Training

It's only a week until the volcanoes walk on the night of the 14th.

Eek!

Of course that means more training.

So this morning I walked to Mazo market, which is about 5 km. Then I bought lots of veggies, plus bread, cheese and eggs and filled my rucksack. I deliberately didn't buy potatoes, but the rucksack was so full that I stuffed a courgette down one side pocket, and a sweet potato down the other. Then I set off for home, wondering how far I'd get before I collapsed and had to phone my husband.

Well, I was clearly going to get home too late to cook lunch, so I phoned the roast chicken shop in San Antonio (the village just down the hill from home) and reserved a chicken. I reasoned that once my husband had picked me up from collapse-point, we could collect the chicken on the way home.

Good golly miss Molly, I made it to the chicken shop, another 5 km, and with a heavy rucksack, too.

I couldn't face the walk back up the steep hill to get home, though. So I wimped out and got my husband to drive me the last half kilometre.

I felt less of a wimp when I weighed the rucksack: 11.6 kg.

Maybe I'll manage the volcanoes route after all.

Maybe.

Slithering around the Springs

On Thursday I took my get-fit-for-the-volcanoes-route programme up a notch. Instead of walking up to Montaña de la Breña, I had a go at the Breña Springs route, above San Pedro.

Most of the path is through laurel forest, which I love. It provides a great workout, since it's steep, and that day at least, rather slippery. I was glad of my new walking poles.

As the name suggests, it goes past several springs. First there's the Lavaderos de Fuente Grande, where housewives used to take the family laundry. It's rather like the Fuentiña at Puntallana, with stone washbasins still there,although not as well preserved. Then there's a little detour to Fuente Nueva, which I missed because it wasn't labelled (at least not that I could see) and on to Fuente Espinel, where the spring is surrounded by lots of little twig crosses. I don't know it this is there all year, or just an Easter thing that hasn't collapsed yet.

And then the path popped out of the forest onto a hillside. Since I was running late, I took a track down to the road, and left the other half of the route for another day. I think I did about 4km with a 300m main climb. Not bad, but I'll have to do better than that if I do the volcanoes route.

Into the Caldera

No writing, but I did survive the Caldera trip.

It didn't help that it was raining when we set off on Saturday morning. We held a discussion in Los Llanos bus station, and decided to go anyway, even though obviously we wouldn't be stargazing or leaving via the river bed as planned.

The mini buses had no trouble driving over the ford, and dropping us off at Los Brecitos.

Then we had a 5.8 km walk in the rain, with overnight supplies weighing down our backpacks.
After the first half-hour or so, I found that my waterproof wasn't. So did several other people, and by the time we arrived at the hostel, many people were soaked to the skin. Luckily, the hostel has a fireplace. Unluckily, the wood was soaking wet. We could have kippered herrings in there, if we'd had herrings.

And then things got better. The fire got going, we changed into dry(ish) clothes. One of the guy who works in the Caldera gave us a couple of bottles of home-made wine, and someone else had bought a couple of bottles of shop wine, which cheered things up no end. We had a shared dinner (my coffee and walnut cake went down well) and several classes, and a pretty good night's sleep.

And in the morning we woke to that the rain had stopped, and there was snow on the peaks, all around the Caldera rim.

After a visit to a pre-hispanic rock carving, we set off back up the hill to Los Brecitos. I was glad that my back pack was lighter without the food, but it still felt like a long way.

My camera batteries died. Then my mobile batteries died, probably because I was taking lots of photos with it. And then my batteries died, and my ankle started swelling up, and I just had to stop. Someone kindly volunteered to take my backpack, and I staggered up to the Los Brecitos at least 20 minutes after everyone else, except the people who stayed back to keep me company.

And instead of being annoyed that I kept everyone waiting, they cheered. They were all really supportive, and seem keen for me to try the volcanoes walk in two weeks time.

Gee. I'm really not sure about that.

On Sunday I continued my walk around the island, from Montes de Luna to Los Canarios. Unlike previous sections, this part of the path doesn't run through villages, criss-crossing the main road. It goes through the lonely middle of nowhere, and I wasn't sure whether there'd be mobile coverage. Walking alone seemed like a bad idea. Not that there was any particular reason to expect an accident, just that twenty years of working with computers has given me a lively respect for Murphy's Law.

Helen and Theresa got up indecently early and arrived at my house before 9 am, so that we could start before the day got too hot. I fed them bacon sandwiches and coffee, and we got to Montes de Luna by 10 am.

Previous sections of the path have been anything between main road and goat track. This was the roughest bit yet: very steep goat track, heading up behind the first house of the village, and up, and up, and up, until we'd climbed 200 m in about half a kilometre. It made a great cardiovascular workout for three large ladies. It wasn't sunburn that made out faces red.

We found fresh dung on the path in several places, and had a ribald conversation. It definitely wasn't sheep, goat, dog, cat or human dung. It looked rather like horse manure, but none of us could imagine a horse getting up that track.

Black skeletons of bushes dotted the mountainside. Last summer's fire had obviously swept through. A little higher up, we found scorched pine trees, recovering nicely. Canarian pines have evolved to survive burning for anything up to six hours.

At the top of the big climb we saw the burnt-out remains of somebody's summer house. Poor things! It was completely wrecked. But they were rebuilding; someone had stacked a pile of breeze blocks and roofing slates beside the ruined back wall.

And that explained the dung. The most practical way to get building materials up that steep, steep path would be a donkey or mule.

After that the path was relatively level, and soon became a track, which was much easier going.



After some kilometres we came across a tiny statue of the Virgin Mary in a niche in a pine tree. And just past that, the track had been washed away. Presumably that happened when the winter rains arrived last year. Since the vegetation had been burned, that end of the island suffered a lot of small landslides. There was no way you could have got a car past, but we managed it on foot easy enough.

The track carried on. It was all very pretty, but we started to get tired, and we were all glad when we reached the crossroads (crosspaths?) with the trail down into the village of Los Canarios. When we got there, we found a restaurant, and my husband and son joined us for lunch. We had the fresh fish, and it was awesome.

If you're looking for food in Fuencaliente, we all recommend, Restaurante La Era.

30 km down, 129 to go.

A Walk in the Woods

On Saturday I went for a walk in the woods at Cubo de la Galga. It's one of the most famous walks on the island, but it's the first time I've been.

Well it was lovely. The path starts out as tarmac, one car wide, and turns to a dirt track the smae width, butt here was no chance of getting lost. It was all uphill, but we were all as unfit as each other, so nobody complained about the slow pace, or my frequent photo stops. I killed three birds with one stone: I gave my brain a break form all the computer work lately, I got a little fitter, and I got some material for the other blog (although I won't post until I've got the photos I took on Helen's camera.)

I'd have liked to go a little farther, but we ran out of time and I had to get back to pick up my son.