March 18th: El Real de la Jara to Zafra

Flashback to the end of yesterday…. It’s about 4pm, I’m cycling towards the end of stage 2 which is a town called Santa Olalla… I cycle through a place called Cala about 10kms away and thought I’d check out a place to stay, well it was on the map anyway… I went there and nobody around, the neighbours were having a smoke outside and once engaged with me were throttled into action… the guy started calling all the people he knew that ran hotels or hostels in the area… the cheapest one was 100 euros… while he did that, I also tried to help the cause and checked out bookings.com on my phone… not much, but there was a hostel in a town north of Santa Olalla, about 25kms, and it was 36 euros… I had a solid 3 hours of sunlight and was feeling good so decided to go for it!

On the way there, I biked through a small national park and saw a sign for camping… I checked it out but couldn’t find the campgrounds and nothing was marked on google… I was kicking myself about spending the money on the hostel when I could have possibly camped… and then I had a bad feeling about this town I was headed into and the hostel….

Arrived at the place, must be more dogs and horses in this town than people and they let you know about it… I met the manager of the hostel, Manuel. Once meeting Manuel, all of my bad feelings melted away… he didn’t speak a single word of English but we ended up having a half an hour conversation… his hostel was also part of the Camino de Santiago, and he started to download all this info about the route going north… i don’t know how, maybe he had spoken to a lot of foreigners, but the way he spoke in Spanish, I could understand almost half of what was going on… and I don’t understand any Spanish at all! It’s been wierd like that, now been in a place for what feels like forever (like 10 days) and not speaking the language around… I don’t feel that silly or stupid… and im picking up quite a bit here and there… 

Anyway, coming back to Manuel… he gave me a spot to go to in Zafra, and that’s where in ended my day today… 17.50 euro and breakfast is included… the Camino which is on a trail called ruta de La Plata is a hiking trail that people make a pilgrimage to Santiago on… there is a parallel bike route (eurovelo), but I thought I’d give the hikers route a go… It was beautiful gravel tracks through farmland a few kms off the highway… I crossed about 10 hikers on the way which felt nice and the route is marked with little yellow arrows the whole way… today was the first day that I didn’t have to obsessively watch the map on my phone as I rode.

Ended the day with a nice dinner with some of the bikers/hikers from the hostel… I’m much younger than them but it made for good company and was nice to have a proper meal after 2 weeks! I had a rice prawn dish which was amazing by normal food standards but by hungry cycling Uds standards, it was tops!

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