She Says - On a long desert highway…

8-10 August
In some very hot weather, we made our way to the Sierra de Guara parque natural to see the cave art we had read about. The scenery was fantastic, immediately a more desert-like appearance with interesting geology. Then we reach the park itself and wow! Some scenery – deep-cut gorges in orange sandstone rock, and hundreds of caves carved into the sides of the valleys. The area is supposed to be full of cave art, not really surprising when you look around at all the caves! Griffon vultures were also everywhere, often in large groups (I counted nearly 30 in one group soaring on a thermal), and several passed very close over us – they were so huge!

The artwork dates to around 10-15 000 years ago, and all the paintings we saw were in red ochre. While younger and nowhere near as impressive as the cave art we saw in northern Spain a few years ago, I’m still glad we made the effort to come here. If nothing else, we got a bit of walking done for once! A bit confused as to how it was all supposed to work, we stopped at one of the caves that we thought was accessible by guided tour only. We chatted with a couple of French families who were also visiting the caves. They seemed to find us pretty fascinating, even their kids, it was a bit embarrassing really. Anyway, they seemed to think you could just go visit the caves, so we set off. The Mallata cave is special for its depictions of people, and after half hour’s walking we were able to access the two sections, but only from outside a metal fence. You can see some of the artwork from outside, but not all of it.

We moved on to the next cave, also with guided tour access, but we could easily see the artwork through the bars at the front of the cave. The Arpan cave is supposed to depict a deer with archers aiming at it, and while the deer was still quite visible and impressive, the archers have badly faded. Without someone to tell you where everything is, our visits were a bit disappointing but that’s not entirely surprising! Signs at the Arpan site indicated another cave nearby, del Trucho, which was supposed to have an older form of artwork. In the scorching heat, we decided to bash our way cross-country to an unclear trail that led us up to the cave that we had seen from a distance. No joy with this one, the front had a massive barrier including stone walls! Running out of water and very hot, we pushed our way back to the bike and on to the nearest town, where there was a cave art visitors’ centre. Thinking it was going to be an information centre, we trotted off to see if there were pictures to decide if the unguided caves were worth visiting or not. These caves would take several hours to walk to, and we weren’t sure a cave with a single picture would be worth 4 or more hours of very hot walking! The centre turned out to be more of a museum, and we couldn’t find out anything more about the artwork without paying. While the walks for us were as much about visiting the park and seeing its scenery as seeing the cave art, we decided after our little taste that we’d seen enough.

Strangely for Spain, which isn’t great on giving tourists useful information, the town had a big sign indicating nearby villages, attractions, and also campgrounds. Even better, in the visitors’ centre I found a brochure about the nearest town with camping, Alquezar, and decided it looked worth visiting as it was a pretty hilltop citadel. The campground outside Alquezar was not great, rather dry and dusty and busy, but with enough shade to keep us happy. They provided an excellent leaflet on the surrounding area, listing several walks that start from the town and lead through the surrounding valleys, including up to one of the caves we had originally planned to visit. Alquezar itself was a bit of a surprise. We drove into town to get ourselves some dinner supplies, only to find it is an extremely touristy place and you can’t drive in! You have to park on the road leading into town, then walk to actually enter the town, first passing a series of shops and restaurants. The walled town itself is medieval and looked great from a distance, but it has been heavily restored. While the colours make it look right from a distance, up close the architectural styles in much of the town are distinctly more modern. I found it really hard to capture a good photo of the town, even when we took some night photos. We decided to stay in town till nightfall, grabbed some tinned fish and crackers, and followed up with a tasty ice-cream. The scenery from the edges of the town, looking over the deep gorges cut into the sandstone landscape, was fantastic. There were signs around the town edges, showing several walking routes through the valleys, similar to those our campground had provided. We probably should have stayed an extra day and done some walking as originally planned, but for some reason we both decided it was time to move on to Portugal.

We’ve spent the last two days making our way rapidly across Spain to reach Portugal. The days have been long and it has been getting progressively hotter as we go. We’ve been seeing really cool sierra desert scenery, and there were a lot of hillforts and castles along the way to Madrid. We visited one castle, Castillo de Montearagon, which looked absolutely massive from a distance, but strangely it was a similar size to many British castles once we reached it. Obviously they had a good architect to help them look impressive from afar! The views from the top of the hill were spectacular, like a moonscape all around the castle. In the distance, we could see a valley cut deeply into a red mountain that was glowing under a massive storm. Xander thought it looked like something out of Lord of the Rings.

We stopped in Soto del Real, north of Madrid, thanks to our GPS list of campgrounds being accurate for once. While not quite the peaceful lakeside location that the GPS seemed to indicate, even with a swimming pool, it was the quietest campground for some time. There were also amazing ant lines at night, with protective warriors guarding the busy lines of workers, and the paths themselves were clearly visible by day – very cool. On the way to Salamanca today, we stopped in Avila for lunch, which turned out to be another walled city but on quite a grand scale. While interesting and impressive, it wasn’t very picturesque or atmospheric. I captured some shots out of town but that’s about it. Our campground list let us down big time in Salamanca, but then the town signage was terrible too! We couldn’t find a single campground by either method, even though the city provided signs to several campgrounds, but as often happens they don’t tell you which turn to take at a crucial junction. We ended up trying to find a camp well out of town from the GPS list, but that took us to an industrial estate!! Trying to make our way back into Salamanca, we found a campground sign and ended up in a pleasant, small site that was cheap for Spain (14 euros, plus only 2 euros for the washing machine, now becoming a luxury!). The campground even had wi-fi access for only a euro all day but we couldn’t connect!!! We got our blog updates ready though, we just need chance to upload them now – Switzerland only, we need more time! We are on the go so much right now that it is tiring and we are only getting as far as making brief notes, to be written up more completely later on. We’re also trying to be conservative with the computer’s battery, although we’ve now got into a pattern of charging it for an hour off the bike battery once we arrive in camp, so that is keeping us reasonably charged. Right now, we are using and charging the computer at the same time, not sure that is a good idea! Camera battery charging is a bit easier, as the charger fits neatly inside the tankpod and can run while the bike is moving. We can’t do this with the computer, as the lead is badly designed and the powerpack dangles outside the tankpod rather than fitting neatly inside.

We pick up various songs for various reasons as we travel, usually because some line triggers a familiarity with our situation. More of often than not, it has been ‘Cows With Guns’ due to the number of cows we see, the words changed into something appropriate for our situation. Cows have been a big feature in the last few days of highway driving – literally. There are huge black silhouettes on random hills as we travel, like we needed to be reminded we’re in black-bull-fighting Spain. The Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ is a new one, particularly for the first line referring to a desert highway (yes, I know this post’s title is incorrect…), something we’re going to start seeing a lot more of!! I’m sure this song will stick with us. We also sing ‘Born to be Wild’ as it was just made for motorbike travel – ‘Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway, looking for adventure or whatever comes my way…’