Day 21: 5 Sep ’91 Thursday Layby to Wild Camp Site in Spain

That was probably the deepest sleep we have had for a while. We were woken by some bastard of a lorry driver honking his horn at us. Everything was damp. We had a bite to eat and returned to the previous night’s camp site to find one of Dan’s gloves which was missing. Once found, we got back onto the road and went through gorges, hamlets and farmland, following a river. It was lovely.

At a garage, we met a Dutch couple on Honda Gold Wing. They were very nice and we chatted about travelling for a while. She, in fact, was Israeli and they were heading to Granada. After saying goodbye to them, we took a picturesque road to Utiel, up some long, winding hills. We passed through ‘pig farm country’ looking for a camp site. At one point, we stopped only to find five or six pigs rotting in the undergrowth near the road which smelt revolting. We rapidly moved out of the area and we camped about 10 kms further on in a pine wood.

I am glad that Dan’s bike is now sorted out. It was making him very irritable. We are testing ourselves and the bikes still, which makes it all the more enjoyable riding through the scenery. We are meeting more travellers and less ‘trippers’. We are gaining a lot of experience in biking and camping out, as well as travelling.

I sometimes feel quite lonely sometimes when we come into a camping site each evening when we are out in the open and away from other people. Dan and I getting on well and I think we are finding out about each other a great deal. I’m missing family and Penny one heck of a lot. Penny is constantly in my mind. I keep saying it but I miss her badly.

Sitting here, I can hear cicadas, bull frogs, birds calling and the odd car passing. Spain is striking in its interior but it still feels quite backwards. (It was only back in 1986, five years earlier, when I travelled through Spain in a car on the way to work on a yacht for the summer that my fellow traveller and I had stopped to walk into a village for which its main road was still a rough track. There was no tarmac at all.) We spoke to an old man who did not seem to know of Africa. I think it might have been lost in translation in reality.

Distance 72.96 kms Average speed 9.3 kmh Time 7 hours 40