We leave the bubble of our Hungarian home. We made an account on TrustedHousesitters, committed to 4 homes, and are off to our first in Pescara. Our plan is to care for other people’s pets while we live in the home of the owners. House-sitting enables you to see the country from another perspective and have the heart-warming interactions with pets.
Making plans is not my strongest asset but for a short hike near the Etna all I know is that I don’t need to go to the top. Elevation stays roughly between 1400 and 2000 meter and the loop is about 37 kilometer in total. Wild camping is not really allowed but also not really forbidden. The beauty coming my way is of another planet altogether. A world I love: barren and lush at the same time.
‘Are you camping?’ asks a slightly older man who sit in the front passengers seat of an overland vehicle, cranking his body forward, shining with anticipation. ‘Yes, I am,’ is my reply and the man, who has hired a female tour guide with jeep to drive through the canyons of Tabernas is beaming, as if he much rather want to camp too, instead sits in a car. ‘Oh, that is fantastic’, he bounces back. ´It is!´ I reply in a high pitched voice. The driver guide isn’t upbeat with my answer and has a look on her face as if she just swallowed a green plum. Camping is not allowed, really, and earlier she’d threatened Alex (the homeless camper I bumped into when stealth camping) with police because he was openly making a camp fire to cook.
Reaching Abla from an unintended and quite uninteresting angle might not have been so stunning, yet I find all the groceries that I wanted in the only shop open on a Sunday morning. Very satisfied pulling the trailer stuffed to its maximum capacity I enter a café to eat scrambled eggs and coffee, the two things I can’t prepare myself.
Walking (for some time) is liberating in many ways. There’s a sudden very clear goal. It is a goal made by myself and even though it is deceptive one, it brings me incredible much joy. I have plenty of challenge and every second is new to my mind. I don’t know where I will sleep the night and to not know is pleasant. Worries arises in thin air because walls that bounces thoughts back and forth are not any longer there. Hot flashes are gone and excess energy get used up. I lack no social interaction and the balance between alone and adventurous input is just perfect. I have a loving partner to whom I can share my experiences, for social media I need not to switch on the roaming data. My social media are the people I talk to and Geo who is together with cat V.
Something hits me like a comet, a tingling uplifting feeling that a young Italian psychologist delivers, just arrived from her travel to Thailand, she’s now trying to help me.
Can the mind be mended to do a steep climb even though it haven’t climbed in years? It is just a matter of eating well, having slept nicely and wanting to do that climb. A few months ago I went along the same climb up to 1100 meter, on foot with a trailer. I want to reach that immense beautiful field of openness again, now with a bicycle. I am sure I can do it.
The tapestry of being self sufficient becomes complex. There, lilac flowers hanging to dry turning deeper purple against the wooden structure that once held corn to dry, I notice a beauty I would have admired while travelling past: now it’s where I am.
Seeing, sitting from an old barn, birds accidentally flying in while buzzing overhead from insects nestling in the wooden ceiling, I know there’s no turning back into a style that I once, and still, longed for.
I develop pinpricks in the Achilles heel and neck. Impetigo starts, a highly contagious skin infection, spreading on my hand. But most disturbing is the pain in my shin. Geo and I walk apart and have about 25 kilometer between us at the end of a day. Being a bit before Porto I feel I need a break. That means Geo has to bring himself to a halt too.
We meet in an elderly home run by Christian church that doubles as a hospital and kindergarten where also a dormitory for pilgrims is. But we can stay only one night. Geo books us a room in a private home a bit off the route for the next days and to get there is another walk through uninspiring towns. One neighborhood after the other like clay balls strung on a thread.
Long ago I was a few days in Portugal. And here I am again, much longer. And I am in a crowd of Africans, dressed in down jackets, some with slippers, some even rather fat and some also, indeed, skinny. ‘They are from Gambia, Senegal and Ghana,’ says the young Algerian doctor who left his country because of the problems he had with his boss, ‘they are from very poor countries’, he adds. He himself came by airplane and wants to become rich.
Arriving in darkness Portugal from above looks like it is filled with thick curls that glow in the dark. It are the streets, the countless lanes on hills and between that connect without much interruption. It is here we will start our 6 week walk and I wonder where I will pitch my tent in between these soft glowing lighted hills?
Cycling Cindy