Tag Archives: Spain

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

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

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!

Cami de Cavalls day 4 – Arenal Lane*

Thursday September 16 2021 – Yesterday’s walk combined two stages and was quite long; designed, presumably, to break our spirit so that we were less likely to be a nuisance over the fortnight. Today’s, Stage 3, looked to be shorter and easier, running from Favàritx to Arenal; and we would end up at our overnight accommodation, so didn’t need a pick-up at the far end and therefore had no particular constraints on our schedule. We had, however, rashly decided, when we met the Cami360 team on Tuesday, to start the day at 0730, since that would get us out walking before the heat of the day established itself.

(As yesterday, by the way, if you want the tl;dr of the day, you can watch it in about 2 minutes on Relive.)

So it was that the 0600 alarm woke us with something of a groan, particularly when we saw that the forecast was for a much cooler day than yesterday and one that featured rain. (In the end, though, an early start was a good idea – see later.) The breakfast, like other aspects of the hotel, was workmanlike rather than fancy, but at least we managed some decent tea (because it was ours) and marmite on toast (because the marmite was ours).

David from Cami360 turned up on a schedule that the Spanish would call prompt but which we wouldn’t, quite; but given how torturous it is to navigate a big van through the tortuous narrow roads in Mahón, I guess we should cut him some slack. Anyhoo, just before 0800, in a drizzle that one hardly noticed, we were at the start – not quite at Favàritx, as the Cami360 team spared us a couple of kilometres of yomping along a boring road. So we actually got going on the track.

We passed a hedgehog plant, which is apparently a thing here in the Balearics

although it doesn’t look like a hedgehog anything like as much as something we saw yesterday which is not, apparently, a hedgehog plant. Go figure.

Generally the scenery was pretty wild

but, as yesterday, varied considerably during the day. We passed some old fortifications

and the first part of the walk generally led us up and down from cove to cove over headlands.

We saw more evidence than yesterday of the work that goes into maintaining the trail. I found this little vignette rather amusing.

I mean, it makes sense, but just looks a little odd to have a horse prohibition on a horse trail. The other end of that duckboard was even more amusing

as I couldn’t imagine getting a horse to walk on the blocks under any circumstances. These blocks were actually not uncommon today, and provided a way to cross dips which were dry, but I could imagine being difficult in wet conditions.

Other things we passed: a well;

a distant view of the substantial hill in the middle of the island, Monte Toro, Menorca’s highest point;

further evidence of track maintenance work;

and some nice views, as the landscape changed quite dramatically to salt marshes.

The rock here is very obviously sandstone, and in places has collapsed quite dramatically

and been eroded into odd shapes that look as if they’ve been artificially extruded from some giant tube.

In places it was very clear that we were right beside a river

(we were glad to find a diversion round that!). The river debouched into an inlet and we climbed a little, which gave us a nice view over the scene.

The sun even came out (we’d been lucky in that only a few drops of rain had fallen on us thus far).

And we came across the first evidence of civilisation on today’s section of the trail as we reached Addaia.

Our interactive map mentioned a cafe on our path, and we’d been quietly looking forward to a coffee and/or a beer, even though we weren’t too far from our eventual destination. Sadly, it wasn’t open. We think that’s because we were too early – it was around 1045 at this point and 1100 seemed to be the popular opening time in those parts. Serves us right for starting too early, I guess.

So, perforce, we pressed on. The official Cami route from Addaia to Arenal is entirely on paved roads and is only about 3km. Our booklet suggested a “hiker’s diversion” and the map showed a path that veered from the road towards the coast before rejoining the official Cami on the outskirts of Arenal. We decided to try this, and so ended up blundering about looking for a path in some very random scrub.

We did make it to the coast

but the path that led us back towards Arenal suddenly vanished beside a wall, so we scrambled about in a very undignified fashion trying to find a way through the scrub, and, to our credit, managed to find a way through, though a machete would have been a handy tool to have at our disposal. And so we rejoined the main Cami and got to Arenal, which is a significant town with a significant beach and a significant tourist presence to match.

We passed our overnight accommodation, the White Sands Beach Club, on our way to the official end of today’s stage. Having completed the stage, we took a sneak peek at the start of tomorrow’s walk

before retracing our steps the short distance to the White Sands.

We had something of a frisson of apprehension when the nice Dutch lady on the reception of this frankly enormous resort disclaimed all knowledge of Jane, me or Fred Holidays. It turned out that there had been some confusion in bookings and Jane’s name had been included with someone called Charlotte Hayward. Well, I hope that’s the story, otherwise Jane and I Need To Have A Conversation About This. The frisson nearly went away when the names thing had been sorted out, but then returned as it transpired that check-in time was 4pm and it was barely one o’clock at this stage – another penalty accruing from an early start. But Hiske, the receptionist, was very helpful and sorted us out a room that was immediately available, much to our relief. And the room turned out to be a suite; I have no idea where it stands in hierarchy of luxury here, but it suited us very well, with lots of room for everything and – bliss! – a kettle. With some handy little milk containers in the fridge we were able to make a Nice Cup Of Tea, which was wonderful.

We were also able to shower and change, and eventually headed out in search of lunch and a supermarket, the latter necessary because our accommodation is room-only, so we have to forage for our own breakfast. As we stumbled about trying to read Google Maps in bright sunshine to locate the supermarket, Jane spotted a restaurant called the Good Bridge Cafe, which looked to have a terrace with a great view. It was also just by a supermarket, and I notice that it’s rated #2 among restaurants in Arenal on Tripadvisor, so it was a nice piece of serendipity that took us there. After a good lunch and a couple of drinks we felt sufficiently restored to risk a trip to the supermarket, and thence back to our room for a siesta.

And that brings you up to date so far. We shall feast tonight on the ham and bread that we bought in the supermarket, and tomorrow on the bread and banana that we also bought, supplemented by copious supplies of Earl Grey tea with supermarket milk. We drain the cup of life to its dregs, we really do.

Before I go, here are the stats of the day:

  • Mileage covered – 9.62 (Garmin), 8.6 (OutdoorActive)
  • Vertical ascent 187m (Garmin – I don’t trust OutdoorActive on this)

Tomorrow’s part of the trail is going, if the booklet is to be believed, to be a little easier than today’s; and once again the trail ends at our planned accommodation; so the day will be our oyster. Thank you for reading this far; and do come back tomorrow to see how we got on?

* I thought this was quite a witty title until it got an Old-Fashioned Look from the distaff side. I explained that it is a pun on an early Pink Floyd song, “Arnold Lane”. It didn’t seem to go down that well, so I thought an explanation here might help. On the other hand, having to explain a joke rather ruins it. However pathetic, it’s the best I can do.