got to pass the signs for Portugal! About 1100km after starting in Santander we had landed in our second country! After a coffee break in Caminha we cracked on down the coast and finished the day having covered 80km, our longest day yet! Of course now we're in Portugal the land is a lot flatter so progress is much easier! As the sun was dropping a bit low over the sea we turned of the coast road to find a camping spot near the beach. Just as we had finished setting up the tent another cycler/camper (Zach from Austria) came down the road with the same idea. Even funnier was the fact that we had all been in Fisterra after following the camino at the same time but not crossed paths until now! Taking advantage of such a chance encounter we all had dinner together and swapped stories of the camino and had a small campfire outside in Zach's stove. The temperature got pretty low that night and we woke up to frost inside the outer layer of the tent for the first time! After a slightly later start than usual to let the air warm up a bit we packed up, said cheers to Zach and headed on for Porto!

Days 22 - 26: Carnota to Vigo After the monstrous uphill climb out of Carnota the road back towards Santiago and our next stop, Negreira, was much easier. However during this journey there was an unexpected passenger on our journey! Just as we were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch, Kate, who was in front, noticed a small fluffy thing at the side of the road. In reaching out to it it turned out to be a tiny kitten! Who spat at her in surprise and fell over. However he turned out not to be feral - just cold, tired, hungry and abandoned. There was no-one around and we weren't near any houses or farms, and he was far too tiny to have got where he was by himself, so we think he must have been ditched from a car. So we carried in him in a bar bag all the way to our next stop, Negreira, where a kindly lady at the vets took him in. We would have loved to have kept him and if it had happened at home we would have just accepted him into our lives as a gift from the universe, but cycle touring isn't the best home for a tiny kitten! We covered a lot of ground without taking many photos - from Negreira we went to Pontevedra and from there on to Vigo, where we stopped for a rest day. The approach to Vigo down the Ria was beautiful, and the city itself was lovely although built on a mother of a hill - which, if you climb to the top, you get a fantastic view :) we found a a supermarket with a better stocked vegan/health section than anything I've seen in the UK, ate some hot chestnuts (starting to feel Christmassy!), drank some Albariño - Galician white wine - and Seb found a Rave Racer machine in an arcade (his favourite arcade game that he hasn't seen since for about 10 years!). While in Vigo we treated ourselves to a room to ourselves in a pretty cool and new hostel. Nice clean room, big beds and an amazing view out of our top floor window. Feeling well rested we left Vigo and headed south along the coast towards the border and Portugal!

The next morning was really tough - the beach is surrounded by a range of hills and rather than go the long (flat) way round we decided to go the short (extreme uphill) route. Amazing view at the top though!

Day 21: Fisterra (part 2) These are some of the shots we took up on the point. It was a fantastic day as you can see! We had amazing views down the coast to our next stop, a beach called Carnota that Kate wanted to revisit. The place was covered in marks from fires, padlocks, clothes, crosses and other tokens and gestures from people who had finished their journeys. Some pilgrims arrived there while we were chilling out having our end of the world beer and crisps. Seemed a funny moment to have reached the end of many people's roads, but the fishing boats going past made you remember that life just goes on, it's another day, another sunset, nothing more or less special than the one before or the one tomorrow. We've at least reached the end of our westward journey and now turn south for Portugal - and hopefully warmer weather!

Day 21: Fisterra (part 1) We reached the end of the world! After a good long rest in Santiago we cracked the 90km to Fisterra over the next couple of days. We did nearly 70km to Dumbria on the first day and considered going all out, but decided to leave the final 20 til the following day. Fisterra was similar to Land's End in Cornwall - not just in name, but with the rugged granite and a similar kind of vibe. We stopped in a very groovy albergue that had been recommended to us by a few different pilgrims in Santiago and Dumbria. Really chilled out, and we'd heard about the culinary mastery of the Portuguese chef Mario. He made the most epic sea bass dinner for everyone who was staying and some visitors as well. We all stood and joined hands before the meal, and introduced ourselves and mentioned something that we were grateful for - a really nice experience as a lot of people were coming to the end of long, hard and deeply personal journeys. Susana, one of the volunteers who worked there, was a deeply sincere character who told us that the most important words they hear from pilgrims who stayed with them are 'maybe' and 'I don't know' - a lot of people who ended their journeys at Fisterra couldn't leave straight away - many people we'd met seemed to be having internal reassessments at the end of the world. We however had to crack on - we are on a different journey man! More pics of the faro (lighthouse on the point) and some of the relics/tokens left there to follow. Off-topic - Spain has incredibly versatile vending machines, often in the street. This one in Fisterra contained some fairly obvious snack food but also packets of biscuits, baked goods, OCBs, beer and condoms - basically everything you need for a good night out.

Bucket Boyz playing "Don't Fence me in" @ Happy Smile

Don’t Fence Me In as performed by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. (Released in 1944) 

Days 17 - 20: Santiago De Compostela - part 2 When we bought tickets for the rooftop tour we were expecting to be shepherded around a sealed off walkway and for it to all be very tame - not so! Stepping out onto the open roof was an incredibly vertigo inducing experience but gave us amazing views of the cathedral towers and the rest of the old town. We had already been inside the cathedral the day before so knowing how much empty space was beneath out feet was a bit disconcerting! We went to a few more of the many museums in the city and found out about the Japanese Kumano. This pilgrimage is twinned with the Camino de Santiago as they both started at similar times about a 1000 years ago. We're now trying to hatch a plan to walk that one next! We tried to do a few timelapses of the cathedral to mixed results and some nighttime long exposures to better results. After giving ourselves an extra day just to chill out we managed to pull ourselves away and onward to Fisterra and the end of the world!

Days 17 - 20: Santiago De Compostela (part 1!) Needless to say the cathedral was amazing inside and out (exterior pics to follow). Inside it is truly vast and we attended a pilgrim's mass and saw the Botafumeiro which is a giant incense burner that gets swung along the inside of the church. In olden days this was to deal with the smelly pilgrims - luckily we could shower just about regularly enough for this to be a ceremonial event! We only explored the old town but it's a rabbit's warren of tiny streets. After 3 days walking around we were still getting lost in the tiny alley ways. On the Friday night we had a bit of a sesh going to a few bars and eating plenty of tapas along the way. (Kate found a shop where we could top up on some vegan bits as well). The tapas highlight so far is Pimientos de Padron - shallow fried sweet peppers in salt! We ended up at a bar called A Gramola and saw a travelling Californian band called The Bucket Boyz. They were a kind of punk/skiffle combo, and with a banjo, couple of buckets, broom handle, string and close harmony singing (and swearing) they were truly awesome to listen to. We had a chat about their make-it-up-as-you-go-along tour. Apparently they are going to try and blag a boat to Brazil from south Portugal - good luck chaps! Next post - cathedral rooftop tour!

Day 16 - Arzua to Santiago de Compostela Started from Arzua after all the walkers - the place was full! Culture shock after Baamonde! We had to stop to fix Seb's bike - thank goodness we brought zip ties. Through O Pino to Lavacolla, where we joined the actual Camino for the last 10 or so km. We saw lots of other walkers and cyclists - good encouraging spirit from everyone in these final few km! However it was at this point that Seb's brakes finally gave up, and what should have been a glorious descent into Santiago was a tortuously steep downhill from Monte De Gozo, hanging onto loaded bikes that just wanted to career away from us. However we walked with an American named Dan into the centre of the old quarter of town, right to the cathedral - reached the first stop in our journey! We collected our compostelas from the pilgrim office, found our hostel and had a hearty dinner (see Seb's epic hamburger conquest!). Spent the next few days sightseeing - more photos to come :)

Days 13 - 15: Mondonedo to Arzua The day after we stopped in Mondonedo was awful - it started raining almost immediately and further, we had an unbelievable 12km uphill in some freezing mizzle. Our waterproofs couldn't take the constant damp and failed miserably so we stopped at Abadin, after a pitiful 20km day, soaked through and freezing. To be fair it was nice to dry out, relax, charge everything up, put a lot of photos on Dropbox - but it was pretty demoralising seeing constant rain out of the window and thinking "are we going to have to go out in this tomorrow?!?!" We waited in the morning til it stopped raining and got to Vilalba, where we had lunch and did a shop, and cracked on down to Baamonde, where we had this fantastic albergue (big enough for 90 people) all to ourselves. Seb dismantled the front of his bike in the hope of fixing the wobble and in the morning we set out in the FROST. I was NOT expecting frost in Spain, what a fool! Hands frozen in minutes, didn't warm up for about 2 hours but I was distracted by the beautiful day. We took a shortcut away from the N road which took us over a challenging hill covered in windmills. It was deserted apart from getting chased by a couple of angry farmyard dogs. Then - the wonderful sign to Santiago and our 600th km! Achievement.

Days 10 - 12: Ribadeo to Mondonedo Arrived in Galicia from Pinero after unnecessarily going to Castropol (a small town on the east side of the Ria de Ribadeo) because we thought as cyclists we couldn't go across the A-8 bridge, but we spoke to the tourist info in Ribadeo she said we could come across the epic bridge rather than go all the way inland to the next one. Dodged a rainstorm by hiding under some trees before making our way back up to the coast. Ribadeo was smaller than I remembered - the Rough Guide (which, due to the writing style, we've renamed the Cynical Guide) suggested it had little to offer other than 'a certain crumbling charm' but it does have a some good hard tarmac - I had my first fall off the bike while trying to find the tourist info, cracker of a bruise on my left hip! 1 week on and it's just about stopped hurting :) At the albergue we met Rico, a Swiss guy who we cooked dinner with. The next day was a rest day as Seb woke up with a cold-type thing so he spent most of the day in bed while I went cycling and getting food etc. The following day we got up and out fairly early and got as far as Mondonedo before deciding to stop for the night. The area we cycled through before we started to head inland felt run down and badly cared for, but heading into the green hills was lovely. Mondonedo was a beautiful town with a huge cathedral in the middle of a tricksy network of cobbled streets - much like St Ives. We had a look in the cathedral with its museum, complete with collection of bishops' slippers! Seb found an awesome patisserie and we both enjoyed some Estrella Galicia - been waiting a long time for that! Galicia is very green - we've moved away from the burnt orange roofs of Cantabria to houses constructed of granite and slate - much like Cornwall. It's also much more 'obviously' Celtic: lots of knotwork, Celtic symbols and iconography and political graffiti. More to come!

From Soto De Luina we went to Pinero via Luarca - another 60km, another beautiful seaside town similarly stepped to Cudillero (but not as small or extreme). Lovely cycle ride winding in and out of valleys along the coast. This was our last stop in Asturias, no one else arrived at the albergue and we got a good bottle of wine at the little shop for the princely sum of €1.60. Delicious.