The intriguing colours of the burnt landscape after last September´s fires make it well worthwhile reproducing Geoff´s report and the 33 accompanying pictures in the AWW Blog. Here it is then , folks, Geoff Hill verbatim!
Anyone who might have thought that this walk was going to be like the last two or three that I had led in this part of the Algarve was in for a bit of a shock.
Anyway , in the beginning, 11 intrepid AWW’ers made it to the start point, though not without the obligatory caffeine fix for some en route:
Sue M’s blister precluded her coming, and Ros’s VW almost did, but , left to right :
John D, David, Miriam, Jan, Gill, Linda, Russell, Sue, Ken, Ros, Geoff.
(Who took the photograph?)
The extent of the fires of 2 months ago were soon evident:
Though, surprisingly, there was some early regrowth:
The bulldozers had been very active constructing new firebreaks, tracks and what appeared to be new ponds:
but still with some manual levelling/grading:
The landscape was quite surrealistic.....instead of a great variety of different hues of green, the palette was now all shades of brown/ochre and black : “bit like an old sepia print” remarked ? Ros.
Anyway, as she might add, it actually made navigation a tad awkward...the tracks through the cistus were obliterated! Even Rosie wondered where to go, till she decided to find the rainbow’s end :
The steep hill was still there, as was water-crossing no.1, where Rosie and Bica decided to ignore their differences and enjoy a drink and a paddle;
Whilst David and I skipt across, others thought some more stepping stones were in order, though Sue waded:
And Jan decided that a little assistance would speed matters up!
Water crossing no.2 was without any misadventure;
Ros admires some more regeneration (thanks to John for his photo below)
But hopefully the occupants of this house evacuated in good time:
Crossing no.3 was equally mundane . Another quick shower caused us to shelter in some old barns, where each room seemed to be equipped with trapeze bars, for unknown reasons ( thanks again to John for photo of my exiting said barn).
A long uphill climb brought us to the lunch stop :
where David and John decided to risk a precipitous slope to get out of the wind :
One other unpleasant consequence of the fires was the visibility of rubbish....but why would anyone drive to the top of the hill to dump old metal containers and bottles?
With rain threatening, but never arriving, we hurried on , past the remains of some bee hives:
An unexpected bonus of the fires was the visibility of tracks, otherwise buried in the cistus/undergrowth.....and just how steep some of the hillsides were. Unfortunately, we shall probably never know what this container was for, as it must have perished in the flames, but here it was from last year’s report:
We thus decided to return via the original hillside track, previously shrouded in cistus but now clear(ish) , even though the ash covered branches left their mark!
Somehow we then took a wrong turning, coming down to the left rather than the right of a villa, but we were only 100m from base by then. Refreshments were taken at O Tasco. Last time we did this I said “Overall time was about 4h 25 mins including lunch, so about 4h 5mins walking; Linda said the distance was 15.4kms, but John H’s GPS reckoned 15.7km a year ago on the same route, so I think John is more accurate!” I won’t argue. Thanks to all who came.
(Copyright: Geoffrey J Hill 2016)
It is also well worthwhile to remember what damage such fires do cause and to admire greatly the efforts of the volunteer Bombeiros in fighting them.
Woops, "skipped" of course, not "skipt"...thanks John
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