Peelies travels

To get to one of the best situated alpine campsites in the world at Bujaruelo, we needed to get west into the next valley. We have driven to this campsite before but not on this road, through the Cañon de Añsiclo. This aerial photo of the ravine is taken from an information board. It starts near the village of Escalona and follows the Río Bellos roughly north west, for about 12 Km . It is very dramatic. The reason was that it passes through a ravine so narrow and so deep, that we could hardly see the top and some of the time, the bottom. When we could do so, we stopped to admire the surroundings. It is so narrow, so deep and so long, that it is a one-way drive.    At one point we realised that we must be close to the walk of the previous day and tried to identify the crags opposite. It wasn’t possible of course but a map check suggested we weren’t far away. I have been trying to think what makes the Pyrenees stand out, as they feel so much different than anywhere I’ve been in...

Driving down from Formigal we were again delayed by animals on the road. This time it was a flock of sheep being driven towards us. They move quicker than cows and anyway we were at least heading into them and not with them. There were two amusing aspects to this. Firstly, all the traffic held up behind them, would be stopped at a police checkpoint which we had seen further up the valley. Secondly my faded eBay-sourced UK sticker for the registration plates proved to be confusing for the guys moving the sheep. They stopped to look at it and then spoke through the window. “Ukrainii?” they asked, “No, Ingleesh” we said and laughed at how daft it seems that we have moved from the usually well recognised GB to UK, for the sake of some Northern Irish inclusivity. Perhaps it’s appreciated there, more than it is by me. The next day we again went for a ‘walk’ and again it was in ‘the book’. This one promised sightings of the Lammergeier bearded vulture and so we embarked on what the book calle...

The setting-off-reasonably-early plan we had, after the overnight stay above the village, hadn’t included the mass movement of cows on a major cross-border road on a Sunday morning! All was going well as we sped north, until we noticed lots of squashed cow pats on the road. As they got ‘fresher looking’, the “cows must have wandered on here last night” became “there must be cows ahead”. It wouldn’t be a surprise to find cows roaming even on a major route up and over to France, so I slowed down. Then around the corner was a traffic queue and we stopped. Then we crawled and stopped and crawled and stopped. Very slowly we made forward progress but this lasted for half an hour.  Eventually we realised that a huge herd was being driven ahead of us. To our relief, they finally stopped in a layby and our traffic jam was able to pass them. Formigal is a ski resort just south of the border with France and it’s unknown to me. I was surprised to see the extent of the skiing using the piste ma...

  I have found the combination of loads of mobile data and Google Translate a very useful holiday tool. In a calendar month I will have used almost all of my 11GB of data. Although my Spanish Duolingo ‘web learning’ before we left, gave me a good start to the language, I forgot to pack my notebook of ‘special words’, so perhaps used Google more than I expected. The Google translate app is easy to use and if necessary it will offer a spoken translation, although I’ve hardly used that. One surprising feature is that it can perform direct text recognition to translation. Just using the camera you hover over the text and English, in my case is superimposed. Like this… With more complex language the translation is a little less accurate but nevertheless it is very handy. We were by now watching the weather forecast for the northern coast and made the decision that we wouldn’t head for the Picos. What’s the point in going there only to meet cool wet weather? The Pyrenees were showing a b...

It’s so ‘fairy story’ here, biblical might be a better description. A castle on a hill, the young shepherd with his flock, the hunters and a small village, Riba de Santiusta . That’s where we spent the night, a little further north as we moved towards the final week. We had approached the hamlet, again using park4night which took us a few km off the main road, into an area of very slightly higher ground and then suddenly, there was another castle. We are used to this now but still, it was a rather wonderful sight. The hamlet was apparently deserted and we found the spot at one end, next to a water tap hydrant and a tiny 16C bridge. In true Enid Blyton fashion we scrambled up the hill, to explore the ruined castle but found it had a huge iron gate barring our entry. We had to be content with scrambling around on the rocks and looking down to the hamlet. Below in the field we heard the bells of a well behaved flock of sheep, happily munching grass and not straying into neighbouring field...