The winding road

After yesterday's dissolution of productivity, it was a relief to have the mountain excursion booked and sorted, with nothing to have to sort out apart from get myself from the house to the bus station on time.

The forecast was amazingly bad - with heavy rain and strong gust of wind from dawn until dusk in the part of the mountains where we were going. This said, the Spainards were going to bail. However, it wasn't raining in the morning, so they all came along anyway. Seems like a strange way of doing things - like looking out the window and not taking an umbrella because it's not raining that second, even though the ground is wet. That said, I was glad they all came along, because they're the only people on the trip under the age of 40.

We drove up into the hills in a double-decker bus - as the roads got smaller and smaller my mind kept bringing up images of us sliding down the steep sides of the cliff, and at one point the tour guide pointed out a car that had taken a tumble into the gorge below, which didn't make me feel much better.

He pointed out some amazing geological formations on the way up - a lateral moraine from the last ice age had truncated a valley entirely, creating a wall of rock some 200m high and perfectly flat, so that it looked like a railway or a road embankment. This had started to erode in textbook examples of fluvial channels, and I was quite happy to look out the window until we reached the level of the clouds and everything turned white.

With this in mind, we change the route of the walk, heading further south to avoid the cloud that builds up on the windward side of the mountains. The walk was great - lots more points of geological interest, thanks to the alternating limestone / loam strata. Loads of caves, tunnels, waterfalls... we ended up in Puentedey, which is built on a limestone bridge across a river - it translates as "bridge of God".

Here we stopped, and piled into the pub for hot drinks. I settled with my favourite end of walk warmer - hot chocolate with rum - and earned the role of drunkard in the eyes of the bartender, who started to ply me with shots of locally brewed Orujo. This stuff is made in each village, from the skin and smaller branches of white grapes, and distilled until it's clear, and has an alcohol content of around 50%. Served out of a unmarked bottle, it felt about as clandestine as possible, and tasted as you'd expect - strong. From here, he introduced is to Orujo with cream, but before we could be subjected to more it was time to catch the bus, which was somewhat of a relief.

Back home at 9, a quick burger dinner before collapsing into bed.