A Means to an End

Getting two bikes and their riders from Tarifa to the start of our Portugal end-to-end in Faro turned out to be one of the most challenging parts of our Iberian adventure to date. After much fruitless research into Andalucia’s public transport network, we concluded that hiring a van was the only way. That meant an early morning taxi ride (sans Bernard and Colin) to Algeciras port, where we could have popped over to Morocco (‘Jesus Christ, it’s Jason Bourne’)

But instead we made directly for the Enterprise hire car office, arriving an hour earlier than our booking, in the hope that we could get cracking. The man behind the counter shuffled his papers, peered at us over his glasses and said, ‘You’ll have to wait till 9.’
‘But the van is there’, I said, ‘and it would be a huge help if …’ I gave up the charm offensive because he was already shaking his head.
‘It needs to be checked and cleaned,’ he said.
So we sat outside and waited. An hour. At precisely 9am, without apparently having touched the van in the meantime, the man called us forward. He clearly didn’t share the more, shall we say ‘enterprising’ approach to customer service that we’d enjoyed elsewhere. And judging by the van’s many scrapes and dents, cleaning was the least of its worries. But on the plus side, when we returned to Tarifa to load the lads, they settled in comfortably for the drive.

For the last few days, I’d been thinking of this as a rest day. Taxi, hire van, ferry across to Vila Real do Santo Antonio in Portugal, then a train to Faro. Easy. Unfortunately, my brain had conveniently forgotten the 50k bike ride from Huelva to the ferry.

It started well enough, with a pleasant bike path through the salt flats of Huelva

And the scenery beside this trail was so beautiful we didn’t complain to Guillaume about the occasional troughs of sand. It seemed we had loads of time before the last ferry at 7pm.

Then we turned west, directly into a head wind, and the time started ticking away. We ditched Guillaume’s scenic route and hit the hard shoulder once again, riding in a two person chain gang. After 45 punishing kilometres, this was a good sign

Arriving with 35 minutes to spare, we paid €2.50 per person and €1.60 per bicycle for our 15 minute international ferry crossing on this fine vessel

Bernard loves a boat ride, especially when he gets the best seat. Colin was a little nervous that the captain might have to call on the Virgin of the Miracles to get us across safely.

But it turned out I was the one in need of her help, when it came to accessing the goods car on the train to Faro. It’s hard to see here, but the floor of the car was waist high off the platform. There’s no way I could have got on or off on my own, but luckily my domestique was on hand to help – and take photos

Today we’ve successfully met our target of doing as little as possible in preparation for our next leg. Though there were some chores we couldn’t avoid