Leaving Denia

I spent four nights with Felix and Ana at their house about four miles from the centre of Denia and they put me completely at ease. To start with we had a proper breakfast every morning with a laid table which I discovered had a value far beyond feeding the body. Ana was born in Uruguay and delighted me with her style of helping me to improve my Spanish. In fact style came as second nature to Ana and by the time I had come to the end of my stay I felt it to have been a great privilege to have spent so much time with her. Something else I have to thank Felix for! 

Denia has an old citadel which looks down on the harbour where the ferry leaves for Ibiza and the Balearic Islands. It's quite a climb to get to the top but it's worth it.

We visited some limestone caves nearby at 

There was quite a bit of work going on at the house and this guy, Antonio, helped to look after the garden while there was no one living there. Antonio is a lawyer by profession but prefers to make his living this way. When he heard that my journey from England was to raise funds for the refuge in London he immediately put his hand in his pocket and sponsored me for twenty euros. Hats off to the man. Thank you Antonio.

All good things must come to an end I suppose and the time came for me to be moving on. Felix was leaving for England and Ana had a busy schedule with her friends. 

 I had put a new chain on my bike and was keen to see how it performed. The topography around Denia is very varied to say the least, and the roadside flowers took on magnificent proportions.

There are some quite large mountains with sheer rock faces that seem to be very dominant, and then within ten minutes a whole new horizon appears with new mountains that couldn't be seen before.  

My new chain was soon being put through its paces. Ana had explained to me that Denia is the beginning of the Costa Blanca, so called because of the whiteness of its sands. She advised me to visit Calpe if I could so I made it my next destination. It wasn't far, but it was very up and down, (mostly up it seemed), and it took me longer than I expected to get there. But I wasn't disappointed. The town is dominated by an enormous mountain that rises out of the sea. 

Despite the number of tall apartment blocks the centre of town has a very traditional almost classical feel to it which I found very attractive, and far from modern. But there is no way out of town without traversing the mountains which surround it and I became quite exhausted having had a lazy few days in Denia. I couldn't find a trace of anything like a campsite but on the outskirts of town came across an abandoned orchard. Surrounded by brand new villas it was clearly in line for development and was actually being used as a tip for builders rubble at one end. The old farmhouse was still there and who I presumed to be the old farmer was outside washing his car.

 So I asked him if it would be ok to put up my tent between the trees and he said it would be no problem. He gave me encouraging signals as I took the bike into the orchard to find a secluded spot. The ground was verdant and proved to be full of slugs and insects, mostly large ants and I found quite a few at the entrance to the tent in the morning. During the night I lost my torch and couldn't get out of the tent quick enough to have a pee with the consequence that I wet myself. Old age creeping in. The smell was disgusting and coupled with the slime from the slugs stuck to the groundsheet made me feel quite sick and for the first time since leaving England I began to long for the comforts of home.

The road out of there was pretty steep, but my energy had been restored with a good campers meal the previous night. I postponed the delight of breakfast until I had done a couple of hours cycling which is my usual way when I'm traveling. Taking the minor roads in these parts means avoiding the traffic, but it invariably means steeper ascents as the roads are older and there was no heavy equipment available to move the earth when they were built. It is a choice I've had to make many times since arriving in Spain. I was resting after a particularly steep section when a passing cyclist stopped to have a natter. He was delighted to hear that I had come so far and explained that he was originally from Germany but had been living here for the last fifteen years. He was a keen touring cyclist and knew the area very well. He confirmed what I had already gleaned from studying the maps, that there were no easy routes from here to Granada. But he gave me some encouraging advice about the route ahead and suggested sticking close to the main N332 coast road. For several sections ahead there would be no alternative, and it's path was intertwined with a new motorway which absorbed a lot of the heavier traffic. And so it was. What I had to pay for in cycling effort was certainly made up for in spectacular scenery, and the hazy autumn mist in no way detracted from the experience.

Following this coast road took me through Althea to Benidorm, photographs of which I had seen before but which did no justice to the scale of it's development. 

Spanish architecture has taken the form of the apartment block literally to new heights here, and against the backdrop of the surrounding mountains and the sea, it is a really impressive place. I've no idea what the population density is here but the authorities deserve a medal of some kind if only for dealing with the quantity of sewage this place must produce. Given that the town is surrounded by mountains and the ocean this must be a huge and expensive problem.

What I didn't know about Benidorm is that it has an ancient and electrically atmospheric heart. It's almost like an Eastern casbah and full of every kind of shop imaginable, with people and food from every corner of the world. Throughout history the Mediterranean coast seems to have excelled in throwing up these culturally open urban environments. Places like Smyrna, Rome, Antioch, Oran and yes Benidorm! For me it was an exciting surprise. I couldn't resist taking this photo of an Irish bar in Benidorm, not because it's Irish but because of the mural inside. I don't know if you'll be able to make it out, but they zoning in, it's worth it.

South of Benidorm there is a stretch of coast that is very hilly and there are no apartment blocks but plenty of detached villas. I noticed a building plot that had been divided up into twelve lots for twelve residences. The asking price for each plot was a cool €250,000, before you even start building! The further along this coast I traveled the more I noticed that bars and restaurants gave way to estate agents, dentists and opticians. A reflection perhaps of the age distribution and interests of the population. 

When I reached my target campsite just outside Coveta Fuma I found that it was full, but was kindly directed to another a little further down the road, in the outskirts of Alicante in a suburb called el Compello. It wasn't cheap at €22 and it wasn't really a campsite but a motor caravan park. The ground was made of stone and I couldn't get my tent pegs in at all. I began to realise that camping with a tent is becoming less well catered for now that these motor homes are becoming more popular. This site brought home to me how many people, particularly more elderly people, are traveling around Europe, and spending their winters here in Spain. Folks had set up tarpaulins with virtual sheds, flower beds, outdoor dining areas and who could blame them? In this climate outdoor living is very attractive, more so in fact than in summer. Somehow I hadn't expected it to be peak season.  Anyway it was worth being there just to have a nice hot shower and to get my clothes cleaned up after the mornings incontinence.

When I left next morning I noticed two more motor caravan parks on the way into Alicante filled to capacity and I felt it a little ironic that the people who have made this style of living a way of life, the Romanies or gypsies, have been pushed to the edge of extinction by the forces of sedentary civilisation. It seems that now not a few of our number are finding ourselves called to follow the trails.