Mountains of Doom

With the right funding and back ground I would have been killed many years ago, on a reckless and ill thought out expedition up K2 in my pants wearing a fruit bowl hat and cowboy boots. Fortunately or not depending on your viewpoint, my back ground and funding never allowed such frivolous risks to life and limb, and in all fairness as a child in the seventies with asthma, I spent a lot of the time (allegedly) at deaths door.

I remember things slightly differently, I remember playing out on my bike, falling off now banned school climbing frames, and jumping between roofs of adjacent garage blocks on a green that had been created because a V2 landed there one night and destroyed or damaged more than seventy houses (and nearly killed my dad whose ceiling fell on him two streets away). I remember running about over what had once been a municipal dump in a corner of Newham now occupied by Newham General Hospital. It was an L shape of land that had a central dirt track running through it, and various branches running off it. It was a mixture of grass and scrub, blackberries, Elders, Japanese Knotweed and Nettles (there were no tall trees). South of this was the old A13 dual carriageway (now a four lane artery that pumps vehicular life into the new city of Docklands and to a lesser extent the old City of London). In those days there were enough gaps between cars that you could run across the A13 in two well timed hops (today you would be killed by lane two). The south side of the A13 was a vast expanse of marsh, derelict fallen downs, part filled in craters from repeated German bombing raids.  The occasional Pillbox subsided into the soft ground. An old style and early container yard (the type that saw an end to the Royal Docks and its sorting warehouses ), and literally hundreds upon hundreds of open acres of not a lot ... I forgot the stinking abattoir, Zif Meats where you could find the horns of cows, hollowed and gnawed by the lord gods many detritivors from rats down the chain.

Heading east you could be on open ground with the odd fallen or trampled down fence from days of yore until you arrived at the banks of the Thames at what is now Galleons Reach Outlet shopping thing. You could wander among the giant fallen in and derelict monoliths of the old Beckton Gasworks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckton_gasworks (for those who would like to see the place today, watch Full Metal Jacket, the city scenes were shot in my once playground). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beckton_gasworks). I also found out reading this article to check my facts that other parts of Vietnam were filmed at Cliffe in Kent, a short hop over the river from Tilbury and a place we used to SCUBA dive in (without permission), in the old abandoned quarries there.

The Brown Bit is the Path

Heading south from the A13 you could walk as far as the old London Royal Docks (now London City Airport), and if you were willing to detour round the docks, you could find yourself in North Woolwich, where you could take the foot tunnel or Ferry to the other side of the river (though I digress here a little). Going east through North Woolwich you would eventually arrive at the southern extent of the area left derelict after the Second World War, specifically the flattened remains of Harland and Wolff’s shipyard, builders of HMS Belfast and the Titanic,(though not on the Thames), the shipyard was demolished in the sixties having been run down, not bombed  by Herr Hitler) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harland_and_Wolff. That open area then rolled north to meet the Beckton Gas Works mentioned above.

Towards the Sea

Towards Fangorn ... We Think

What you ask has all this to do with Mountains, fruit bowl hats and cowboy boots, and being killed with the right funding?

The Vikings are Coming

The answer is nothing and everything.

Wilderness Photobomb

Yesterday, we went for a walk, we’ve been in Alcossebre for seven days. We wanted to stop and clear the new year before we moved on again, to let things get back to normal (though we have discovered that the 5^th and 6^th January are possible Bank Holidays in Spain, and that they are the equivalent of our December 25^th from a childs perspective).

Another Peaky Bit

We’ve walked the rugged coast here on and off for five days, first from a campsite called Playa Tropicana which wasn’t our cup of tea. It was naff in the extreme, jammed full of little Englanders doing winter Ex-pat things, coffee mornings, sitting around watching telly ... they even had a committee and an agenda for some bullshit, and the site itself was sardine tight with a Roman statue theme (frankly I hated it). We did our two nights and then moved to our current base` Camping Ribimar’, just north of Alcossebre down a dirt track (Moho Moho has done some off-road).

A Long Walk Back Down

We’re in woods off an unmade road that runs from Alcossebre to Peniscola (Penis Cola tee hee hee) for  15 kilometres. The coast itself is a mix of tiny beaches as little as three or four metres wide; some sandy, others pebbles; from the size of a marble to the size of a football, and every size in-between. There are shelves and layers of different rocks, waiting for erosion and gravity to do their worst and collapsed sea caves.

Doesn't Really Capture the Drop After the Treeline

Inland a few hundred metres the land starts to rise to a height around 550 metres. We scrambled and yomped  520 of those metres, through valleys, then gorges and then ravines, upwards and eventually out onto a goat or donkey track made some time before dynamite blew out a road some miles south. By the way, as we are told Eskimos have lots of name for snow, or correctly types of snow, so the Spanish have lots of names for their high landscape; far more than I can explain. However someone has and here’s the link: http://www.iberianature.com/material/mountainssynonyms.html

See Just leads You On

Just a Wafer Thin Scramble

A Wide Bit with Sky

These various gullies have all been cut by the passage of torrents of water, evidenced here and there by bare rocks scoured smooth, while others higher up have been dry long enough for other slower erosive forces to rough up the sheen left by the earlier running water. In wide cracks or cracks made wide, Pine trees  grow at impossible angles, Date Palms likewise cling to places you wouldn’t expect. The Palms stunted (I think due to a lack of light), here and there Ivy grows as does Blackberry and creepers I know not the names of,  this gives the whole place a very strange atmosphere, silent for the most part, very still and dry, and yet jungle-like and prehistoric (there are a lot of wows along that track). The trees are wild grown and straight, but very thin, and not too tall outside of the deep places where it can be cold despite the broken sun shining through.

As with the drive across the high plateau, I periodically looked at the barometer readings on my watch, and at our highest point air pressure had dropped from 1014 millibars at sea level to 968 millibars at 520 metres above sea level. I also took altitude readings from the same watch, my now trusted Casio Protrek Triple Sensor Tough Solar Titanium (£350 from Watchshop.com ... other retailers are available etc).

We were three hours walking in to our highest point and nearly three hours walking back out. And now maybe we see why fruit bowl hats and cowboy boots get a mention.

In truth we weren’t as well prepared for this hike as we should have been. We didn’t take enough water and we didn’t take lunch, however in mitigation we had intended only to go as far as the first incline up to see the lay of the land for today when we planned to walk up. And let this be a lesson, them there high mysterious places lead you on, a minor foray with binoculars to see the lay of the land turned into a six hour hike with a litre and a half of water and no food, no torch, no silver blankets (in case of issues), no rope or para cord, and finally no first aid kit ... we were a tinsy bit irresponsible.

The pictures will fill in the blanks of my description.

As a child I couldn’t aspire to climb mountains, we didn’t have TV until I was probably eight years old, I had no dreams to aim for. But what I did have was the remains of a part of East London, used as a tip, bombed flat during the Blitz or left polluted by the process that turns coal into coal gas. A vast brown and green waste and wetland, a place where as a child and early teenager I would disappear into further and further, year after year with barely a breakfast in me, no water in a bottle and no real awareness of the risks. And that’s what happened on new years’ day; there was a wilderness, there is a wilderness, and in many ways so much more dangerous than the one I wandered as a child, but we lived to tell the tale despite being irresponsible, and I’m so glad we went up that hill.

The Journey

This was mostly going to be photos ... but. From Santander, through the (to our eyes) Alpine Basque region, up through the mountains and then across the cold seemingly endless plains of Northern Spain and then down onto the East Mediterranean coast and a seven day stop to allow for Christmas ... an actual holiday, there were some things a picture alone couldn't tell.

These are the voyages of the Moho, Moho.

The mountains to the North east are lush and green, there are Oaks and Alders and Poplars, Plains and Beech all doing what deciduous trees do at this time of year, namely shedding leaves and baring their branches to the winds and rains. There are conifers as well: Scots Pine, Stone Pine and Cypress (and lots of others I couldn’t begin to name without a magnifying glass and my Mitchells Guide), both wild and cultivated edging fields and highways. There are wild grown woody slopes and regimented plantations. Where these two types of wood sit on opposite sides of a highway, but on exactly the same gradient and terrain the managed woods look so odd compared to the giant broccoli covered slopes they oppose (there are very few straight lines in nature).

Santander

Out of the woods and mountains (where we nearly boiled the vans engine climbing the mountains) we crested the final hill (not that we knew it at the time), and let the Moho cool down for twenty minutes, heater and fans full on, windows wound down, engine still running. There is a strange place of transition up there, the woods peter out, the signs warning of snow or ice disappear, and the traffic thins to virtually nothing (not that there is a huge amount in the first place, just what there is, is enormous ... huge HGV’s hauling Timber and who knows what). This is the high road from Santander to Bilbao and beyond and the start of the vines. For forty miles they stretch along the road on both sides, and to the limit of your vision, a vast monoculture of grape, no trees, just rust coloured soil in great flat fields or walled terraces, home to possibly millions of stubby pruned vines. Far to the north and far to the south higher mountains capped with snow enclose and isolate this arid looking environment.

We have left Kansas

Sign telling us the Greenwich Meridian is ahead

The Greenwich Meridian in the middle of Nowhere

It was like this a lot

Really a lot

At Bilbao we managed through a foolish attempt to avoid paying tolls to get routed through the city. A long way from the transporter bridge or anything worth seeing or stopping for. We were just stuck in a commercial district, among a confusion of pedestrians, weird traffic lights, one way systems, and road works. They are doing a lot of road work in Bilbao, and the Satnav gets very confused. In the end I used the Force ... well I just bullied my way to high ground, away from the madding crowds, and in the end the Satnav found our elusive motorway, and we were off again, we’d lost an hour or more, with more than a hundred miles to go.

You can almost see the smell

Out of Bilbao, back up to the plains and vines, the Rioja region and maybe another eighty miles of grape, interspersed here and there with  fruit trees that I think may have been cherry, and wind eroded rocky outcrops. We saw huge birds of prey gyring and soaring, or hovering like our own Kestrels near the roadside, and once one flew beside us at head height to the Moho’s cab.

We eventually arrived at Cascant a tiny town with an Aire 45 miles east north east  of Zarragosa, just as the sun set, which meant the last ten minutes of the drive was done in darkness. This was our halfway point and having driven over two hundred miles we needed a walk.

We mooched the streets of Cascant in the dark, a strange mix of ancient and modern in such a small place. Streets barely a car or cart width wide, an ancient monastery castle with a cleverly designed cobbled slope with steps. A central courtyard in the oldest part of the town where five lanes met in an ancient central precinct, a crowd of people were gathering outside a church. We passed a building from which a familiar noise came to my ears, the unmistakable noise of a swimming pool, and a feint whiff of chlorine. We picked up a prepared Paella mix from a tiny Supermarket, were the locals looked at us like beings from another world. We bought fresh milk for Amanda from a street vending machine, having bought a litre bottle for it to be dispensed into from another vending machine adjacent, and then we wandered back to the van to eat and then get our heads down.

Beside us in the car park Aire were two other Motorhomes, both bearing British plates, we didn’t see the occupants. By the time we got ourselves together the following morning both were gone. Though to be fair to us, we also made an earlier start, being on the road around 9am local time. We filled up with diesel at a filling station I’d spotted the night before, and then we hit the toll road again, for another 231 miles, through more grape and later more fruit almost exclusively as we came down slowly from the plateau.

Around fifty miles from the end of the mad dash, the landscape changed as the plain started to descend to the sea properly (though the cliffs behind us are still at least 900ft tall, maybe 1200ft at the highest).

From barren seeming monoculture interspersed by rocky uncultivated plain, we started to see at first scrub, then trees ... those familiar with Spain’s Costa’s and Islands will picture a landscape and it’s trees ... that’s the one we were descending into. I noticed the Moho’s Engine noise had changed to a purr rather than a low growl. I checked my watches barometer and air pressure was back above a 1000millibar, and all the long straight sections of road seemed to be inclining down, some of them steeply, with a requirement for low gears. And then all of a sudden we came upon civilisation, cars and lorries again, intersections, bridges, viaducts, a huge refinery of some kind, railway lines and precipitous drops away from the road, and bends and switchbacks .. thankfully fenced in, giving one the psychological edge one needs to avoid straying into the lane of oncoming traffic on the opposite side of the road.

And finally we’d dropped to maybe only 300 feet above sea level, the gantry cranes of Tarragona visible above unseen docks a few miles to our east, some other heavy industry adjacent. We drove around the outskirts of Tarragona towards Hospitalet Del Infante and our final destination for now. A near empty campsite, with rolling surf when air pressure is low and that jaw dropping Mediterranean blue when calm descends again.
It’s Christmas day as I write this. Earlier the German contingent of motorhomers left on mass, leaving us and maybe five other units, to the grey day with huge rolling waves; miniatures of those you see on surfer beaches, but no less dramatic or exciting for that.

We will do as near to a traditional English Christmas dinner, including Sprouts for later today, nod to our remaining neighbours, feed our myriad feathered friends and walk the beach.

Chicken thighs wrapped in bacon, with Sweet Chestnuts and potatos (hob then oven)

For some of these things you will have to take our word, because stopping to take pictures wasn’t possible, either because we lacked a hard shoulder to pull over onto, or we were pressed for time in the headlong dash to warmer climes.