eBiking Somiedo to Oviedo via la Senda del Oso

you're joining me on day 17 of my cycle tour around Spain we're in aerus and we're just leaving the spectacular po SoDo National Park uh and setting out for aido 83 km away now I cycled up yesterday to the POA SoDo H so the first 10 kilm of this cycle today I've cut out you can look at yesterday's the end of yesterday's and you'll see me going up the other direction I might actually post it separately as well just because it's quite a spectacular cycle but just as yesterday was saying H it's hard to pick a favorite day from the whole tour but maybe yesterday was it I reviewed the footage of this this morning and I went oh actually no maybe this is my favorite um so I'm climbing up to a pass called the Porto de San Lorenzo which is at I think it's 1347 M so I think that made it the third highest pass of the tour and I remember as I was cycling this uh thinking uh this feels like the sort of ense you might find in a uh a national cycling tour tour to tour to Spain in this case of course and sure enough on looking it up it turns out it is used in the T of Spain it's been used a few times and what felt like very steep sections on this Ascent were in fact 15% slopes so they were very steep indeed uh it's certainly something that I think would be very hard to do if you were Turing with luggage and everything and you weren't using an ebike you could probably do it if you were very fit indeed but I'm doing a total of 83 kilometers uh today and this initial part of it was a real kind of wasn't struggle it was actually really enjoyable it was extraordinarily beautiful as you can see from the roadside shots I'm posting here but it was quite uh you get a sense of achievement even on an ebike uh when you B your way up these sort of slopes uh I end I did end up taking a couple of breaks on the way up uh and as I explain in a minute I also used a lot of battery uh but I I looked at the map and I was aware that once I was at the top of this climb it looked to me like a lot of the rest of the day was going to be descending to oido over a long time [Music] [Music] well I've just climbed to I think the third highest pass of the whole trip I think this is about 14 10 m but it was unusual because it's very early in the day and also it's a very quick well very slow is more accurate climb uh it's something like 800 M over 6 km which lots of esand quite tight I just put the bike into sport mode sport mode which is the second highest and used about 40% of a battery on it but uh absolutely spectacular as you can see uh it's windy up here very windy so I'm using the microphone and hoping that comes out a bit better and the if you can hear the ding ding ding ding dings uh what that actually is is a load of the mountain cows uh oh it's all cows on these high passes I've seem very few sheep uh and they have these beld on it and the other thing about this part of the trip is these mountains have bears in them uh I've seen signs warning people to be careful but they also have wolves and I did have a moment of going should I be Googling what to do if you come across a wolf are I meant to shout at it they like dogs are you just meant to Pedal as fast as you can to get away I think they can do 40 km an hour so a wolf going uphill would not have been good but um I have not yet been eaten by a wolf there is a possibility this will turn out to be a tragic last message they'll find my half eaten body on the way down and they'll get into my phone and uh this will be the final message on us but uh let's see maybe not anyway uh day 16 or 17 can't quite remember which been a hell of a trip uh definitely feeling I've bitten off a bit more than I can chew at the moment uh with these days of climbing uh but I do have an option for shortening a couple of the days coming up uh so I'll see how I feel at the end of uh this day where I'm heading to aido at the 60 well I think 65 km to go but it literally looks like it's all downhill I think it's must be following a river or something uh so maybe I'll be lucky and I can switch from worried being worried about the battery running out to instead being worried about the brakes running out uh anyway good trip oh my God I think this pass is where you cross over from the SoDo National Park uh to the Las urbanus Lessa uh Park which is I think about 450 square kilometers it's pretty vast a lot of this is beach trees uh the highest mountains in it I think are 2,400 M so pretty substantial um and it's famous also for its wildbear population but also there are golden eagles apparently um and uh a w quite a wide range of uh Wildlife uh but also uh paintings uh in caves from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age so there's basically a whole load of different things happening here as well as the more human uh sorry more recent human agricultural practices unfortunately this is yet another day where i'm zooming through it uh I'm doing 83 km trying to get AO I know there's a lot of climbing so there's an awful lot of stuff uh that would have been good to stop at and have a look at in more detail and to be honest I think I'm definitely going back to this whole region uh the couple of days cycling here was fantastic now if you've been following the earlier days you'll know round about day 14 uh coming down some very steep uh Cliff roads in galsia I began to worry about the state my brakes were in and today was another day where I was beginning to go am I in trouble here uh so basically one of the issues with ebikes is because they're heavier and also because of the motor putting extra force on components uh things like chains and the disc brakes tend to wear out faster than they will on other bikes H so my routine practice whenever I do one of these longdistance tours as I bring it into my bike shop that I got it from Green air and I asked them to replace anything that's likely to wear out in the next 2,000 kmers so the chain and the brakes are things I would normally mention explicitly and I had done this before I came over however I'd also done about 300 kilm in Kara uh which is also pretty heavy on brakes and of course Spain there's so many descents I mean like there was a lot this trip had far more climbing and descents than I've done in any other one so so by this stage the breaks are kind of they're just beginning to feel a little bit uh not convincing and I'm a little bit concerned about them and wondering how that's going to turn out but it's going to be a few days before that gets more serious uh and getting back to blow itself would turn out to be know a little stressful in that last final day um so the area we're going through at the moment is also with this long distance uh Comm uh walking route come and read the Messa uh runs um and that's something actually I might well go back to and try and find it's I think it's at least 5,000 years old and then was developed by the Romans so there's Roman roads along part of it h until quite recently into the Modern Age it was it was still one of the major routs to get from aorus into leyon my first coffee break of the day as snacks cost a couple of Euro now as you may well have noticed traffic has been picking up uh and I was got wondering because I'm getting close to aido which is a big city uh whether I was going to be facing heavy traffic perhaps on this road all the way in which would have been a pain but then I had a very uh pleasant surprise and that comes because I hadn't really planned this route myself I just stuck it into uh the cycle travel website and it then planned a route out for me and what I hadn't realized was that I was about to join a very long Greenway called the Sendo deloso uh which is basically I think translates as the greenway of the Bears uh so this runs along an old rail track as many Greenways do it does have the one problem that it's in a relatively bad state of repair the surface is very rough and in fact uh a cyclist died a couple of years ago uh leaning on one of the wood wooden railings Over The Gorge which broke and gave way but this year they are putting a lot more money into restoring it apparently all right oh this beautiful oh my god oh we have sound here because I accidentally uh recorded this section in video mode rather than the usual time-lapse mode I use I've speeded up these segments because otherwise we'd be cycling along here for hours uh but what I've done is I've left in the audio uh and brought it back to normal speed at bits where anything of interest is actually happening uh mostly interactions with people I'm cycling past some of those turned out to be quite entertaining um The Gorge as you can see is very impressive I've left in my exclamations as well um and this was entirely unexpected I I didn't know there was a Greenway here at all uh it was purely that my cycle travel with the the the website and app I use for planning Roots had rooted me along this it always tries to find the quietest way and uses Greenways if they're available uh so that was great surprise as you might imagine as I was coming down here um as I said the one problem and if you look you can see is the surface is very rough in parts so it was quite slow and I knew it was relatively long holy this is amazing also keep in mind that I am cycling this on the 1st of June and it's already starting to get quite busy including some large groups of cyclists I think it might be pretty tough if you were trying to do this more towards peak [Applause] season the enthusiastic cheer there is quite entertaining so why was that happening well I think basically it's because I'm obviously on a Touring bike I've got two big panas hanging off the back of it uh so carrying a lot of luggage uh so that probably is people going oh that's weird and then they're going wait a second where's this guy coming from he's probably coming from an overnight stop somewhere and they're realizing that in all likelihood I've been up I'm coming down from that pass which as I said is a pass that is uh one that is used in like you know the the longdistance road races tour Spain type thing so it's probably the sort of thing that's a bit of a legend among cyclists so you you see somebody on a Touring bike and you go what on Earth are they doing and that I'm sure with along with my um not super Spanish pronunciation even if I'm just doing an Ola H did result in quite a few people being visibly entertained by me um I had noticed as well actually earlier as I was coming down for the past were Road cyclists passing me on the other side and the way up the L and all the rest and quite a few of them were kind of staring at me as I was going pass them as well and I presume for exactly the same reason they were just going what on Earth is this guy doing H so there's also Wildlife on the trail and here we have some insect no snake a little snake little snake in the in the middle and for this reason we we have stop Yes has it gone into the grass yeah yes okay bye of course the combination of my raincoat and my Fisherman's uh baseball cap underneath the helmet with its long uh orange neck scarf probably does mean I also look quite unusual so uh as far as I can make out this is probably a popular day trip out from Mido and uh surrounding areas uh for cyclist so you probably you know you drive up here get R to bike and then you cycle part of the trail and back uh and so you don't really expect people to be 17 days into a a long distance turret around the entire region of Northern Spain uh to be accompaning you on the track um there's Walkers as well you have seen me doing the Olaf there which was my technique I used during the Camino to warn people I was coming my bell had broken just before I came over for this trip uh but in fact I find ringing the bell is a bit awkward on these sort of trails cuz people often feel you being cranky with them uh or you know it's a bit too much like beeping a horn so the Ola probably works [Applause] better if you've been following the 17 days so far and I've still another five to go uh you'll be aware that I hadn't done a huge amount of planning for this trip uh I had relied on cycle travel to plot the route for me I just basically put in where I wanted to be each night H and it's mostly worked out very well uh and I would say in terms of people thinking about doing cycle touring uh what I see a lot in terms of online discussions in Facebook pages and things is I think people putting themselves off by uh packing their fears is one expression people use it but you know thinking of everything that could go wrong for instance and thinking you have to be prepared uh for all those possibilities and also then Al in terms of roots H just trying to plan at a level of detail that means you'd be planning for days for every single day you were cycling and I think my not halfhazard but uh uh more willingness to um accept things may go wrong a bits is one of the things that enables me to get on the road a lot more and from following people who are cycling almost full-time I think that's even more so with them like you you get a very strong sense that the thing that enables you to stay on the road is been willing to uh accept uh minor setbacks you know nothing too serious you'd hope um it does mean though that as I have said a few times on the previous days I often get home and then I discover that there was something about the place I was cycling by or very near the place that I was cycling by that I'd really like to have uh scene and somewhere along here is one of those examples uh because the trail is called the trail of the bear or whatever because there's bears in this Valley but there's also there's two particularly famous bears that were orphaned after the mother was shot um and uh they were brought up by people however uh they became to domesticated to release back into the wild um so they in fact live by the side of the trail in an enclosure I think it's 12 acres so it's a pretty big enclosure H but as far as I know the trail actually goes right past it and when I was looking at the video playing back there is a section where there's an obvious kind of high wire fence sloped inwards um may even be coming up in fact in this section here um and there are you know those like labeling plaques of information boards yes just here on the right just outside of it uh so I possibly could have seen the Bears all the time the mountains I didn't actually see any I saw the signs I did see in po do SoDo after I'd eaten and I was walking around the evening there were a group of people pointing up the mountains at something and I thought maybe they'd seen a goat uh but it was only later on I was thinking oh maybe that was a bear they were saying no I got my phone out and went into that maximum Zoom which gives you a kind of pseudo binocular type effect and went looking but I couldn't spot anything there myself uh but yeah so you know don't over plan because if you do over plan you'll you'll miss stuff but the one disadvantage you are going to have to accept is that also means you'll miss stuff because you just don't realize it's they Azure cycling straight past it uh the journey being more important than the destination I guess applying in this particular case part of my purpose in creating this channel apart from having a place to upload my videos to uh which is important to me I want to be able to keep those for years to come uh was to encourage other people to take up a bike touring uh I think it's a very sustainable form of Tourism you can take to the roads for weeks and you're probably not really using that much more in terms of resources than you would be if you were staying at home and that's fairly unusual in terms of travel uh we've become very dependent I think on travel that requires a lot of energy in particular jet flying around the place um so yeah I'm hoping and watching this you're kind of going oh I think I could do this doesn't doesn't look that difficult I might take off for spay myself next year H and then uh you know as I use my catchphrase I might meet you on the road uh the one thing I would encourage you to do if you're enjoying this is to give the video a like it will help me get it out to more people uh obviously subscribe if you haven't done so already but also uh if you're on Instagram give me a follow there it's ebike touring life as well uh and the reason to also follow me on Instagram is that this YouTube video I'm editing it together in mid December you can probably hear my voice a little bit grally in comparison to other ones CU I've got a cold I've had the last few days and that's uh as I said it's recorded the 1 of June so it takes me a long time basically to edit each of these videos together you don't get to see them anything like live H so what I do is as I'm actually traveling uh I post live photographs short video clips uh to Instagram and then at the end of every day I do a little write up about that day and stick in my 10 best photos so it'll give you a much more immediate sense of what I'm doing right now at at that particular moment as I got towards the end of The Greenway section I was wondering what came next in that I'd been looking at my uh cycle map and it was pretty clear before I could get into a video I'd have to go over what looked like an incredibly steep set of ridges uh uh but it wasn't showing much of an elevation so I was going oh that generally means there's going to be tunnels and if you've been watching the previous days you've known a couple of occasions I've had quite long road tunnels which are never great to cycle through because they tend to be very narrow and you're always worried about other traffic in them not seeing you H but as it turned out that was Grand uh so what happens at the end of the rail trail is it for it goes into these sort of quiet Village back roads uh and then you reach the town of tro I think it's called Uh which is the site of a major arms manufacturing plant in fact uh so so if you read the social history uh of the route I've just cycled down uh a lot of it talks about rural migration because uh all the young people left the villages in the mountains to get work in the arms plant uh down in this town that we're now going to come into but then on the other side of the town as you'll see uh we go back onto fairly uh narrow roads again heading up towards uh that the kind of steep mountains I could see ahead and then it turns out what there is is there's another old rail line uh that is cutting through those mountains including a couple of tunnels and that takes you right into AO itself uh so it gives me a moment then may perhaps to finish up with that talking a little bit about AO because it's got a very interesting history so Vito's history essentially belongs or start in the 700s uh and that's the period where basically uh Spain is has been well the area Spain also is been fought over between two rival migrants groups uh one of which are the uh the calipat the uh Islamic rulers coming as part of the huge Arab expansion uh and the others are the vizigot who of course were originally coming from I think somewhere around Germany uh and had done a deal with Rome where they were given Spain uh so the vizigot held aorus um and the um Muslims had captured most of the rest of Spain below that H and the viig got in about 760 uh established the kingdom of aido it's well it's normally described to being established by two sets of monks uh and then so the next couple of 100 years is the battle the battles back and forth between those two forces uh where the viig gods eventually managed to expand South and they move the capital to Leon around uh uh the the the New Millennium and then afterwards H there's an interesting period in aido in the 12th century where there's a bishop plot oido who is known as the fabulist and basically that's because he uh forged or rather in the um uh the the recreation of various legal documents to property uh he changed wording uh so that the church in oido gained a whole load of possessions that they perhaps would not have otherwise H so that's quite a good sort of setup for the ancient history of the C City but jumping to the modern era it's also the site or the center of the 1934 Insurrection in in aorus and let's talk about that for a moment so Spain even by European standards had a fairly brutal uh stratified class society as it went in from the 19th into the 20th century you still had a you know strong feudal remnants in terms of church church Holdings of land H you had campaigns of assassinations against Union organizers You' a whole load of things along those lines that meant Spanish Society was very polarized between a working class which was often engaged in factories and Mining work uh and a Bourgeois ruling class uh that was often very very hostile to those workers that's a really long history to get into in detailed so I'm not going to talk about that here uh but in voo uh things come to AE in October of 1934 when when during what was intended to be a national Insurrection but it mostly just happened in aorus uh there was a revolt against the conservative government involving about 50,000 workers mostly miners who armed themselves with dynamite and captured a veto after heavy fighting um they captured an Arsenal with 30,000 rifles and machine guns and the Army responded by sending in General Franco whose name is Infamous uh who brought in soldiers from the colonial army in Africa to put down the Insurrection and the reason for doing that was they were worried and probably with justification that if they use conscripted Spanish troops to try and put it down they might very well sympathize with the rebels and go over to them uh the aftermath of the rising saw a a brutal set of reprisals uh executions against ring leaders and in many ways uh set the scene for the Spanish Revolution stroke Spanish Civil War that was to follow just two years later and in turn of course that set the scene for the european-wide war against fascism in 1939 it's sometimes said that those who vought in Spain against fascism fascism were premature anti-fascists because people traveled internationally in particular doing it were doing it illegally where 3 years later everybody in Europe was more or less involved in that fight but to a certain extent Vito is the same story within Spain itself I stayed in the hotel aorus in noo and locked my bike to that railing Z side uh this was a supermarket meal evening uh but I did spend the evening wandering around the old city and getting in the sights so this gets us to the end of day 17 of my trip around the Spanish North I am now 5 days out from bilb and the ferry home uh stay tuned for those stories and hopefully someday I get to meet you on the road

2025-01-13 16:55

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