Daily Bulletins 2005

15th June 2005 - Departure date minus 19 days.

We haven't exactly trained hard for the trip this year. We've each been commuting to work, we've had one 100 mile weekend together and that has been about it. I suppose we will just have to hope that the residue of last year's exertions, the fact that we have kept the pedals turning over the winter and the expectation that we might get fit along the way will see us through.

19th June 2005 - Anniversary of the Start of the Pilgrimage

Unusually for Scotland, it is searingly hot, tropically humid and excellent conditions for looking forward to getting back to Spain. The team got together today, over a glass or two of fruit juice (really!) to consider all the things we haven't bothered to plan for yet. After an hour of talking campsites and tools and airport logistics and porridge, it now seems real again. There are just two weeks to go till we restart the journey and the anticipation is beginning to rise. This time last year, we had just boarded the Ferry, changed out of our rain-soaked kit and were settling into one of several beers. We had everything before us.

26th June 2005 - Disaster strikes

Gustavo is stricken with sciatica and can hardly walk. He woke up with it a week ago and, despite various medical interventions, is only slightly improved. It seems unlikely, if not impossible, that he will be able to cycle with us. We are trying to encourage him to join us without his bike and make the journey by public transport, with perhaps the last few kilometres on foot, but he has to decide whether he is fit to do that. A huge disappointment for him and for us. Who, for example, is going to make the porage?

July 5th - on the road

Well, not Gustavo. He couldn´t make it. But Ken and Andrew and I have made it by plane and bus to Pamplona, we have re-built our bicycles and we are ready to go. Also, this technology looks as though it will work, so we will try to keep you in touch with how we are getting on. Santiago, here we come.

July 6th - somewhere on a hill west of Estella

We did not get in to camp until 10 O´clock last night after a longer than anticipated sojourn in Pamplona, some long drags into the countriside along the hard shoulder of some hot dusty and busy roads and a detour to a campsite at Estella that proved to be full. However, where we are is better than there, offered us a good night´s sleep and is now serving breakfast. It is warm but not unbearably hot, as there is cloud cover. Along with that comes a stiff wind, into which we will be pedalling all day.

July 10th - half way up a very steep hill at Rabanal del Camino

It is hot, we are off the main road at last and climbing up through highland scenery towards the highest point of the pilgrimage - 1500metres up in the Mountains of Leon. We have had several days of endless highways but at least there was a wind behind that allowed us to make swift progress. The day before yesterday we did 135 km, about 80 miles. The campsites where we are staying have been incredibly noisy, with the Spanish clientelle preferring to stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning shouting at each other. It seems that they dislike silence and seek to chase it away. Last night there were loud fireworks at about 1am. This leaves us somewhat drained on our bikes and we always end up cycling in the hottest part of the day. Still, we are keeping to our schedule. At least until now. Although the prospect of the next two mountain climbs does inspire a certain amount of dread. Ken and Andrew have set out already. So it is time for me to sign off and face what has to be faced.

July 12th - seventy five kilometres to go - Palas del Rei.

Which means that we have done almost 2500km since leaving St Andrews Cathedral, which is past the 1500 mile mark that we estimated the journey would be. We did not, however, suppose, that after so many leagues and so much turning of the pedals, the last few days would be the hardest. Perhaps that is how it should be for pilgrims. No let up until the last step. After Rabanal, the road climbed up under skies that were almost white with the heat to a mountain pass that was as desolate and as high as Ben Nevis. There we paused a while beside a huge cairn with a telegraph pole sticking out of it to which pilgrims had stuck souvenirs of themselves - stickers, badges, ribbons, prayer flags and of course scallop shells. We jammed one of our shells into the pole before mounting our bikes again and setting off down the mountain. It was not all downhill, there were other climbs to do, but when it started to go down, it positively fell away. We skittered around bends, rumbled through stone villages and flew around the edge of a gorge. Ken got to 92km/h in competition with a small car. Andrew and I, less experienced, were much more cautious. As we descended we plunged into great wafts of hot air coming off the cliff face where the sun had baked it all day. When we reached the valley floor at Molinaseca where young families were bathing in the river, we stopped for cold beer and then more cold beer. The ride through Ponferrada with its obscenely huge Templar castle and out to Cacabelos was, again, hot and long. There was a great forest fire burning up the mountainside at Ponferrada, with a single helicopter vainly trying to keep it under control.

At Cacabelos, we broke our habit of camping every night and booked into the pilgrim hostel, which was a series of stables arranged in a horsehoe around the outside of the parish church. There was something curiously oriental about it. Ken and Andrew shared a stall. I was next door. When we returned from a very fine meal in the town (cheap and delicious), there was a walking pilgrim asleep in the other bed in my stall. We were evicted at 8am, which gave us a chance to make an early start on the second great mountain climb of the last few days of the Camino (pilgrimage). This one is the one they all talk about and, although it is lower than the Montes de Leon (ONLY 1335m), it is the last great obstacle before Santiago. We sat in dread in a bar at the foot of the pass, drinking coffee in silence. Then, after further displacement activity in a supermarket, we set out. The gradient was benign in that it was never too steep, but more importantly and unlike Scotland, it was entirely consistent all the way up. Once you found your gear, you just kept turning the legs and watching the drips of sweat falling onto the road like tears and sizzling away like spit off a hot iron.

Andrew was sick half way up and looked pale with it. We are not sure what it was, heat, something he ate, but it affected him for the rest of the day. But we had no option but to keep climbing, higher and higher, watching the motorway viaducts on great concrete stilts above us and knowing that we had to get higher than them to get over the pass. At 1099 metres, we finally outranked the motorway, which disappeared into a tunnel, and stopped for lunch. Andrew was in a bad way and could not eat much. Ken and I had beers, it was too hot for much solid food. Then, off again, with Andrew offering to catch us up at the next town, at the bottom of the mountain. I stayed with him until Cebreiro, nearly the top of the mountain, and then we lost him among the strange iron age buildings that characterise that place. Loud celtic music was blaring from the souvenir shops so we did not stay long.

Ken and I climbed on up to the pass of Rojo, 1335 metres high and 30 miles since departure. I have never climbed for so long and in such heat. I cannot deny that there was a sense of achievement there. We swept off the ridge, down a beautifully made road, on which you didn´t have to touch the pedals for 10 miles. I have no idea what ridiculous speed Ken achieved on that descent, but I was ahead of him, and loitered rather guiltily under a tree at the bottom, having now lost both of my travelling companions in the mountains. Ken appeared shortly, exhilarated with the descent, as was I. No sign of Andrew so we pressed on to our agreed rendezvous: the first bar in Sarria.

After 3 beers in the first bar in Sarria, Ken and I thought it would be impolite to order a fourth. We had overtaken a group of mountain bikers coming into the town. I was wearing my Tour de France yellow jersey and burned them off with boyish zeal on a hill. There was much badinage and shouting and two of them gave chase, but I beat them up the hill on adrenalin alone. One of them stopped at the bar where we were. Whilst Ken and I tucked into our third beer, he was finishing his mineral water and salad. We were to see him several more times on the trip. He was pleasant and very interested in Ken´s antique "flying scot" bike frame. We went to the town centre, to another bar and had three more beers and a mountain of fresh peanuts (you always get given a snack with your drink in Spain). The music was good and the beer was beginning to sink into hot and tired limbs. We formulated several inadequate plans to find Andrew and resolved that hope was our best option. Sure enough, he turned up after a while, guided to us by our mineral water drinking fellow cyclist. Andrew had spent an hour or more in a bar on top of the mountain, and had got a massage off a French herbalist (but no fresh peanuts). We booked into a hotel. It seemed only right in the circumstances. It was cheap by hotel standards, expensive by hostel standards. We ate out in a wonderfully demode terrace restaurant and slept long.

Today, we missed the chance to get away early while the haar was down. Galician haars obviously don´t last as long as Fife ones. By the time we were out in the delightful and curiously familiar lanscape of rural Galicia, it was 45 degrees and the cycling was getting tougher by the minute. A small boy on a large bike travelled with us for a while, chattering away in a language I could make nothing of.

We stopped at Portomarin, a town displaced to the top of a hill by the adjacent reservoir. They had moved it stone by stone. We baked there. And we lost Andrew again. His instinct was just to find a bar and sort himself out: ours was the same. Eventually we ended up in the same bar.

This afternoon was horrific. One long climb without shade in 45 degree heat. It was a satanic slope. It hurt. I tried to think about anything except the climb. I lowered my head so that I could only see the metre in front of me. The sweat ran from the peak of my cycle helmet onto the crossbar of my bike and crystallised instantly. After an hour of more of this torture, we got into a narrow country lane, stopped, ordered beer from a cafe and snoozed in silence. After an hour´s rest, we pressed on, assured by the barwoman that it would not be so bad to Palas del Rei and it was not. We got here in time to see the climax of the Tour de France. Lance Armstrong recovers the yellow jersey at Courchevel. The speed with which he climbed his mountain would have put us to shame. But he is not carrying panniers and a tent.

The bar where we stopped has internet (hence this long diatribe) and rooms, into which we are now booked. The bikes are in an underground garage. Tomorrow, we will lead them to Santiago de Compostela. 2500km. 1500miles. A very long way from the Ceres Inn and the whimsical notion that struck us that it would be fun to cycle all the way from St Andrews to Santiago de Compostela!

16th July - back in Ceres

It is 4am. I have been back from Santiago for a couple of hours and am about to set out back to the airport to join the family in France. We made it. We stood before the great cathedral, we were given our pilgrim certificates, we went to the ends of the earth (Finisterre) and we stayed in the oldest hotel in the world. We celebrated our achievement. No time now to tell those stories. Later.

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