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Cami de Cavalls day 7 – Ets Alocs less demanding than we thought

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Sunday 19 September 2021 – today had been built up as being The Big One, the Tough Day; short, only 8.63km, (or just over 5 miles in Brexit currency) with steep climbs (28%) and descents (32%), so we were a bit apprehensive about whether we’d be Found Out and have to be airlifted off in some dire emergency situation.

We also had a couple of “gently uphill” kilometres to do at the end to get to where the Cami360 folk could pick us up and whiz us to our next overnight accommodation.  Plus, it had rained very heavily during the night and didn’t immediately show signs of stopping…

There was a certain amount of dickering about the schedule, not least because of the triathlon planned for the day (which you remember from yesterday’s thrilling instalment). In fact, as we were about to leave, cyclists were whizzing past on the main road near our hotel

and our pick up was slightly delayed because of road closures in support of the event.

The practical upshot of all that bdickering was that we could only be picked up at the far end of our walk at 3pm.  So we would have a generous amount of time, 5½ hours, to complete the total 11-odd kilometres. The morning’s forecast was for cloudy and cool weather, which, frankly, suited us fine.

By the way, if you want just to see a summary of the following guff, you can watch it on Relive.

We had a robust breakfast; the accommodation might have been basic, but there was muesli for me and plain yogurt for Jane and toast and Marmite an’ everyfink. The same lass (Maria, we think) who picked us up from Binimel-là took us back there along the same horribly bumpy track

with the big difference this time being an almost total lack of cars.  When we left yesterday, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the track above was packed with cars parked along it.  Today? Not so much so.

It had stopped raining as we retraced our steps to the end of yesterday’s stage and the start of today’s

and it was, indeed, cool – and windy! We stumbled across the sandy (and, it has to be said, smelly, possibly from rotting seaweed) beach to the official start post for The Big Day.

We passed some evidence that there might have been human habitation

(though why you’d want to live somewhere with no mobile signal is beyond me), past some great rocky scenery

and came to the first steepish bit.

The view from the top was nice enough

and the path abruptly led to a complete change of scene

followed equally quickly by another.

Before too long, we came to an uphill stretch that was a lot more industrial strength

with some interesting rock formations along it.

We did actually scramble up this bit, but honesty compels me to admit that we might have missed the approved path somewhere around here, as we had to adjust our course to get back to the posts that marked the track. So that was exciting. And once we got back onto the True Path, still quite steep.

(You’ll notice that a lot of the photos today are in portrait orientation – that’s tall, rather than wide. I prefer landscape, which is the other way round, but rather a lot of the scenes needed height in the picture, as you’ll see if when you read on.)

The view from the top? Not too bad.

Once up, the path led past some interesting greenish-tinged rocks

before starting another uphill stretch.

Of course, once you get up a steep bit, what happens? You have to go down the other side. Experienced walkers (including this Walker) know that going down is often actually harder work than going up – maybe less puff needed, but more strain on bits of the anatomy such as ankle, quads and knees.

 

The goal of the path is a gate you can just about make out, far below us, at the far end of this cove.  Looking back, one can see it’s quite a steep descent.

If you look carefully at the top horizon, you can just about see a marker post telling you where the descent started.

At the gate, there is an indication of progress along the stage.

Referring back to the chart at the beginning of this screed will tell you that the previous toil was simply a warm-up and the hard work is about to begin. You’ll also have noticed, being observant types, the shadow on the sign which tells you that, yes, the sun has come out and is once again shining fit to split any paving stones it can find, accompanied by a lovely cooling (but stiff) breeze.  This meant I had to dig out the hat I’d fervently hoped not to need today. It did a good job of keeping the sun off my head, but only because I spent most of the time clutching on to it because it kept trying to blow off in the strong winds (the hat, not my head…).  Anyway, back to the mainstream of today’s symposium….

So: up we go again

and down a bit

and then up a bit more.  Quite a lot more, actually.

Once at the top, the path passes a mystery object, perhaps from the island’s Talaolitic past?

(either that, or some hikers decided to build a cairn and got a bit carried away).  We tried to find some information about it, but there was no internet, so we just carried on. And, of course, down – the track led alongside the wall in this picture.

and then down some more.

before the very last uphill pull of this part of the track.

which takes you into yet another change of scenery – farmland.

There was even a farm building; deserted, but recently-used, to judge by the fresh straw outside it.

Very soon after this, we got to the end of the stage. Phew!

(Notice that the sign says “Ets Alocs”, which for some linguistic reason far beyond my ken is different from the official name for the place, Es Alocs.  But it suited my purpose to use in the title.)

As it happens, neither of us felt that the stage was as difficult as it had been made out to be.  Yes, it was tough and steep in places (definitely not suitable for anyone with vertigo!), but it wasn’t exhausting and didn’t feel too much harder work than yesterday.

Any feelings of satisfaction about a good job well jobbed, though, were abruptly snuffed out by the knowledge that we still have over 2km to walk to get to where we could be picked up, following a forest track

along which we walked to the finish.

 

It may have been “gently uphill”, but it was not a rewarding surface to toil up in the unrelenting sun and it adds an interesting twist to the end of the day’s walking as recorded by my Garmin device.

So we ended up a little higher than one of the high points of the walk! Not only that, but we had over an hour to wait for our pick up. There was no mobile signal to contact them, but in any case it had been made fairly clear that the schedule couldn’t be altered.  So we found a shady spot to rest and eat a couple of apples while we waited.  Eventually, some 10 minutes early, Philip from the Cami360 team came along and so we were able to get to our overnight accommodation, the Aparthotel Loar, where rather pleasantly we didn’t have to explain about Ms Hayward; they were ready for us, even having our bags stored for us in a locker, and so we were able to get to a shower and some moments relaxation with minimum fuss.

Since we had an apartment room, with cooker and fridge, we were looking forward to going out to have a Nice Lunch somewhere and to buy some milk and other provisions in a supermarket. Wrapped as we were in the happy haze of Being On Holiday, we had, though, forgotten that it was Sunday.  All the restaurants shut at 4pm until 7.30 earliest, and the supermarket was closed until tomorrow. Thus we had to make do with a beer/juice (delete as appropriate) in the bar and retreated to our room to hope that the bread, butter and ham that we’d bought back in Arenal, so many, many days ago (OK, only three) was still fit for human consumption having been bumped around in a suitcase all that time. So, ham and Marmite sandwiches it was, but at least we could get some milk from the bar for a Nice Cup Of Tea, which was very welcome.

The bar was quite noisy, and the source of the din was a couple of tables of old geezers, playing cards

and dominoes – something I haven’t seen for ages!

 

Our room is perfectly nice, with a decent amount of room and a tiny balcony which gives out on to a decent view.

We’re about to go down to the bar for beer and crisps, because we know how to have a good time, but I thought I’d leave you with the stats of the day.

  • 8.26 miles walked
  • 486 metres climbed
  • Cumulative distance is therefore just over 48 miles in 5 days
  • My Garmin tells me that this stage consumed 1320 calories, which is  couple of hundred more than yesterday’s 8.35 miles. So, yes it was tougher, but yes not that much tougher.

Tomorrow’s walk sees us take on two stages, 7 and 8.  The total distance is about 15km, which means we’ll be walking 17 by the time we have to trek down to the start.  On paper it should be a little easier than today, but there’s rain in the forecast as it stands at the moment. We’ll find out as the day unfolds, and I’ll report back in these pages, where I hope you’ll join me once again.

Cami de Cavalls day 6 – Ooh-la-la, Binimel-là

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Saturday September 18 2021 –  I was expecting an easy day today – not too far, not too high – and the early light seemed to augur favourably.

The weather forecast was a bit uncertain.  The UK Met Office promised sunshine, the Spanish equivalent suggested that rain was in the offing; but in any case the temperature was due to be a bit lower than some of the roasting of our first couple of days.

We had the Breakfast of Kings, or, rather, perhaps that of minor despots of unimportant fiefdoms. But Marmite figured, as did toast and Earl Grey tea, and some Proper Yogurt for Jane; and since we were due to stay in this hostal for a second night tonight, we didn’t even have the hassle of packing before we were able to set out at, as usual, 9am.  A minor difference from yesterday – we have a target destination and time: Binimel-là and 1300, giving us four hours to cover some seven miles, which should give us time for a beer at the far end before the Cami360 folk arrive to whisk us back here.

As usual, if you have only a couple of minutes to spare, instead of reading my deathless prose, you can see a summary of the walk on Relive.

So it was that we started again just back down the road to where we left off yesterday

along a paved cycle/pedestrian track.

We got a different viewpoint of the Mystery Building,

showing the farm buildings behind it, which gives credence to there being a farm shop there. We also passed some somewhat exotic trees…  Dragon trees maybe…?

Just down the road is the town of Platges de Fornells, which is another of the many tourist outposts on the island.

In the foreground you can see some keen bean two-wheelers, who were either Saturday cyclists or who were practising for a half-triathlon to be held tomorrow (see later).  Eventually, we turned off the road towards the town’s beach and passed a group of German tourists, who were having some aspects of the Cami explained to them.

It was a slightly surreal experience to hear German spoken in a Spanish accent, the first time I’ve particularly noticed this.

There was a walkway up to the beach

which appears to be a fine example of its kind (I say this as definitely a non-expert, though)

and then a walkway down

so that one can stumble awkwardly across the sand to the point where the path leaves the beach again. You get a nice view back over Platges de Fornells (indeed the view is of very little else for quite a while)

and the path is a wide track at this point.

However, it soon gets much steeper

(an e-bike won’t help you here, mate!)

as it leads past a view of a lighthouse at a point called Cavalleria

(a detour from the track is on offer – 2.7km up a road to see a lighthouse and 2.7 back again – we declined the opportunity)

and some interestingly-striated rocks on the ground. These have rather obviously fallen from above

taking bits of fence with them, and there are warning signs about the danger.

To misquote Michael Flanders, “there’s not much you can do about it – keep your hat on”, I suppose.

The trail ends at a road, where you can turn right to waste minutes of your life walking along  road in baking hot sun to see a lighthouse, or you can turn left, past a nice view, overseen by a watchtower

to get to a beach at Cavalleria, which (it being a Saturday) was very popular

but also featured a kiosk which provided us both with welcome ice-creams as we paused for a moment.

There was a touch of irony here, in fact double irony.  We are at this point on the Cami de Cavalls – the horses’ trail – and at a beach called Cavalleria (obvious horse reference in the name) and yet

horses are not permitted here.  Frankly, I’m not sure I’d want to try to get a horse up or down the steps, but I permitted myself a chuckle at this point.

There is a nice view of the rocky coastline along the last couple of miles of the trail to our pick-up point,

and some beaches where topless sunbathing is not unusual, as is nude bathing

which would probably suit anyone interested in seeing free willy. We moved swiftly on towards the end point of the trail, which involved, yes, going up another hill and round a headland

and through some rather bare countryside

before giving us a glimpse of our eventual end point – the restaurant at Binimel-là, where we could treat ourselves to a beer whilst awaiting pickup from the Cami360 folk.

I had been expecting the day’s walking to be similarly light to yesterday’s, and it definitely wasn’t.  It was a bit longer (8.35 miles as opposed to 6.8), but involved somewhat more climb (255 metres as opposed to 140) and some much steeper scrambles.  This is probably a good thing, because tomorrow’s walk is tougher still: shorter than today’s but with twice as much vertical ascent and even steeper sections, according to our trail booklet.  It also has no restaurants or anything along its length, so if you come back to the blog tomorrow, you can have a good laugh at our discomfiture as faithfully reported by your correspondent.

Anyway, today’s 8.35 miles means we have now covered a smidge over 40 miles in the four days we’ve been on the trail. Just so you know.

The restaurant at Binimel-là looks an imposing place, and it has great service and beer so delicious that I felt the need for two large ones; but it has no wifi and there’s no mobile signal.  So when our Cami360 pickup didn’t materialise at one o’clock, we were in a bit of quandary.  In the end, a lass with a van turned up at 1.30, which is almost on time by the standards of these here parts, and took us back to our hostal – along, it has to be said, a very lengthy and bumpy access track before reaching normal roads.  It seems odd to me that the beach at Binimel-là is so very popular and yet so inconvenient to get to – an unusual case of a popular tourist destination with practically no local exploitation.  Thank heaven for the restaurant and its beer pump, then.

After the necessary shower and siesta back at base, we set out into Fornells with the intention of having a Hairy Crab lunch.  Fortunately, there was a table spare and we had a lovely meal in cool comfort whilst being able to see the harbour and watch the people in the sunshine – a very nice interlude. Once we’d finished, Jane we decided to pop along into the village proper to have a look at the preparations going on for a half-triathlon due to happen tomorrow. It looks like there are over 500 participants, so it’s quite a big deal, and explains, possibly, the large number of cyclists we’ve seen on the roads hereabouts.  They’d set up a long corridor where the cyclists could pick up their numbers

store their bikes with the front wheels in washing-up bowls (WHY?)

and get their bikes sorted out.

One chap doesn’t even appear to have unwrapped his new bike yet; I do hope he’s happy with it when he leaps on it tomorrow

and another was so in love with his that he was sharing a hotel room with it in our hostal.

Anyway, all the best to the participants tomorrow, even if they have comprehensively buggered up our original plans for the day. Several roads are closed at inconvenient times (bloody cyclists!) and so although our pick up is at the usual 9am, we’ll probably spend a lot of time waiting for them to open roads so we can bump our way back to Binimel-là in order to restart.  The Cami360 folk have done their best to work out a new schedule and we hope it’ll work out well. As I say, it’s looking to be a very tough day tomorrow, so you can come back for a giggle at our suffering if you stay tuned to the blog.  See you then!

Cami de Cavalls day 5 – Salines Solution

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Friday September 17 2021 – A day of relative ease beckoned: a leisurely start; reportedly easy walking; and no dependency on anyone else for logistical support, so we could start when we liked. Add to that the great facilities at our disposal at the White Sands Beach Club – a kettle and a toaster – and our start could be on the basis of a decent breakfast. Ah, life’s good!

The forecast was for slightly changed weather than we’d had thus far. Instead of 28-30°C and cloud, we were promised 25°C and bright sunshine. We thus thought it would still be worth getting out at a reasonable hour and so were on our way just after 9am, with less than 10km to cover to our next stop, in a small town called Ses Salines. As ever, if you can’t bear to read my guff, you can invest just two minutes of your life in watching the Relive summary of the day.

It was with regret that we left the White Sands, as it had been so nice to have unfettered access to such luxuries as a mug of Earl Grey whenever needed. But we wended our way out of the resort

and were soon on the Stage 4 track, in sunshine fit to crack the paving stones, as promised.

We were overtaken by some show-offs fit young things going for a run on the track and they must have got lost or something because they passed us coming back as well.

We reached a very odd thing, which was a decision point which didn’t feature a Cami marker post.

Intuition suggested that we take the right fork, staying by the cliff, and eventually we were proved right with a marker post some couple of hundred metres further on; the first time that the correct way hadn’t been very clearly marked, actually.

We reached a town called Ses Fonts, a pleasant place which seemed to be mainly a tourist area, as there was an exit road clearly marked, and it wasn’t itself en route to anywhere.

It had what looked like a well-maintained “Parc Forestal”

with a kids play area, and various areas for various activities and trails for things like “footing”, whatever that actually means. There was a seniors’ trail as well, and we speculated that this either meant frequent seats or gin dispensers round the course.

We cleared Ses Fonts and got back off tarmac on to tracks, past a sewage farm

(all of life can be found in this blog if you look hard enough), and along a stony uphill track through woodland. Some cyclists came down it with a dog, but common sense overtook them and they got off and walked a while as this was clearly safer.

The rocky path carried on

past a disused house

before the scenery morphed into much more open countryside, with, once again, a view of the island’s high point, Mount Toro, in the distance.

We felt we’d earned a short rest at this point, so stopped for an apple break before moving on. The track passes the site of the Paleochristian church basilica of Es Cap des Port.

In the photo above you can just see the covering over the baptistry, which looks like this

with steps down into an immersion chamber. Apparently the church (discovered in 1958) has been disused since the 7th century.

The trail continued through some very pretty scenery.

At one stage we saw some very nicely-done modern drystone wall construction, with some lovely patterns among the stones used

with, just beyond it for comparison purposes, an older stretch of wall

and, a bit further on, an Inca-style set of steps built into the wall, to make it easy to climb over.

Shortly thereafter we came to tarmac, which led, via about 2.5km of rather unrewarding walking on a busy road, to the end of our day on the trail.

We noted an interesting decoration on a roundabout

and some handsome properties by the waterside.

Eventually, the road bears left, as does the Cami de Cavalls trail,

but our destination was straight on to Ses Salines and our overnight accommodation. There’s a mystery building high above the road to Ses Salines

We don’t know if such a grand place could be just a cheese factory, and it doesn’t appear to show up on Google Maps, so we’re not sure what it is. But it’s an impressive-looking establishment, and it actually figures in the view from our accommodation, which is the Hostal Port Fornells. This bills itself as a(nother) family-run establishment, and it’s fairly basic, but our room is quite large, has a balcony and is spotlessly clean. The place has a lovely garden with some striking flowers.

As at White Sands, there was some confusion about the booking and the name of Charlotte Hayward came up again, to further fuel my suspicions about the distaff side. It turns out the mysterious Ms Hayward is the booking agent for Fred Holidays, under whose aegis we are in Menorca, and looking into the details of the booking reveals our names; so we know how to avoid confusion in future. We hope.

A nice little vignette happened when we handed over our passports to Daniel, the chap behind the registration desk. He beamed and said “Ah, you’re English! It’s so nice to have English people back again!”

Sadly, events had overtaken the Cami360 team and some last-minute scheduling changes meant that we had made it to Ses Salines some two hours before we could expect our baggage. So there was nothing for it but to head into Fornells, a fishing town about a mile down the road, for some lunch.

The walk took us past some rather attractive rustic fencing

and a traditionally- but, we think quite recently-built well

into Fornells, which is a real fishing village, based upon real fishing. It features a restaurant well-known across the island, called the Cranc Pelut, which is Catalan for Hairy Crab. Lobster stew and paella are among its specialities, apparently.

We near as a toucher took lunch there, but decided to walk on to re-acquaint ourselves with Fornells, to which we’d had a flying visit a couple of years ago. It’s a very attractive place.

and as one would expect, it features many many seafood specialist restaurants. We decided to lunch at El Pescador, and a very fine lunch it was, too; slightly eccentric service, but delicious food.

After lunch we wandered across to the other side of the harbour, where we found a very strange object.

We’re really not sure what this is trying to tell us. One of the other faces is a standard sundial, though.

That side of the harbour is the mooring point for many more fishing vessels, and some of them are dedicated to catching for restaurants in the town.

You can see one of Es Cranc’s several boats in this picture, for example.

Thus, full of lunch, we tottered back to the hostal, where our bags awaited us. The rest of the day has been spent furiously relaxing and working out what the schedule is for tomorrow. The day promises to be about the same intensity as today’s, i.e. quite light, but we have to rendezvous with the Cami360 people to be picked up and brought back for another night here, so we will not be quite as carefree as today.

The stats for today – 6.8 miles covered, and 140 metres vertical. (Our running total, or rather our walking total, ha ha, is now at 31.92 miles for the 3 days of the Cami so far.) Tomorrow will be comparable. The day after that, though, is likely to be a savage one so we’re just starting to psych ourselves up for it. Stay tuned to the blog and you will find out how things go!