Today we headed inland on another of the trips that the booklet from denia suggested. However that wasn't our initial intention. We were going to go for a bike ride around another reserve just a few kilometres from here, however we couldn't find an entrance to the park (probably in hindsight because we were looking for something in a different guise to how it existed). We went onto the next town, Pego, as we knew there was an information centre there and that it had info about the wetlands area. Of course it was now just after 2 so it wasn't open and wasn't scheduled to be until 4 pm for an hour and a half, until 5.30. Instead, after driving around a maze of ever more narrow streets, we decided to head off in pursuit of a picturesque area which was part of the tour in the booklet. We drove up gentle slopes, higher and higher inland, with surrounding orange groves, olives, almonds, and further on cherry trees. There was also a lot of barren looking areas and many rocks. We stopped at a little village in the Valley of Gallinras ? because the print said there was a walk (or possibly bike ride) through 8 little villages, which was only 14kms each way. We found the Rute de 8 poblets (very poor sign-posting in places) and started off through the orange groves and almonds to the next village. I presume this track/road is used for work vehicles predominantly, I think we only saw 2 vehicles, one a police car which seemed to be just checking everyone was behaving, and another a local just out doing their thing. The road undulated a lot, quite steeply in places, but despite this we had a very pleasant bike ride for an hour or so. We only got to about 4 of the villages because at one point I took us off on the wrong track and it wasn't until we were trying to bike through waist high grass that we decided to back-track. It was probably a good 2.5 kms each way that we detoured off the track by). Anyway at the last village we decided to have a bit of a sit down and a coffee/drink at a cafe. It was interesting trying to order, we got there in the end, a coffee con leche, a cappuccino (I can never spell it) (easier than latte), two orange fantas and a coke, oh and some peanuts. Very reasonable prices (except for the peanuts) - 6 euro for the five drinks, and they were good!!
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| Village amongst the olives, almonds and cherries |
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| Biking |
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| Orange groves |
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| Post cold face wash in village water supply (freezing cold on a hot and sweaty face) |
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| Olive trees in parched soil |
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| Happy bikers after coffee and coke |
We biked back the way we came, up and down steep slopes, at one point when my gears were failing I came to a halt, glancing at the orange trees I saw something that didn't quite fit with what I expected, something brown and with interesting skin pattern!!! It was a snake sunbathing at the top of the tree, catching the heat from the leaves. I called Hilary back (Di had already stopped beside me), and so we all got a look at it before it realised it was being observed and it flicked its tail and slithered into the tree out of sight. We tried to work out what type it was when we got home, doing a google search of Valencian snakes. We disovered there are 13 snake species in Spain, 5 of which are venemous (not sure how much so, i.e. whether they would be fatal to a human) but we hopefully don't need to worry about that. I am keen to show them respect, and let them have right of way at any intersection. I don't do snakes.
We had a pleasant drive back to our campsite, back-tracking much of what we had already driven but taking an alternate route back from Pego, so seeing a bit more of the countryside.
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