Two Wheels Over Catalonia (eBook)

It was a calm, misty-blue morning. Eerily calm for a spring that followed the most violent of winters. Two sheets of identical blue were divided by a distant grey line. Since the lower sheet ended abruptly 200 metres beneath my feet, it must have been the Mediterranean Sea and the grey line the horizon. Standing alone at the dead end of a dusty track, I strained to hear any sound but the call of a gently wheeling gull, eventually picking out some thin voices, too far away for me to detect their language. After a minute or two the limp, white sail of a small yacht, perhaps a kilometre out to sea, drifted from behind the sharp, black rocks of Punta del Falc to my right, the south. The voices must have been carried from there on the gentlest of breezes, across the marble-still water. The track had been unsignposted but might have pointed to 'End of Pyrenees', 'End of France', 'End of Spain' or 'End of Catalonia'. For this was why I was here. And why Benny the bike was here, too, leaning against one of the two green water tanks that evidently justified the track's existence. The ridge of short, spiky bushes running parallel to the track carried along its crest the frontier between France and Spain before this invisible boundary plunged down the vertical cliff face into the sea, and so this weedy spot, just in France, was the nearest I could get to the top-right corner of Catalonia, Spain's north-easternmost region. Catalonia is a right-angled triangle, its right angle at the north-west, high up in the Pyrenees, and its 300-kilometre hypotenuse forming the region's coastline. Three hundred kilometres if it were a straight line, that is. My objective was to cycle this coast before turning inland to sample the Catalan interior. Raising a hand to shade my eyes, I squinted along the visible coast to the south and could just make out the light-grey curve that ended in Cap de Creus, a target for lunchtime the next day. In the morning haze, it seemed half a world away.