Vallada to Casas de Benali – I like being…. well, just being!

You know when some words don’t look right. Do you get that? Being just looks wrong today. Like Boeing without it’s O. Bering without it’s R or Beijing without it’s etc.etc. Anyway I’m glad that God made such beauty around me. My walking environment, the Blades and my family in reverse order. I’ll sing hymns while I’m walking. 

My paternal grandfather owned a forge in Sheffield. Not as grand as it sounds, he was Little Mester rather than Master, and one of my many uncles (Grandad was prolific on the reproduction front) wrote an article in the Guardian about him when he died in the 1960’s. My Uncle worked in the forge  as a child and remembers him singing hymns as he hammered industrial scissor blades white hot from the forge. Or summat like that, memory in shotgun rather than rifle territory. When I reread that a couple of years ago, after discovering a cut out copy lurking in the loft, I was touched. But the article was entitled Double-Edged and there was a selfish and uncaring side to him too. He wasn’t a family man. 

He chewed and smoked tobacco in a pipe. When I was about five years old he gave me a wad of tobacco to take a bite out of. I pewked and had a headache for hours. I was about to say what an old bastard trick that was but I’ve just remembered feeding Juliet a spoonful of chili oil at the same age, saying it was tomato ketchup. I wet myself laughing at her distress. Some of the genetic chain is unbroken. I hope I care more and that my epitaph is more like At Least He Tried. The maternal grandfather? Words cannot be written or spoken that would adequately describe the beauty of his soul.

I was in the Hotel Makasa four days ago and a taxi took me back in the morning to where I had left off my walk the night before in Vallada. A Spanish breakfast in a busy bar and a walk past a local mini-chapel.

There must have been an air of hopelessness about my gait as the vultures circled in the sky. Big buggers they were too. But not from this distance.

It took me a while to cross the valley floor and make my way to the start of the canyon leading up into the mountains, and some of the way was a struggle round flooded patches from the recent deluge. Eventually I had to wade through a pool, getting my socks and boots wet for the rest of the day. The jungle was too thick either side for me to work through, even with my chopper ‘Harris’. 

My feet might have been wet but my eyes were delighted. The track drifted up, down and across both sides of the canyon and was mostly rough rocks building up to a strewn boulder path. 

Nobody. Nowt. Even the vultures had pushed off. Disappointed at my survival. The track up the canyon wound for at least 10 kms, twisting and turning and revealing fantastic aspects and features.

After a sweaty lifetime, my pack was peak full with food, water and what I’d brung, and the sun was out, the valley opened out with olive trees and a ruined farmhouse and the track kicked up to my right by the side of this grand arch. Duke. Ferdinand.

I struggled to climb up and escape the confines of the canyon. But it was great looking down to where I’d been and where I would have gone.

The path led further up a reasonably flat back of a long escarpment, with long distance sideways and backwards views, and then dropped steeply down the scarp.

Working down, across and up valley sides became the norm. Until a farm blocked my way. Thank God for my gps, Gav. You can’t rely on signposts. This is one of the primary walking routes across Spain, GR7, and it forms part of a pan-European route that arches through France, Switzerland, Austria etc to the southern tip of Greece. And it’s not properly signed, locals don’t know it exists and nobody walks on it. They’re too busy walking in groups of hundreds of people on pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela like I was going to before I realised how crap it is. Flat, featureless Caminos. I’d crossed the one I was planning to take earlier in the day. Earlier in the day I’d crossed the one I was planning to take. Back to the blocked way.

I climbed over the farm fence and crossed it’s land. A pack of dogs suddenly let loose and I reached for Harris in my shoulder bag. Luckily they were penned behind an inner fence. If I’d got pepper spray I could have blasted the lot. An angry young man stormed towards me but relaxed a bit when I was ok with him. He explained in Spanish that he ran an animal sanctuary and they had to fence off land to keep a wide variety of animals. The GR7 maintenance crew had come out a year before trying to cut a swathe through the woodland and scrub around the farm and he’d seen them off. He smelt. My sense of smell is poor but he stank of sweat and unwashed body parts. Dirty get. He helped me through the scrub on the outer fence and got me some water from their well. The water level here had dropped to 300 metres below the surface so I was topping up with deep supplies. Tasted great. A woman who spoke a bit of English said hello. Bet she stank too.

Just two hundred metres away the track rose up a very steep climb. It was a killer. I pulled myself up with the pack pulling me back. At one point I slipped and grabbed hold of a cactus. Kiss my tomatoes Christian! That hurt. I still can’t get all the spikes out three days later. One poor little bugger had given up half way up.

Finally I emerged out on the top ledge. A feeling of relief.

I belted it down the last three kilometres as it was going dark and found Casas de Benali to be a tiny row of terraced cottages less then 50 metres long. Two people were taking the evening air and neither knew of of any rooms locally. I traipsed up the trail and plunged thirty feet into a wood, hidden by the trees from the track, pitched my tent, had a can of cold beans and slept fitfully from 7pm to 8am. 

A long, long day and a cold, cold night. Night night.