eBiking Asturias to Pola de Somiedo on day 16 cycle touring northern Spain

I can't really pick a favorite day for my whole tour of Northern Spain but if I was this might be one of them from the coast of aoria starting off at my hotel here to the PO soda National Park uh a Funny Story coming out of the hotel is the proprietor who didn't have any English I very little Spanish came out and was shouting something at me and I worked out she was actually trying to tell me the Cino route was running in the opposite direction she presumed that was it the rail line we're passing under here has a train station just off to the left however one looked at the timetable there's only one train a day that goes there and it says no bicycles uh on it so I don't know how that relates to the rest of that line but you know it might mean you need to get off earlier it's a very rural stop in the middle of nowhere H so today's basically a day of mountain cycling I'm flipping over from One River Valley into another because that's the way I planned it months ago and then flipping back again that's the hard way of doing it because it means you've got to climb over the passes on each side ever uh it was as I think you'll agree very worthwhile uh we're going down these River Gorges that have cut through the mountains the mountains on uh either side are steep when we get further into the mountains uh but here you've got these big kind of meadow Plains and apparently that's where a lot of aerian beans are are grown and we'll talk about those in a minute or rather towards the end of that video because that's what my dinner is going to be so this region I'm cycling to today is home of the vura of vura the aalda people uh and basically there are population a nomadic population that practice a form of transhumance uh and that's basically where in the summer you're up in the mountains uh with your cattle normally and then in the winter you come down to the lowlands and the coast and you spend the winter there and apparently uh some of them will migrate up to 100 kilometers uh between those two seasons some of them all the way down to the borders of the province of Leon on the other side of the mountains up to 50 families are currently involved in this practice although I'm not sure the word families is the most accurate translation I suspect it might be closer to Clans I.E extended families in doing it and the sense you have reading the tourist information that this was probably once a quite excluded population H it there's various references in terms of the way it's written up but in more recent years uh the authorities have realized there's a tourist potential to it and so they are being promoted as such a fairly common experience I think of a lot of mountain dwellers uh all over the planet where they're kind of seen as difficult and then they become something that useful in the mo terms of modern day Society uh day 16 uh I was nervous about the start of today because it was on one of the main roads for 20 km but are now 18 km of on that I'm just in a la by here um and I was cycling this at morning rusher there's almost no traffic on it whatsoever so uh yeah that Motorway that's nearby has obviously taken all the traffic office uh you can sort of tell from the construction a lot of effort went into building it there just long sections where they've dynamited the hillside uh to run the road through um so I've come across a few of these main roads here so I guess they must have had a big road building program I know maybe back in the 70s and then that was followed by a big Motorway program uh which has left all these main roads to the mountains that are excellent um a little bumpy they're probably not maintained very much but uh there's not much traffic apart from local delivery lores the OD timari course they're a bit scary because the the trailers and everything and then a few cars nipping up and down but uh yeah big day today 93 km 1,700 M of climbing first tough day I think in about 4 and so see how much I've actually recovered from those um and it's actually pretty intense from here for the next six or seven days back to B ba well the the last day is okay it's only 50 km but there's a lot of mountains and a lot of distances coming up in terms of the tourist information about the vurus let me give you a couple of samples uh the described as a social group that marked the life of this region since ancient times with nomadic sense of existence the cattle imposed their times and places in the summer life was spent in the mountain passes and grazing areas of the mountain passes and with the arrival of cold weather the return to the winter Villages quite a romantic kind of synopsis there H now here's the bit that I noticed the way of life and the fact that they were constantly related to each other LED them to to live excluded from the social structure of the group settled in the agricultural areas the vurus are still identified today by their surnames and even by their physical features and their culture is one of the great intangible heritages of the region that adopts their name every year at the end of July the fiesta vura is held in the barana of aaban and it's declared a festival of tourist interest so I think that gives a fairly neat summary of what I'm talking about the festival sounds interesting though on this day a wedding is held in accordance with cowboy ritual and custom the bride and groom arrive on Horseback and in oxd drawn carts carry the belongings they bring to the marriage such as the bed alluding to fertility the bride's trero showing her family's capacity her DIY and the groom's riding gear accompanied by bag Pipers and A procession the wedding is ascended and celebrated the traditional food empanados chooon nastas washed down with wine and cider dancing to the sound of bag pipes drums and a pandero which I don't know what that is but also the pale an instrument that resembles an iron frying pan with a long tail and singing for curus complete this day I mean that definitely sounds like like a festival that would be well worth H going to and perhaps there's some resemblance to some Irish ones like Pok fair so just had one of those navigation things that uh I stick a picture basically brought me down this track here pass The Farmhouse with the dog I was approaching another Farmhouse with a dog and I could see a sign saying private no entry and the track just turned into you know real dir track from that point on I've come back up and I think this road will connect through I'm a bit nervous though because uh uh there's a this is a long day with lots of climbing so I have to watch the battery and I'm worried I'm going to go down a big descent and not be able to get back up again the other side but we'll just have to see how this works out so the one navigation issue I had with this trip overall was cycle travel was sending me on some very short unnecessary and very hilly detours around villagers and with great relief this is the other end of that road here coming out so it did rejoin it and I will be able to make it through hopefully that just makes me so nervous now that I was complaining there I probably should restate uh that I've done almost no planning whatsoever on these days so this is day 16 of the route the first few days I kind of looked at it in much detail but by day 16 I'm basically just picking where I'm starting I'm picking the place I'm ending and I'm to totally trusting cycle travel to come up with the roof between the two uh for me so really on that basis are visiting somewhere I've never been before not having a clue how the road networks even work uh and all that it does a really really good job uh the one uh it's not even a failing but basically because it prioritizes keeping you on quiet roads sometimes it send you off on very short detours of Roads running straight through the center of a village that are actually quite hard to cycle on but once you get the hang of that you kind of spot them coming up and you can make a decision to actually go on them or not uh retrospectively I mean I think the amazing thing for me about this trip was just how uh stunning it was and how little actually really went on sorry went wrong in terms of the route navigation on it uh we will see now in a couple of days uh I run into problems where there's been Rock slides over winter and um some routs have been closed and that ends up being some very big detours but really that's the only significant issue I had and to be honest uh the beauty of an awful lot of The Quiet back roads that I got to cycle but I probably would not have cycled any other way even you know I could imagine trying to do this manually with paper maps might have taken me forever if I got around to it at all um so this is kind of the only way I could have done it I think uh and really I was very happy indeed and satisfied with the results H so here we're right up among the the um wind farms uh whenever you see the wind farms you know you've reached the peak of a ridge great views from up here looking down into the valley and I could see there was heavy rain falling if you've been following uh all of these uh day byday Vlogs and this is the 16th you'll know on day 15 I got absolutely soaked cycling the coast of aorus where it just rained solidly on me for about 3 hours so when I had set off this morning I had managed to dry everything out overnight but only just was quite nervous going into the mountains that I was going to see a repeat of that rain and particularly when you're doing mountain passes the last thing you want to do is hit uh both heavy rain and strong winds that can make it difficult to Impossible particularly if you don't really know where you're going anyway H but no it was fine today I saw some rain in the distance but really in fact then I was getting a lot of sun and as we'll see later that became the bigger concern in terms of trying to avoid getting sunburnt uh it's easy enough on these roads because you don't feel it's terribly hot uh you're getting the wind from cycling you're quite high up it's probably here I think I'm probably around 700 M uh as I as I'm coming back down the other side of this Ascent uh so it it's not warm it's probably about 20° uh I was probably wearing my very thin uh rainproof jacket and I wore that a lot of the time not because I thought it was going to rain but because I realized actually it was a very good Factor 50 sun protection that I didn't have to keep reapplying uh and most of the time until you got in the afternoon you weren't going to be overheating with us so there's probably a pretty good top tip there H but yeah that that was where I'm going I'm coming down to the forest so the forest here are probably Oak uh and then you're hitting areas of Plantation that are eucalyptus um there's a lot of eucalyptus plantations in the Spanish mountains at this stage I talked about that in relation to Galia but it's also true and aerious but then there are also remnants pockets of chestnuts these were edible chestnuts and they would have been harvested once but a lot of that land is now abandoned so they're used for uh wood production but but nobody's really harvesting the chest nuts anymore I think it's probably too labor intensive H and now so we're coming down into my one of the major town stops of the day uh which is this pretty little um medieval town uh Salas that's sitting on the Camino primero I think runs through it it's running down and then across the mountains and it's got several old medieval buildings that are worth stopping and having a look at uh because I was doing 93 km today I didn't manage to do any of that uh I did however uh stop here in the Main Street once I crossed the river uh at a coffee shop uh and got my uh second breakfast I had eaten in the hotel that morning uh but this was a very comforting second snack and pastry uh before setting out again on the other side so as I I was saying the disadvantage of what what I did today which is I basically decided I wanted to visit Salas on my way down was that meant I was cycling from one one River Valley into another River Valley that meant crossing the ridge so up to mountains and crossing the ridge to get into the river valley so was on and then to get back onto my original route it then cycling back up uh the ridges on the other side um uh to get back into that other River Valley uh you kind of realize after a while with the sort of mountain cycling that uh I mean I think actually not it was great uh that was a spectacular cycle up and down uh so I'm glad I didn't do it otherwise I'd have been staying on that main road and it would have been relatively busy all the time and it's less interesting uh but if you're planning this sort of Route it is thing you want to take into account when you're thinking about where you're going to go uh be aware that uh what may look like very short distances May therefore involve lots of lots of climbing as you're climbing up and then back down again uh this actual descent down was great um it was an increasingly rough road that was getting narrower I was getting more and more squeezed in um lots of bends on it and I was kind of going oh I hope this isn't actually going to fade out of me into a duck track Midway through I've had that happen in Ireland uh as well as other countries uh you can see here where it's getting very narrow indeed and then it turns into a bit of a mining road but in fact it did come all the way through into into this next let see the mud there into this next River Valley and so I could continue on the route and that cut off basically a corner of what would have been a main road coming out of Salis that I could have taken instead I would have missed this lovely little uh single track back road I don't know if they refer to these in as cart roads like they do to the equivalent in galsia but they're probably pretty much the same story to about a width of a car Scotland they call them single track and with' plenty of these in Ireland as well and in terms of cycling uh a lot of the best cycling is to be found on them H very little traffic absolutely fine views the one challenge with them is they're often very very rough so you can't really be doing them on of road bike but here we are coming back on to the as15 and this is pretty much now going to be following the rivers there's no more uh substantial climbs uh it's a gradual uphill basically from here all the way to PO doodo which I think at this stage is probably about 50 km away now the really interesting thing that happened with this and I don't know if it was due to the Heat or what was going on um was that there was an optical illusion as I was cycling where I felt I was always going downhill even though I knew it was going uphill and in fact I couldn't really convince myself I was going uphill until I stopped at a couple of places and had a look over the side at the river that's flowing alongside and you can see the river was flowing to you know from up there down towards me and the road was always slightly above the river so I was going yes I'm definitely actually going uphill on this H you can see even in the video like a load of this looks like it's going downhill but actually it's going uphill and the battery consumption on the bike also confirms that I was going gently uphill H if anybody has any explanation of why that had happened please do tell me in the comments maybe this is a well-known effect I don't know uh probably a good point to tell you to have a look at the video description I'll include a uh root map that you can follow yourself uh links to some of the other days and more general information about ebike touring down there and also as I'm always telling people do read the comments because often other people will watch the video who KN knew this area quite well they'll know things I don't know they'll be able to H clarify things I've said correct me maybe on mistakes I've made and give you additional information about things I may have missed out here one feature of interest is what are called indiano houses so they're migrants who returned from the Americas with a lot of money uh built mansions and they're frequently characterized by having Pam Tree Gardens planted around them uh anyway at this point I'm getting close to Bel mon which I'd realized was about the last place I had a good chance of a decent lunch H so I I stopped there uh at at the hotel uh Grand R rural Celia that was a hotel Grand rural Celia got a great fish food soup uh followed by rural sausage bottle of wine as usual with that don't worry I didn't drink all the bottle it's very tempting uh and then setting off again for the last bit of the Trek up into the mountains um so belon there is interesting because it's at the it's part of a a very very old Route across the mountains uh that probably goes back to at least Celtic times it's certainly pre- Roman H but the Romans also came up this way and the reason they were up here was the usual reason that there was gold being extracted both from mines in the vicinity but also from panning and apparently you gold panning there into the 19th century and with some gold still being discovered that late um it's also got a wolf Museum and the reason it's got a wolf museum is as we get into the contaban mountains we are now getting into the bits where they St to get serious Wildlife so up to this point uh the rivers we've been going alongside do have substantial utop populations H they a couple of them have are very good salmon fishing like fishing and some of them are Tri fishing but as we get into the mountains themselves where the population has fallen quite a lot in recent years uh what has has happened is an increase in the wolf population and also an increase in the bear population and I'm about to come across a sign at the side of the road here that warns people to be be careful because Bears may be Crossing at the time I found that hilarious but then later on I was going I wonder what you meant to do if you actually run into a bear when you're cycling I mean you could probably out run it if you were going downhill but if you were on one of these uphill as scents I suspect you probably couldn't um I I think the European brown bears so they like American grizzly bears or polar bears they don't really eat people uh you don't want to get between a bear and its Cubs obviously because that might well get you muled maybe if they Maul you they lead you afterwards uh but they're not particularly known for uh killing humans the wolves are also interesting um what do you do if you run into a wolf when you're cycling up one of these steep hills on your own that's far more Curious again I think actual attacks on wolves in Europe in recent decades are almost non-existent despite the very uh substantial increase uh both in terms of numbers and range uh but if you're you know doing that cycle you can't help but you know have these thoughts cross your mind and thinking I probably should have watched a couple of YouTube videos here's that bear sign attention Bears Crossing uh obviously encouraging you not to hit them in the car I probably should have watched some YouTube videos on what to do if you run into it h so we are now on the approach to PO soda itself I think at this point we are already in the national park around it uh which is relatively strict um it's it's a big protected area uh you know you're not meant to leave anything behind uh does the accommodation in po deoda itself which is actually quite limited um although there is a camper van Park among other things up there I don't know if you can camp there I think you might be able to camp in the town itself uh but yeah once you reach Lera here you're on the outskirts of the park and the park is extending from here all the way up into the mountains and into Pua D sod itself from my very brief visit I had the impression that the SoDo National Park is a little bit of a secret in terms of international tourism H it seemed to only be attracting Spanish tourists when I was there and as I said the accommodation options are quite limited there's not that much but it's absolutely stunning uh now I didn't have a chance to do any of the walks all I did was I stayed in the town and I walked around well Village rather than town I walked around it in the evening and I watched the people staring up the mountains trying to i' see what I think were probably Bears because there are meant to be a lot of bears uh but it covers five valleys I'm cycling up one of these valleys here um and apparently there's a lot of really good trail walking that doesn't have the crow that you find in many other European areas of similar natural beauty uh so from my brief visit I would totally recommend it uh the accommodation wasn't particularly expensive it was I think €65 for the room and that could have been uh two people other than one as far as I know I don't think there was a discount um and yeah H definitely what doing so I'd also tell you at this point that this video of course takes me a while to put together they come out months after I've done it but if you follow my Instagram account which which is also called ebik touring life you'll get photographs and short video clips on at the moment I'm actually doing these Cycles where you can see me stopping here and posting a photo from the side of the road I posted those live so ebik touring life H to get all of that in real time here we're coming into the village a small town uh a lot of it made out of traditional uh Stone hoods and you can see just how buried it is amongst these Limestone Crags every direction you look in you see the Limestone uh this was the uh Hotel I stayed in uh I got an aarian bean soup very traditional dinner they're very very fussy about their beans there's a whole set of skills to it um and then as I said went for a stroll in the evening around the town in which I caught the shots basically every direction you look in it's completely stunning uh I would say definitely recommend it so this is the end of day 16 of my tour around we have six more days to go uh before I'm getting the ferry back to Ireland if you've just found the channel uh do subscribe if you found if you watched it this far you're going to be interested in the rest of the content H you'll also find my tours of Scotland that I did last summer and my tour of the entire Irish Coastline that I've done the previous summer but I live in Ireland and I regularly return uh to do more tours around irelands I've been doing the inland waterways as well over the last year so that may well be of interest uh that's about two3 of the content in this channel the other third is about the technicalities of touring by ebike uh wild camping and you know a range of skills basically that you need uh in order to enjoy uh what I'm doing uh while I'm doing this channel to encourage more people to take up cycle touring I think it's a much more sustainable form of Tourism uh than a lot of the things people would do and particularly if you're doing it by ebike you won't be able to fly so therefore you'll have to be using faeries and trains to get around which is also uh quite an important and useful difference uh anyway hopefully you've watched this you're feeling inspired uh have a look at the root map in the descriptions you could easily do this if you're living Ireland uh anywhere in Britain France whatever else easy enough to get to Spain uh fairies go to bilbow or Santa andura from the islands or just cross the border in Continental Europe do that Loop uh and if you do hopefully one day I will see you on the road

2025-01-04 01:57

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