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Cami de Cavalls day 3 – First day of walking; our Favàritx Thing

Wednesday September 15, 2021 – Well, This Is It. Today, we started walking the first stage of 20 over 13 days which will take us round the island – if we survive, of course. It is one year and two days since we started our Camiflage walks, the exercise of trying to recreate in Surrey the walks we couldn’t do in Menorca due to the pandemic.

If, by the way, you can’t bear the idea of reading through the following screed about what we did and saw today, and if you’re prepared to spend 3 minutes watching a video, then the tl;dr can be viewed on Relive. You’ll see the route and some photos, but you’ll get more information by staying with me here.

To sum up: we had to walk 20.37 km between Mahón and Favàritx, over hill and dale with a vertical gain of some 450m – and we had to get to the end by 3.30pm, as this was the time we’d agreed to be picked up by the Cami360 folk to take us to our accommodation for the next stage. The hotel breakfast started at 8am so we took as early a breakfast as we could and then Got on With It.

The start, as I mentioned before, was at the Three Horses statue by the convent, and we’d researched the first few metres of the route, making sure we were aware of signposts and such.

The route took us past a view of the industrial end of Mahón harbour

past caper bushes embedded in stone walls

and out on the road north of the town. The first several kilometres of the route were on paved roads, which was a but dull, but the views were OK. For example, we got a good sight of Mahón from the north side of the harbour

and a look at the back end of Golden Farm.

We wound our way along the road, occasionally spying mysterious things in the distance

before arriving in Sa Mesquida, which is a town with a popular beach, but also some nice residences.

Some convenient benches

gave us a chance to look over the place

and we eventually discovered the mysterious object.

We couldn’t get close to it, but it looks like it was once a watch tower, similar to those found all over the island.

Mesquida has a popular beach,

and also marks the point where the trail leaves paved roads. From this point, the marking is done via posts.

and the surface becomes a lot rougher.

(The posts are very well-placed. Above you can see one in the foreground and if you look carefully, you can see the next one. It actually takes no little skill to get lost because the trail is so well-marked.)

The trail winds up and down

(occasionally very steeply up – see later) and can be very rocky. The purity of the air is attested to by the existence of some very colourful lichen on the rocks.

As I said, the trail is very clearly marked, occasionally passing through traditional-style bentwood gates.

I don’t want to bore you, but actually some of this trail was really quite steep

(20% according to the booklet) and overall the going was somewhat tougher than I’d expected. In theory, we’d covered pretty much exactly this mileage and ascent in one day in Surrey a year ago; but here, on rocks and tree roots, in 30 degree heat, it just seemed rather a lot harder going. So it was with considerable relief that we reached the mid-point of the day’s trekking.

The Cami goes left at this point, but we headed straight on into a town called Es Grau in search of beer and lunch. I’m glad to report that we were successful, and, much refreshed but feeling we had to get on with it to make our 1530 deadline, we headed back to the track to get on with the next bit – officially Stage 2 of the Cami, from Es Grau to Favàritx.

The first part was on a very different surface – almost like a forest trail

leading past a lagoon.

into some weird woodland

and eventually offering a nice view back over Es Grau.

We got our first sight of our finishing point for the day

which was the lighthouse at Favàritx (you can see another watch tower in the foreground). From here, the track wended up over headlands and down into coves and beaches.

through some rather blasted scenery

past some actual cavalls (whose copious product could be found, piled up on the path by some unknown force)

past tantalising glimpses of our lighthouse destination – closer, ever closer –

through more weird woodland

past mysterious government-sponsored things hanging off trees (moth traps?)

to the end (phew!) of today’s part of the trail.

All we had to do was to walk to the lighthouse (which began to seem a long way away at this point, although it was probably only one kilometre on a paved road) but eventually we reached it

and got to our pickup point

with about five minutes to spare before our official pickup time, which is either brilliant planning or a source of considerable relief, depending on your view point. Anyway Juan Gabriel (“Juanga”) from Cami360 turned up bang on time and drove us to our overnight accommodation. En route we asked him whether they were very busy, and he said that they really were: they had to manage 40 groups of people doing the trail in various places. That’s a lot of co-ordination; let’s hope they carry on as well as they’ve started.

Our accommodation was actually back in Mahón – a fairly basic hostel, Hostal La Isla. It describes itself as being “family run”, and the practical upshot is that a single person runs the reception and the bar – he whole place, in fact. It is not at all fancy, but at least it has a lift to get us and our bags to the second floor, even if the timer switch on the corridor gives out before you can get from lift to room, leaving you in utter darkness. Once inside, you discover that the room is almost entirely taken up by bed; but it was at least spotlessly clean and the cramped space was quite well-organised. And since we were fair knackered by this stage it didn’t really matter. To validate our tiredness. let me bore you with some stats.

Garmin Connect says we walked 15.6 miles, or 25km. OutdoorActive says 14.2 miles, or just under 23km. The Cami 360 book says 20.37km and we did a few detours. Whatever, it was quite long enough, thank you.
Garmin says we ascended 449 metres, much more than OutdoorActive’s 1000 feet. The official datum is 475 metres. Whatever it was, it felt tough.

We showered and rested a bit and then pottered out for some tapas before an early night, because we have agreed to be on the road again early tomorrow; the Cami 360 guys will take us back to Favàritx so we can carry on our trek round the island. So, please come back to the blog so you can see how we got on. See you then!

Cami de Cavalls Day 2: Way Navigation

1. Hotel breakfasts in a pandemic world

We went downstairs to the hotel’s breakfast room, which was deserted except for one chap, sitting at a table. It was encouraging to note that he had breakfasty sort of things in front of him, because there was no other clue that we were in with a chance of sustenance – many tables and chairs, no evidence of food or drink. It eventually struck us that Covid precautions meant that laying out a buffet breakfast was, of course, Not The Done Thing These Days.

Trusting that something ought to happen, we sat down and sure enough a lady came from the kitchen with basically a breakfast menu for us to select our food. The service was obliging and the tea was Earl Grey (very important!) but the breakfast itself was rather sparse – a very small bowl of cereal, two small slices of toast for me; some fruit (very good, apparently) and small pots of granola and yoghurt for Jane. This serves us right for only asking for one portion of things, so tomorrow will be very different and may well result in the staff asking us if we’re having a laugh wanting that number of servings of toast; we shall see. However, alongside the Earl Grey we could be sure that there was some corner of a foreign restaurant that was forever England:

I remembered to pack the Marmite!

2. Shopping

This small but perfectly formed breakfast consumed, we headed out to buy supplies. The original idea was to get ourselves some gin (the local, Xoriguer, gin is is much to our taste), but we decided against this as the likelihood of finding ice when we needed it was going to be slight. From our previous visit, we knew there was a supermarket situated, non-intuitively, underneath the convent.

So we confined ourselves to buying some apples, for sustenance on our walking, and sunscreen.

The convent has some lovely cloisters, now home to market shops.

and outside it is a convenient square where one can take coffee. So we did.

3. Understanding how to navigate our way round the island

It seemed a good idea at this point to understand some of the details of navigating the Cami – finding the “start” (it’s a loop, so this is a notional notion) and working out at least the first few yards so we didn’t look like utter tourists tomorrow morning. It turned out that where we were taking coffee was exactly at the start, by a statue of three nags

(appropriate, I guess, for a route called the “horse trail”). Then, based on our meeting with the Cami360 folk the previous evening, we looked for the next waymark, and eventually spotted it on a signpost.

While reassuring, this wasn’t, in and of itself, a lot of use: the two bands set like that tells one that the trail lies straight ahead (as opposed to right or left), but since the bands were entire rings round the post, this didn’t help a lot in directing us further. However, eagle-eyed Jane spotted another marker which gave us a clue as to how to start; and it became clear that there were plenty of markers to help along the way.

So now we feel more confident about navigating in the town; and there are waymarks of differing sorts around the rest of the island; very reassuring. Almost as reassuring, in fact, as the interactive map we found which shows us not only the trail itself, but also useful nearby points, e,g, cafes.

3. Strolling the town and finding lunch

After dropping off the shopping at the hotel, we eventually set out for a stroll to find lunch, and, en route, to re-acquaint ourselves with Mahón, which is very photogenic.

and provides the odd occasional charming vignette, such as this relaxed approach to WFH.

We passed the fish market, which was open and displaying a variety of fish that would bewilder many English restaurant chefs.

We decided to head out once again along the harbour, as there was a restaurant there, Latitude 40 (warning – Facebook page only), that we remembered fondly from our previous visit. En route there we passed the local version of the Little Mermaid, called Sirena Mô.

You can read her story here.

The lunch was a delight. Jane had tuna steak with wasabi and white chocolate sauce which was wonderful (I was unadventurous and had a steak on the basis that this might be less easy to get hold of in the more remote parts of the island).

After such a thorough lunch experience, further walking was needed to settle things down, so we carried on out of the town beside the harbour.

A little further on, there’s an interesting staircase which provides a major dilemma for photographers, because it’s almost – almost – dead symmetrical. So, do you capture the symmetry of the stairs

but have the annoyingly off-centre screw at the top (no schoolboy giggling at the back!)? Or do you centre the screw

which screws up the rest of the symmetry? Oh, how I suffer for my art!

We carried on along the harbourside to the point where we could rejoin the Cami de Cavalls route as it ends, back in the town. This took us down my favourite street in Mahón, Camina Es Castell (so named from the village it leads to/from).

I love the trees that run down the middle – this makes the road completely unique in my experience and I think it’s wonderful. One can also note that the locals have the same relaxed attitude to supplies of mains electricity that so marked out many places we visited in South America.

Nice architectural flourish, dodgy wiring!

And so we came back to the square where we started the day’s perambulations

and thence to our hotel, the Sant Roc. It takes its name from the street it’s on, which, in turn, takes its name from the city gate at the top.

and very much has hexagonal close packing as a design motif.

as well as a stunning 17th-century clock in its reception area.

4. Understanding the importance of The Season

When we visited two years ago, we came at the beginning of October, and it became clear to us that The Season ended in September. The bus service from Mahón to the rest of the island was drastically reduced from its summer levels; some restaurants were closed; and the evenings, whilst lovely and warm, were quiet. This time, whilst walking around, the evening atmosphere was utterly different.

Early evening sustenance was in the form of tostada con sobrasada, a Balearic speciality; spicy sausage meat, honey and cheese on toast (the “Talaolithic Sandwich” from last night!). This and beer in the cathedral square

was followed by a walk through the Tre Cavallis square, where a Mercat de Nit was in full swing

to a terrace overlooking the harbour, which was also very popular, for a G&T.

As the evening darkened, the buzz grew. Like all of these areas, the terrace remained popular,

the fish market was a happening place,

and the buzz on cathedral square gave a delightful evening atmosphere.

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It’s delightful to see that despite the pandemic the town is popular and busy. It will be interesting to see how this translates to the rest of the island as we start our walk tomorrow. Keep coming back for updates, and join us on our journey as we walk the Cami de Cavalls.

Cami de Cavalls – Day 1: understanding what we’ve let ourselves in for

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Monday September 13 2021. Well, what a day it’s been!

Re-acquainting ourselves with so many barely-remembered experiences: flying from Gatwick Airport; EasyJet flight being on time; the geography of Mahón, the capital; the glorious warmth of a Balearic city in late summer. And new experiences – finding out what we’ve let ourselves in for; and a Talaolitic sandwich inter alia.

So, to recap: my wife, Jane, and I are actually doing what we’d planned to do 12 months ago, having discovered the delights of Menorca, but which had been mullocated by the pandemic: to walk around the outside of the island – 185 kilometres on a trail called the Cami de Cavalls – the “horse trail”, recognising that one can ride around the island’s periphery. Apparently one can do this on a bicycle these days, though goodness knows why you might actually think this is a good idea.

The first part of such a holiday is, of course, the domestic fluttering about that attends being away for the better part of three weeks: running the food supplies down, figuring out milk orders to ensure we can have a cuppa before leaving and dealing with the uncertainty of going to The Foreign where we don’t necessarily understand the Covid rules. Spain (including the Balearics) is on the UK Amber List, and both Jane and I have had our full complement of injections so far, so the theory is that the pandemic admin for the travel bit of this will be no different actually from our recent trip to Iceland. There’s always the frisson of doubt that it might all go pear-shaped at the last minute in the mix of emotions that attends the complexities of international travel these days.

In the event, everything about the travel went perfectly, with only one exception. Anyone who knows us will clearly understand that a glass of champagne in the departure lounge is an important part of our departure on holiday. To my utter horror, I discovered that Gatwick’s North Terminal doesn’t feature a Caviar House & Prunier bar. The South Terminal would, if it were open, but it isn’t at the moment. So we simply scheduled a taxi to the airport to give us time for check in and security.

(Note to travellers: there are various maps online of Gatwick’s North Terminal; I can’t find one that reflects reality. As we were heading to our gate, we passed an establishment called “Juniper & co” which would appear to have been able to dispense bubbles had we but known about it; but it’s not shown on any map that I could find online.)

All of the above whinging is the reason that I was not able to share a photograph of fizz on the way out; I apologise to all my social media friends for letting them down. Anyway, we didn’t leave enough time. The queues in Gatwick were not oppressive, but they were a bit slow-moving, so by the time we’d dropped our bags, gone through security and bought sandwiches for the flight, it was time to head to the gate. The flight itself was, like almost all of them these days, crash-free; we arrived slightly before schedule and were being deposited outside our hotel (from a very posh Merc) some 30 minutes later, which is pretty good.

The hotel Sant Roc is a boutique hotel and has some lovely features, which I’ll show later; but the room is not a lot larger than the bed, which doesn’t encourage lazing around. So we headed out fairly pronto to meet the Cami 360 folks who are primarily responsible for directing us as we walk around the island. Their office is in a road called Cala Sant Esteve, which I find mildly amusing.

I suppose it’s bleeding obvious if you think about it in any detail, but given that this outfit are co-ordinating multiple groups on their various journeys along a 185km trail, there’s quite a lot of complicated planning that has to be undertaken. We knew in advance that they would take our main baggage from overnight stop to stop for us and that we would stay in various hostelries around the island; but, of course, there’s a lot of picking people up and dropping them off involved. They explained this to us, and for planning purposes we had to make some guesses about how long each section would take us so they knew when we would arrive at pickup points. And that’s when a small dose of reality hit: we are going out in hot weather to walk a long distance and we need people to help us, when we haven’t really got much of a clue as to the details of what’s involved. Happily, the Cami360 folks are used to dealing with this and provided detailed maps, booklets and a WhatsApp group so that we could (a) have a clearer idea of what’s involved from day to day and (b) call for help if all of a sudden our plans changed. It seems a pretty impressive organisation so far: we have some 13 days to find out how good their execution is in the face of bumblers like me.

After this, we headed out for some evening sustenance, and found ourselves seated outside a very buzzy joint which did very basic burgers and such;

and on the menu was a “Talaolitic Sandwich” (you’ll have to read back on our previous blog to understand the significance of this). Actually it was just a toasted sandwich with spicy sausage, cheese and honey and it was delicious. Not quite sure why it could be associated with the stone age, though.

After such a meal, it was only right that we wander round the town to settle things down a bit, so we walked out along the harbour – one of the largest natural harbours in the world, you’ll remember – and then up to the cliff above to take in the view back, which is quite something.

Our hotel is just by the cathedral, and the square outside features several restaurants which gave the place a happy, warm mediterranean buzz.

We have a day of leisure in Mahón tomorrow (shopping for essentials such as gin and tonic) before we start the walk proper on Wednesday. Do keep in touch with the blog and you can see how things unfold.