We caught the bus to Potes on Monday morning, Sabine once again noting features of towns we passed through and where they were on the map, while I just gazed at the mountains. We determined to get back to La Hermina and San Vicente de Barquere, two of the more spectacular towns. San Vicente was surrounded by water and had a gorgeous castle on the hill in the centre of town, while La Hermina was in a long canyon. I spent the last half hour of the trip craning my neck to look up the steep walls of the canyon to the sliver of blue above.
We arrived in Potes in the early afternoon and on seeing the crowds, including many foreigners, decided to rush to get a room. The place recommended by the Lonely Planet, Fogon de la Cuz, was just around the corner from the town centre and on the main road. Luckily, we thought, they had a room spare. We battled through the check-in process with the amiable owner who was preparing lunch. Whenever we didn’t understand something he’d try to explain it a different way, eventually pointing us up the stairs and saying ‘cinco,’ five. The room was bright and airy, an overlooked the courtyard. It seemed a good place to base ourselves for a few days.
It was market day, so we wandered through, not finding much of note except cages full of live chickens and a goat chained to a tree in the centre of the market. Lunch, the only meal we timed correctly in the whole of our stay, was greasy eggs, chips and slices of veal. While we waited for the food, Sabine showed me the options we had for walking. My knees, injured from cycling the previous weekend, were going to keep me from anything serious, but there were a number of walks and we could follow them as far as I was comfortable. The highlight was to be Fuente De, to which a cable car ran from the town at the end of the road (I forget the name), and from which most serious walkers ambled down a circular route to Espinama, the next nearest town. Today, with little time, we decided to walk up to Santa Catarina and San Miguel, two church ruins on the hill overlooking Potes. That walk turned out to be shorter than expected so, with a warm sun still high in the sky, we settled down to read for a while. There were only a couple of other walkers to disturb our peace, and the birds flitting around us added to the feeling of seclusion.
Back in town, we mistimed dinner again, spending half an hour in a pub adjacent to our chosen restaurant, chatting with the bar tender. I tried Orujo, a local drink like vodka, but coming in many flavours. Sabine had one with apple, and I started with a straight, then after dinner I tried another with honey. Each one was delicious.
For dinner I tried Pimientos rellenos con carne – red capsicum stuffed with mince and cheese. They were spicy and the best meal I had on the trip, not counting the next time I had them a couple of nights later. Sabine ate some sort of seafood risotto that she found disappointing, but not so bad that it stopped us from going back to the same place for the next two nights. I decided that I liked the idea of going back to the same place, against my usual style, because you got to know the locals and the people behind the bar better, watching them, even talking to them, over a few days. An old guy was the main regular here, and he stood up to come and talk to us for a while, happy to help us struggle through our Spanish. A pretty girl worked behind the bar – another good reason to go back to the same place – and when she wasn’t busy, would join the chat. I often asked about the bands that were playing on the Latino TV channel in the bar, wanting to get some Spanish CDs while I was here.
“That’s Las Orejas de Van Gogh,” I told Sabine when a familiar band came on. I’d bought their debut album in Peru a few years ago.
“Why two ears? He only lost one.” My knowledge of European history and it’s people let me down again. Sure enough when the title came up at the end, it was La Oreja de Van Gogh. Another favourite was Olga Tanon whose husky Spanish tones draped themselves over rock influenced by everything from flamenco to techno music.
Sabine and I were both worn out, as we were every day, so we retired at about 10pm and didn’t see if the parties really did go on late into every night as the rumours say.
The next morning, Tuesday, we got up early to catch the 8:15 bus to Espinama, but never saw it. It seemed it only ran in season – July and August – and it was only May now. The taxi couldn’t take us either, because he had a school run to do. He’d be available if we came a little earlier tomorrow though. The following day turned out to be cloudy, so we decided to leave Fuente De until Thursday when we had a better chance of catching the views. So Tuesday and Wednesday were spent doing a couple of half day walks directly from Potes. The crowds of Monday had evaporated, and it now seemed we were the only people in town. Even the locals had been from the surrounding villages and only come down for the market. The tourist information centre was closed for repairs, so the only person we had to ask for advice was our hotel owner. He suggested in very expansive gestures and strongly enunciated Spanish that we go down the road, and take the path straight ahead. “Don’t go right to Santander,” he said, swinging his arm out to the right while shaking his head. “And don’t go left to Palencia,” another swinging arm and headshake. “Go straight ahead, up a little path between the houses. It’s a difficult climb, but the views are pheNOmenAL,” he said throwing his head back and making big circles with his arms. I’m not sure if we ever made it to the point he referred to so enthusiastically, but we climbed for a couple of hours up long steep hills, then turned to look up the valley of Potes towards Fuente De. The clouds blocked our view of the distant mountain, but what we could see – lush green, steep hillsides cutting into the valley on both sides, and the river winding its way down between them – was spectacular.
That evening, sitting in our room, we heard another couple of travellers arrive and check-in. It was clear they didn’t speak any Spanish and weren’t very interested in trying. “It’s 24 Euro per night. You can have room 7.” It was the familiar voice of the owner, and he’d spoken in English.
Those pheNOmeNAL views couldn’t compare to the walk up to Fuente De, though. On Thursday morning, we met the taxi driver, who greeted us jovially. “Hi! I thought you’d found another way up.” We assured him we hadn’t and that we were very keen to go today, despite the clouds still hanging around. He told us more about the area on the way – that there were about 150 villages in the area, but that the children all came to school in Potes; that the old lady there is 99 and has walked up the road every day of her life, now only managing about 300 metres each day. Then he dropped us at Espinama, showed us where the track started, and drove off. We’d chosen to do the walk backwards because neither of us like walking downhill, and there was no way my knees were going to take that kind of stress. That meant we had the road to ourselves, and we set off into the freezing mists with optimistic thoughts of clear skies ahead. What we got was much better.
Our first steps up the mountain were just after 8am and we didn’t reach the peak until after midday, but both of us were captivated for the entire trip. Sabine managed to take about four roles of film in those few hours. At first, our view was limited to the hills immediately around us, and the only sounds were the occasional gurgling of a nearby creek and some cow bells. Then the mists started rising and we saw sheep and cows on the hills ahead, and higher up on all sides. At one point, we had stopped to hazard a guess at which direction the peak would be – not easy given our two-inch square map – when a gap opened up in the mist to reveal a small section of sheer, grey rock with snowy patches above us. Our gasps echoed through the valley, causing the sheep to bleat in surprise. Sabine’s camera whirred, as she took five shots before the mist closed over. That was to be the first of many peeks of what I came to think of as killer whales playing in the mist. For the next three hours, we kept an eye on the mists around as various pieces of the craggy peak were revealed. Finally, as we neared the last stretch of the walk, we broke through the mist, and like a Christmas present, finally unwrapped after days of exploratory shaking, the panorama appeared around us. Fuente De was a mountain of snow-capped rock, settled on a range of moss-covered peat.
We made our way around the peak to where the cable car was, and found ourselves in the middle of a crowd of people, all showing mild excitement at the view. Sabine and I nodded smugly to ourselves, knowing that our experience of Fuente De was extraordinary and that we’d earned it. We took the cable car down, walked the road back to Espinama and waited for the bus. I was delighted to watch a couple out in their garden until the bus came. Their property was on both sides of a small creek, and a quaint bridge lead from the house to the garden on the other side. They’d raked it into neat but irregular ditches, and were planting seeds for this year’s crop.
Sabine went to ask in the pub next to the bus stop when the bus would leave. “At ten past one,” they told her. “Or twenty past. Or perhaps half past.” We decided we liked the pace of life here. When it left, the driver put up the school bus sign and picked up about twenty children from the villages along the way. It turns out we’d missed the bus on Tuesday because it was a school bus that we’d ignored. We also learnt that schools take a break between noon and 3pm each day and the kids are sent home for lunch to the 150 villages from which they came.