Beside the Seaside

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In Which I Reach Rock Bottom

November 2, 2007 by Mike

Tarifa

Route: Punta Umbria - Matalascanas - Almonte - Sevilla - Los Palacios - Pinzon - Puerto Real - Tarifa

*****

Note: This entry was written before my Ma died and the journey took a temporary break.

I'm filing it on the date it was written even though it's making it to the website the best part of a month late.

*****

A 180 mile detour inland to get past the Donana National Park -- all those birds flaunting themselves and me without binoculars to get a good gander at them -- the farthest I have had to ride away from the seaside since the pointless political posturings at the Polish-German frontier -- sees me return to the motorway network that crisscrosses Sevilla. I had no idea when I was here a couple of weeks ago for my brief flight back to the UK that Sevilla was pretty much on the coast road. But then, I came here last time without a map.

Not that having a map this time has helped me today.

Guys, I let the side down and read the route like a girl. I got hopelessly lost as I headed south to the sea again. There's a particularly thin road winding down beside the Guadalquivir river from Los Palacios Y Villafranca to the coast at Sanlucar de Barrameda. It took the best part of an hour riding round Palacios to find it. Admittedly, the half-a-dozen people I asked for directions all sent me off down different roads.

(The highlight was a white van man who I approached on the street outside the municipal football stadium. He offered to guide me to the road I needed. I followed him through narrow backstreets, up and down, until we emerged on the main street next to police station. I'd already ridden down this road twice. He stopped his van and admitted he was going to be staying here for an hour. I could wait for him to finish, or if I took the next right.. and the second left.. past the municipal football stadium and over the bridge.. was the road to Sanlucar.

I could have clocked him! I'd been 50 metres from a roadsign and the exit from town when I'd stopped to ask him directions -- and he'd taken me on a wild goose chase all over town! And.. this was the strangest thing.. there wasn't a shred of malice or mischief or enlightenment on his face.. he had no concept that he's messed me around. ¡Ay caramba!)

The road to Sanlucar passed through a tiny pueblo called Los Chapatales then skirted another whitewashed jumble of houses at Pinzon. Not the most romantic of places, plonked next to a single sleepy factory that presumably employs the entire village, in a vast, flat, dry valley composed of expansive fields baked by the unseasonal sunshine. At the edge of Pinzon the tarmac disappeared to be replaced by a rutted dirt track.

[Fantastic, think biking readers of this blo- I mean diary. Some offroading at last.]

[Wonder what his excuse will be for turning back and taking the motorway, think more experienced and weary followers of this trip.]

Well.. my excuse is, I reckon, a decent one. That cracked & welded frame. The last time it was repaired it lasted 300 miles. I'm riding more than that today.. ruts and bumps are too great a risk. The offroading will have to wait (he writes, breathing a sigh of relief) and I turn back.

I ride into Pinzon to check my options. The grocery shop has a rack of clothes on the pavement: fashions that haven't been seen in Britain for 40 years. The streets are empty. There is one bar in Pinzon. An eight year old girl is pouring a beer for one of the customers who, when he offers directions, turns out to have no voice box and talks with a rasping squeak. Everybody under 25 has a mullet. Everybody over 25 is over 80. There's nobody inbetween. Their accent is so strong I can barely understand them. If the Spanish ever do a remake of Twin Peaks...

--

But that's not why I'll remember today.

I eventually found my way back via dead straight earthern tracks scored between empty, stagnant fields, weaving down unmarked roads of cracked and bubbly, broken tarmac via crossroads without signposts and roads that turn back on themselves to the A4 "Motorway Of The South", and hightailed it past Jerez and zoomed back to the sea just outside Cadiz.

I've not shaved for a fortnight, just so I can set up a little video 'funny' of me trying to set my 'beard' alight.. an apology to the Spanish King Juan Carlos and his people. After all, Sir Francis Drake sacked Cadiz and described it as "singeing the King of Spain's beard".

You'll be glad to hear that I decide to press on, today at least, because I have a much better place to be.

--

In 2001 I rode a bike in South America for a few months. I'm a lucky so-and-so. In Buenos Aires, friends introduced me to an erstwhile former colleague who like me was employed by a Mouse to write about football. Hernan, who had never heard of me before that afternoon, cooked the most incredible assado on the roof of his apartment and we all ate and ate and ate.. I counted four separate, whole cows (sorry, vegetarians).. and drank Quilmes 'til it was running out of our ears. A great night.

Hernan moved to Europe and we've met a handful of times since -- most happily the day he made an honest woman of the equally fantabulous Annie. Luckily for them, I've never offered to cook a meal in return.. yet.

Annie and Hernan live in Tarifa, the southernmost point of continental Europe -- rock bottom, but a top place -- a small town of windmills and kitesurfers tucked behind Gibraltar at the very mouth of the Mediterranean. When they heard about this trip they issued a standing, open invitation to come and stay. The kind of thing it's easy to do when someone is thousands of miles away and talking airy-fairy of a trip like this. Today I'm turning up on their doorstep.

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Hernan y Annie, Malena y Lucas -- and I can't work out how to get them to stand upright! Bloomin' computers!

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It's late. I've had the best of introductions to Tarifa. First, from Annie and Hernan, together with Lucas (2-and-a-half) and Malena (10 months) and then, together with the grown-ups, at the opening night of a new club/ bar/ restaurant.

One word of warning: if it looks like chicken, and tastes like chicken, it's probably octopus. Yaakk!

More next time on a small town with biiiiig potential and my good friends who make it such a pleasure to be here. But for now, that pillow looks very invitin-zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

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