Pugsworth in Alicante

Next stop, again by train with more great mountains on the way, was Alicante. It was several degrees warmer again meaning I was now back to shorts and t-shirt all day. The best bit was Castillo Santa Barbara, an extensive hill fortress in the middle of the city but high above it with a great view of city, sea and mountains. I also climbed a small hill nearby, a remaining island of natural green area in the middle of the crowded city, the ideal lunch spot. It was a few days into December now and I was beginning to wonder what a Spanish Christmas might be like when riding home one day, I heard Christmas carols being played over PA systems in the street! Lots of people had said that Christmas in Spain was big but that´s just crazy, is there no escape?

It was also in Alicante that I found the book ‘Discovering your psychic powers’ on my host´s bookshelf. At the beginning of this trip I would not have even considered picking this book up but my horizons are broader now, particularly because of my time in Ireland, woofing and seeing ´Steiner Graffiti´. Even so, I still picked it up thinking I´d just like to see if this stuff could be described coherently. Once I started reading it though I found that the author, Tara Ward, had an overly careful approach and I was ready to agree and understand her more than she expected. She really grabbed my attention though when she offered an explanation for a phenomenon I had observed but never heard anyone else even mention, let alone explain. It must be a couple of years ago now when one day I observed what appeared to be little glowing lights, moving around in the sky in a pattern similar to that of flying insects. At first I thought it was just spots on my retina but had never been a satisfying explanation and I didn´t know who to ask. Anyway, I´m reading this book when I find exactly this phenomenon described as the earth´s energy field or aura and a small exercise for people to try to see it. Well I didn´t need the exercise and now I can see it any time the sky is blue. I don´t claim to understand what this means but it´s the only explanation I have of this phenomenon. I didn´t get the chance to finish the book but I am now working on trying to see the energy fields of plants, but it´s hard to know what´s real and what´s imagined without someone else to check against. Something I´d like to explore more though, do you know anything about it?

From Alicante I got up the motivation to ride beyond the cities of Spain, thanks largely to the beckoning of the fantastic mountains. Until now I´d hesitated going in this direction because going inland meant getting colder. However I found a Servas host in the little town of Novelda about 30kms inland, and decided this wouldn´t be too cold and a good introduction to Spanish rural roads. It turns out that Spanish roads are considerably better than British ones, probably thanks to European funding but that Novelda is several degrees colder even though it´s only a couple of hundred metres in elevation. As I´d hoped I got to go mountain climbing. My host took me up Peña la Mina, a peak of 1100m. It was a steep climb up some frosty ground that lay in all day shadow due to the low winter sun. The view at the top was fantastic though, I really love the Spanish landscape, dominated by erosion. You can see pretty clearly how the whole area used to be a large plateau which has now been eroded into magnificent mountains and valleys. They valleys contain the civilisation, farms, towns and roads, while the hills (if they´re not mines or terraced) are pockets of natural environment with great views. Erosion is very obvious on the small scale too, little barancos (rugged river beds), unusual rock formations and just generally water leaving its mark on the landscape, fantastic.