Our story continues.

I didn’t say yesterday but when we got back last night I noticed that my walking shoes were in a bit of a mess. The left one in particular was really bad – the sole was hanging off. Mampa decided that I couldn’t use them any more so we asked the nice lady in reception if she knew where we could get some glue and I could try glueing the soles back on. She gave us three addresses, one of which was a cobbler’s (a man who mends and makes shoes), so we went there first.

Unfortunately when he saw them he shook his head, smiled and explained in Spanish that they couldn’t be fixed. Glue wouldn’t work either so the shoes were useless 😥.

There was a recycling truck nearby so I threw them in the back and we went to decathlon to buy some new ones.

😊

We’d taken quite a bit of time to sort all of this out so we decided that the long walk that we’d planned would leave us walking in the dark so we went back to the start of yesterday’s walk and did a circular route instead.

We started off just like yesterday, through the forest but mampa didn’t remember that there was a fallen tree on our path that we had to duck under 🤫.

Bang ! Squeak (just like Snowflake would make if you trod on her tail).

What a Wally!

Mampa was ok, just a little bit shocked and surprised but no real damage done.

On with the walk!

We decided to aim for the big rock in the photo below.

This meant going first to a small village called Las Carboneras. The walk there was quite easy with some lovely views.

When we got there we had a late lunch of a ham sandwich with cheese, beer (for mampa) and fizzy water (for me). The sun was shining, it was a lovely warm day and it really felt like we were on holiday 😊.

We’d seen a beautiful flower next to a tall Palm tree.

So we were really enjoying ourselves 😊.

I’d noticed that there was a small unmarked path on the map that would take us to another small village called Taborno which was much closer to the rock so we made our way through the sleepy village to the start of the path.

Wow!

Taborno is the small group of houses on top of the left hand side of the mountain. What you can’t see in the photo is that in-between mampa and the village is a very deep valley and we had to climb down to the bottom and then pretty much straight back up again to reach Taborno.

This is mampa on her way down 😉

Near the bottom we passed through what seemed to be a small forest of bamboo.

Just for a change, can you tell who the slim handsome man is in this photo?

Is he helping mampa up the steep slope you might be thinking? Is he a hero do you think?

When we got closer to Taborno, we looked back at Las Carboneras and this is what we saw. Las Carboneras is the small collection of houses on top of the mountain that we just came down. Phew!

But what a view we had on the other side too.

After so much hard work we decided to stop and have a nice piece of chocolate cake 🤫.

You can see how tired mampa is looking but we still had miles to go so we couldn’t stay long. After a short break we were up and away.

I took the next picture shortly after we started, looking back on the village and the last sight of the rock we’d been heading towards.

Right next to me I saw these really pretty little trees. Perhaps if we come back in twenty years they’ll be huge and blocking our path.

Here’s the path ahead of us.

Along many of the paths up here there are little caves cut into the rock. I’m not sure if the wind and the rain did this or people made them. If some parts of rock are softer than others the wind and rain can break down the soft rock much quicker than hard rock and this can make strange shapes. This is often how caves are made. When rivers flow along the ground, if the rock at the bottom of the river is soft, over thousands of years the river can cut into the ground and the river valley will get deeper and deeper. Sometimes rivers can disappear into the ground and cut through the soft rock underneath the hard rock of the ground that we walk on and this can make caves.

These are two different ones. People or wind and rain? What do you think?

This picture was definitely made by people. Spanish people are often quite religious and leave crosses and religious pictures (icons) alongside the path.

We’ve got to finish with a picture of mampa so here she is walking the last few km back to the car.

That’s it for today girls. We’ve had a really lovely hot bath. We’re going to dinner at 8 o’clock but I’m sure that will speak to you before then.

💕