__________________
www.thegreatgallivant.com - video blog of my current year long trip around Europe on the F650GS Twin

March 11-20 Rome - San Marino - Bologna - Avignon - Sant Jaume de Llierca



A kiss good bye, a full tank and I am on the road to San Marino. My plan is to spend a few days making it slowly back up to Avignon where I will stay for a week or so before heading down to Spain to start volunteering at the horse ranch. The place is called 'Can Jou' and they are going to feed me and house me for a few months in exhange for about 5 or so hours work per day.

Getting ahead of myself though. It's time to enjoy the moment. Leaving Rome I take a familiar road back through perugia and cross over a path I have been on before. Sunshine, and the warmth of the Italian coloured countryside brings a slow smile to my face. I feel alone, dwelling in the lonliness of an open highway, it is not a bad feeling, not a good feeling, it just is. Accellerating I pass cars and trucks, a fleet of Harleys only to realise that I have to sustain a high speed to keep ahead. My competitive streak finds it hard to go on holiday. Stopping to put on the banana suit I let the Harleys pass me.
I relax into the road and just past Perugia I start to gain elevation. In what is now a familiar process the temperature starts to drop. Stopping the bike I add another layer. Sunday riders flicker past, seemingly warm enough in their one layer of leathers.

Snow still lines the roads and it briefly gets down to 3 degrees. Annoyingly, I still can't shake the paranoia of the cold. Before I can overthink the situation I am decending again, through a beautiful part of Italy.

San Marino really is a case of just going to see what is there. I am intrigued by these small sovereign states and San Marino is the oldest surviving sovereign state in the world, dating back to the 4th centuy AD. It's independence has probably only survived because it has the backing of the pope and the Italians tend to listen to the Vatican.

San Marino sits atop a mountain, overlooking its subjects, surrounded by snow capped peaks. The city itself seems very touristy - my litmus test for this has become the 'torture museum', if you see one of these in the city you are visiting, leave quickly, they are up there with the living statues, Madame Tussauds and portrait artists for useless tourist traps that only take away from the culture of a place.



The entry to San Marino translated means - Welcome to the ancient land of the free.

Next stop Bologna. I roll in with a couple of hours sunshine up my sleeve. The only hostel is booked out so I have to camp, fully aware that it will get down below 0 during the night. I check the opening times of the Ducati museum, my reason for being in Bologna. Gutted. It is closed on Mondays. Churning the possibilities in my mind I know that I don't want to wait it out until Tuesday. This is an area I will definitely come back to and so I reluctantly put the museum back on the shelf for now.

It is at that point that I start flirting with the idea of getting back to Avignon in one day. 720k's away and 11 hours without using toll roads. If I only use toll roads for about 200 k's I can do it in 9 hours, theoretically. I text Nicole, "Going to have a crack at getting back to Avignon tomorrow, Ducati closed Mondays, xo", "Don't push yourself, take it easy, stop in Genoa for the night if you need to, text me as you go, xo". Resolved to reach Avignon the next day I stock up on food at the supermarket. Once I set my mind on getting somewhere, it takes a lot to stop me.

Two girls who are hiking are camped next to me in a Vango Helium, the same tent I have back home, a common link, a conversation starter. Scottish girls, used to the cold, they only have a couple of layers each and are planning to hike over the same mountains I came through to reach San Marino.

The reason the hostel was booked out becomes apparent at about 9pm when heavy metal music starts to pound away. Switching on the bike I check the temperature, 5 degrees and dropping. All my layers go on after a hot shower and I head to bed inside 2 sleeping bags. Earplugs are no match for the heavy metal bass and I struggle to sleep sometime after 12 only to wake up a few hours later, sweating in all my layers. 7am I am up, it's just over 2 degrees. Hard-boiled eggs and porridge will keep me going through the cold. Tent packed, on the road at 8am, temperature hovering at 4.5 degrees, just above my comfort threshold.

A few k's down the road it gets down to 1.5 degrees. It is my constant battle. I know it will be over 10 degrees by lunchtime but if I stop to wait I wont make it to Avignon today. Another hour and the temperature should be up to a bearable point. I bite my lip and push on, it's grim, my thoughts run in circles, slowed by the cold and constantly thinking about it. My purple elephant.

3 degrees flirts with 3.5, flickering back and forth, becoming 3.5 flirting with 4 every new number on the dial triggers a release of seratonin. Somehow my endorphin system has become tied to the thermometer. How did I let it get like this. In the words of Ewan McGregor - I thought I was made of tougher stuff than this.

I know, you get it, it's cold, I don't like, lets move on. I just feel the need to talk about how it affects me and affects the ride. For all the winter months and even some of spring it dominated my planning.



Cold fades into warmth and reaching the start of the apennines I opt to take the scenic route. Snow starts to thicken on the sides of the road but I am twisting the throttle through the curves following snow melt rivers.



I stop for a bit of a dance for an upcoming video blog and to eat a banana in the banana suit. The road is flowing with ease and I descend into Genoa kept up for a solid half an hour to wait for a cycling race to pass on the road I am riding.


Waiting for the cyclists to pass... Already looking a bit tired.


At least it is now warming up and that gives me enough time to get the banana suit off.

At Genoa I turn off the avoid tolls function on the GPS and start attacking the auto-route. I get a solid 200 k's out of the way bringing me into France. Now I just have to cross the haute-alps to get back to Avignon.



I am running low on fuel and headed into the mountains out of Nice. The fuel light is on and the computer tells me I have about 18 miles left. I punch in the next fuel stop on the GPS. Down to 10 miles to go I reach an abandoned fuel stop with only the rusted remnants of fuel pumps reaching to the sky from a pile of concrete. I punch in the next fuel stop in the GPS, a little less confident of what I will find. Without a fuel stop behind me for 30 odd k's there is only going forward. I reach the next fuel stop with 2 miles to go only to find a 24 hour pump that only accepts credit cards.

So I should mention at this point that I loathe credit cards and as such, don't have one, opting to use a visa debit card for online transactions and only taking cash out on a debit card. The next fuel stop in the GPS is 20 k's away and I doubt I will make it. A smart move would be to wait for a while until someone turns up, hand them the cash and get them to put it on their credit card. Instead I cross my fingers, roll the dice, and hope that there is a fuel stop in the next town about 8 k's away. As I ride I am being ever so gentle on the revs to get as much distance out of the tank as possible. The computer hits zero and now I have no indication of how much further I can get. It feels like I am riding on borrowed time. Little do I know how miniscule this problem will be in comparison to the problems that await in the months to come.
Rolling into the town I see a fuel station, it's open, you ripper! Fuel for the bike, gatorade for me.

"Bonjourno!"

The attendant gives me a funny look.

Ah, France, "Bonjour!"

She gets an over enthusiastic "Merci!" I am just glad to have fuel.

I promise myself that I won't let the fuel get that low again, a promise I have made before. Lesson learnt that the fuel stops on the GPS map are by far out of date.

It's the homeward stretch to Avignon now, about 250k's of twisties and country roads. It's about 4 in the afternoon and I have been on the road for 8 hour with little more than a couple of 5 minute breaks.

When we came through this area weeks before everything was covered in snow. Now it has melted and the landscape is entirely unrecognisable to me. I hate to say, without the snow, it has lost a bit of the magic. I focus on pushing into the turns. Without Nicole on the bike I can really carve my way through the mountains. Pushing the bike, twisting the throttle, punching the brakes. Of course I am not the only thing on the road and often get stuck behind cars, slowing me down. I have a resolve to reach a destination and an adrenalin gland that might as well be hard wired to the throttle.

We slow into a town, 50kph and I see my opportunity to overtake. Dialling up a good 80k's I cross double lines to overtake the car. In only 3 weeks I have already started to ignore the rules, as the saying goes 'When in Rome...' but I wasn't in Rome anymore and the Gendarmerie are standing at the end of the road. They motion to me to pull over.

Shit. The adrenalin injectors in my stomach fire and my heart rate kicks into a higher gear. This is the first time that I have been pulled over by an official on my entire trip. I have only heard bad things about the "Gendarmerie". My insurance paperwork, my license - everything is going to be put to the test. The French cop asks for my papers. I get them out. He looks them over. Looks over at me and smiles.

"Slow down on the turns."

Hands me back my paperwork.

Poker face. You can't look happy in this situation. I pack the bike up while he pulls over the Kawasaki I passed minutes earlier.



Steadily I make my way back to avignon, passing the same scenery from three weeks prior like watching a video cassette rewind. Fighting through the weariness I join a cavelcade of local French riders headed home from their Sunday ride. None of them seem to take much notice of the GB plates as I join their ranks and let them set the pace. Riders peel off the main road, leaving the group to their respective destinations as the sun dips behind the horizon in front of us. Slowly the group thins out until it is just me again.

I pull the bike into a it's secure spot below Nicoles apartment. Exhausted and red-eyed I kill the engine but my body still hums with the vibration of 11 hours on the road. Nicole smells of shampoo. Her eyes are fresh from sleep. I hold her and squeeze her tight. She has dinner cooked and Chevre waiting for me in the fridge, the French goats cheese I didn't realise was my favourite until now. Eating quickly I collapse into bed where I stay until the next morning.


Rue Paul Sain - Nicoles street.


You have to have your name on the door here in France or they won't deliver your mail.

One week is all I had to soak up a bit more of Avignon and spend some time with Nicole. It was her Birthday on the Friday and so I of course had to stay until then. Her sister and her boyfriend were also travelling through France and so they stopped by for Nicoles birthday. Cashflow was a bit of an issue for me at the time and to be honest I am not a very good present giver. I didn't want to buy some half-assed present for the sake of 'buying a present' so I painted her a card and just doted on her all day by making breakfast and dinner, cleaning the house and trying to make her day flow as best as possible.

The week went quickly. I spent the days editing blogs and trying to come up with a solution to not having a camera. My mother in England had an insurance policy on the camera I was filming on. I don't know if I mentioned it yet but I had swapped her for her camera with the one I had been using earlier. Theirs filmed HD in much better colour and mine was better suited to what she wanted to do, take photos. So I sent it back to them in the post to try and get a new one on warranty. Fingers crossed.

Unfortunately this means there is a huge gap in footage, I only have the gopro, and so I will share a few photos here that Nicole took around Avignon to give you a bit of an idea of the feel of the place.





In the Centre of Avignon



The Pont Du Gard, a bridge that goes to nowhere.



Relaxing at a picnic in the park with the locals.

So it's only a few days until I leave and it's about time to have the 'conversation'. Up until now my plan has been to spend about 6 months in Spain working and volunteering followed by a whirlwind tour of Europe before shipping the bike to South America. Nicole was due to finish her English teaching placement at the end of April and was free to travel after that. After long discussion we agreed that Nicole would come and meet me in Spain at the end of April and volunteer or work wherever I am at the end of April. We will then hang around in Spain until after June at some point and then ride around Spain/France/Belgium and up to the Netherlands. Three of our friends are coming over from Australia and are going to meet us in the Netherlands, hire a car and come with us around Germany/Czech/Austria. At that point we will then head to Eastern Europe for a couple of months before shipping the bike to South America. That will give us a few outs in case we get sick of each other.

The day to leave came up very quickly and being a work day, Nicole had to leave early in the morning.

So Nicole went to teach at the school while I packed the bike and got ready to ride to Can Jou. It is a 5 or so hour journey if you don't take the Autoroute and I get on the road some time after 10, stopping in at Nicoles school to say good bye one last time. At this stage we don't expect to see eachother until the end of April, 6 weeks away.

The sun is shining. It's the sun of early spring the casts a slightly yellow tinge on the landscape.



Back home in my office cubicle I had one particular fantasy. I am in the desert, alone, somewhere in the US, Arizona maybe, on a deserted highway, on a bike, the type of which is unimportant. The sun is shining through my visor. It's not too hot, just warm like a friendly hug. I feel excited and I feel free. I have the means to go wherever I want but I am in that one place, not because I have to be, but because I choose to be. I don't know where I am going in the fantasy but I am in transit. Between destinations. The important part in the fantasy is not where I am going but that I am going.

It is a rare and fleeting state, but in that ride to Can Jou in the North of Spain, with the sun shining on me I feel like I am living the fantasy. My transit takes me through the rustic parts of France to the border with Spain. Two years of Spanish classes under my belt and I am keen to put it to use. That being said I have made the decision to volunteer in Catalunya so I can be closer to Nicole and well, I like the idea of riding and working with horses in the mountains.



I head up the Pyrennees and cross the border into Spain. I start recognising a lot of the words on the signs. They may be in Catalan but with my basic Spanish I can still catch the jist of what they say. I will later find out that due to the laws in France this place just past the border is a hot spot for prostitution. Women in short, short shorts line the roads, texting on their phones, waiting for someone to pull over.



Mountains loom in the distance where I will spend the next three months.



Rolling into Sant Jaume de Llierca, the small town at the foot of the mountain on which Can Jou sits. I follow the winding road for about 10 k's up and up. Finally I reach a sign 'Can Jou' A massive rural inn sits on top of the hill with small cottages peppered around it. The Inn looks out to the South and behind it the view takes in the snow capped Pyrennees. Horses are standing around in fields cut out on the mountain side. Crisp, fresh air. The place seems deserted. I can hear a radio in the distance. Following the sound down to a set of stables I find a girl working on the horses. One lone dread lock hanging down the side of her face and a dew piercings... typical Catalan looking. She introduces her in a thick French accent, "You must be Jackson, the new volunteer, I am Cammie.. welcome to Can Jou." I get the traditional 'Besos', kisses on each cheek. Cammie shows me my room in a small wooden prefab house and explains the daily routine to me.

I take the afternoon to settle in before I start my first day working in the stables.

__________________
www.thegreatgallivant.com - video blog of my current year long trip around Europe on the F650GS Twin

March 21 onwards - Volunteering at Can Jou - Part 1

So, I had arrived at Can Jou and I ended up spending a fair bit of time there. This post I want to give you an idea of what a typical day of volunteering there involved and some background into the people and the place.


A storm rolls in from the Pyrenees. Can Jou sits perched on a hill in the North East of Spain in Catalunya.

Can Jou - a Can is a rural house in Catalonian, a Jou is that thing that holds the plough to the neck of the pulling animal. The house sits proudly in what we would describe as the saddle of two peaks on top of a mountain. A saddle the same shape as a Jou, where the house took its name. It consists of one main hotel building with over two dozen rooms. This hotel was built onto the side of a farm house that dates back over a thousand years. Surrounded are a couple of smaller cabin style houses for workers, a set of stables with yards for training and preparing horses. Horse paddocks, outlined by modern electric tape fence, cascade down either side of the hill. A horses appetite keeps the grass at bay, ensuring a each paddock is a mixture of mud and hay, clearly defined against the thick forrest surrounding.


Breakfast time for the horses. There were a total of 35 horses on the farm.

A typical day at Can Jou starts at 8am. Wake up and head down to the stables. Feed the horses, work them in the arena, send them out and then start work on any other tasks that might need doing. Greasing saddles and bridles, mending fences, trimming lawns and just general tasks around the farm. Horse blankes would also need washing, everyones least favourite job as the smell was less than favourable.


Cleaning horse blankets.

"Desayunar", breakfast, is at about 10 am we stop for a good long breakfast. Spanish meals are all a few hours back from the standard western meal schedule.

Breakfast is normally Jamon and Eggs on bread, or Muesli. Being a volunteer I have been given unfettered access to the larder in the Inn. Possibly a mistake on their part. There was always a giant leg of 'Jamon' to cut a slice off and I developed what will likely be an expensive taste for me in the future. When away from home, Catalonians will often cite 'proper Jamon' as the thing they miss most.


Raiding the larder.


Cooked jamon and eggs on toast... mmm.


We could look out to the mountains and watch over the horses from the window where the staff ate their meals.

The day from here always depended on whether or not there were clients. In late March and early April we had very few clients. This meant my day of work practically ended at breakfast. If there were clients we would have to prep the horses and help the clients saddle them before they went on their ride for the day. Then hang around until the afternoon when we would feed them on their return and help clean up the stables.


Prepping the horses for the clients. You can see the hotel up on the hill behind.


Brushing down a horse. As they were losing their winter coats through most of my stay I was nearly always covered in horse hair.

As a client you could either do one day treks on the horses, or, each week, a trail would run where clients came in on the Monday morning and each took a horse they would stay with for the week as they tour around the local area. They would stop at various rural inns around Catalunya and someone would go along to do trail support, make lunches for the clients, feed the horses and check the clients into that particular inn.

Clients mostly came from Germany, then the Netherlands, Scandanavia, Britain and the US. They were predominantly women. The array of nationalities meant there were always different languages being spoken.

Can Jou was started by a guy called Mick Peters, he was British, married to a local Catalonian woman. He found this old worn down farm house back in the 80s and rebuilt it with the vision of running horse trails around the local area. He ran it up until two years ago when tragedy struck. Mick was driving a tractor up a hill when it rolled, crushing him to death. He left 3 sons and a daughter behind.


Cutting fire wood to keep us warm was another of the many random tasks I had around the farm.


Exercising the horses in the ring.


Julian drives the guy in the back, another Aussie volunteer to court as we attempt to get him out of some trouble he managed to get into with the police... a story for the next post.

When I arrived at Can Jou it was in a state of transition. Julian and Marcus, both my age, had inherited the responsibility of running Can Jou. However their heart was not in it. Over the months I would get to know them better and I think they are very similar to their father. They wanted to start their own tourism style business in Costa Rica and make something of themselves in that respect, just like their father had. Julian and Marcus were great guys, always smiling, even when they were complaining, sometimes fiery, always with an abundance of energy. They lived the party life, prefering to live in their mothers apartment in one of the local nearby towns. Very rarely would we see them at Can Jou unless they needed to do managerial tasks or sweet talk the female clients. The latter being an art form they had perfected. I watched Marcus chat a woman into the bedroom in under half an hour. Having said that, they did treat me well, taking me out for long lunches, tapas, s, squid breakfasts and making sure I always felt looked after.


Marcos sits across from me as we enjoy a 'Clara' - basically a with lemon soda. At first the only way to tell him apart from Julian is the ear stretcher.


A squid breakfast very typical of that area of Catalunya.

So there were just a few regular people who I would see every day. The stable manager, Cammie, who cared for the horses and took out clients on day rides. Cammie was French born in a town close to the border with Spain. She had been coming to Can Jou every summer to volunteer for the past 14 years. Since she was 10 years old. Her degree in science had her running tests in a lab the year prior but that was not where she wanted to be. Julian put a call in to her a few months prior when the previous stable manager had to quit due to injury. She jumped at the chance to work outdoors with horses and took a significant pay cut so she could work with horses every day.


Cammie adoring a horse.

Cammie was a hard worker and expected the same from everyone. It was not unusual that you would see her still in the stables late into the afternoon, training horses and practicing her show jumping. She would prefer dirt over make-up and sometimes I wouldn't see her change her clothes for a few days.

Liam is the younger half-brother of Julian and Marcus. At a fresh seventeen he spends most of his time smoking joints when he should be helping out at Can Jou. Always smiling or laughing but he would always have his older brothers on him to do things. So he was always in fear of his brothers catching him skiving off. Liam loved the horses and taught me to ride, it was always a good excuse for him to take off into the scrub and smoke a joint while we watered the horses.


Senda on the left and Liam on the right, probably stoned, looking out over the Pyrenees.

Senda, pronounced send-ah, only spoke Catalan, a bit of Castilliano and a touch of english. Our conversations consisted of one word sentances at first, which slowly progressed to being able to talk about his boxing. The same age as Liam, but a bit more mature, he trained in boxing all the time and despite smoking nearly the same amount of weed as Liam, still had the motivation to go to training in the mornings and then run 7k uphill to help out a couple of days a week.

Senda rode his dirt bike around the local area, a little 150m. Now here is the clincher. He did this with road tyres that were down past the wear indicators. Never shying away from corners either.

Adina and Juan. A very warm Romanian couple who had come to Can Jou for work many years ago when Romania joined the European Union. Adina was the chef and cooked all the client meals. She had mastered the Catalonian cooking and I was often the beneficiary of the leftovers of these country home cooked meals. She spoke a small amount of English and so I was able to talk with her from the start and only learnt more about her as my Spanish improved.
Juan could only speak Castillian and so it wasn't unil my Spanish improved that I was able to understand his sense of humour. He helped Adina in the kitchen and looked after the other tasks in the small hotel. They have two daughters, Roberta and Sara, seven and five years old. They all lived together in a tiny little cottage on top of the hill at Can Jou. Roberta and Sara went to school in the local town and so they spoke Catalan. In the house, the whole family spoke Romanian but Adina and Juan only spoke Castillian so their daughters had their own secret language.


Adina and Juan in the kitchen.

Roberta and Sara were typical of children brought up in the country. With few friends nearby and only nature to entertain them they had broad imaginations, often riding sticks around and pretending they were horses.

Getting back to a typical day. Lunch was served up by Adina around 2 o'clock. Some days I would eat by myself, sitting on a rock, watching out to the Pyrennees. Earlier on in my stay it would be quite cold and so we would get a nice log fire going in the communal area of the house and sit around eating, chatting and maxing out the wifi connection. As it got warmer we would eat together outside and then nap in the sun on the grass for siesta.

The afternoons were either spent editing or writing emails and watching old reruns of america sitcoms. Some days we would ride the horses around the nearby mountains and slowly my riding skills progressed. Cammy would take me for long canters around the hills, happy to push my abilities. In my entire time at Can Jou I never fell off a horse and so I always had that naive optimism of someone that has never been burnt. When clients came back from rides in the afternoons we would have an hour or so of work removing the gear and feeding the horses before sending them to the paddocks for the night.


Enjoying the dirt roads in the hills around Can Jou after all the work is done.


We watch the sun set over the mountains as Sara and Roberta in the Pink and Red run a muck around us.

In line with the late schedule we wouldn't eat dinner until about 9pm. Dinner was often not made for us and so I would usually cook for myself. This meant getting creative with whatever happened to be in the larder. Garbanzos, zucchini and carrots with tomatos and some pasta. Lucikly we had an endless supply of onions and garlic to give the meal some base flavour and plenty of herbs and spices to top it off with some punch. There were a few things in the larder labelled 'No tocar' - No touching, and so we couldn't quite pull together the same meals as Adina.


We were more often than not treated with some pretty spectacular sunsets. Photos cannot do justice.

Initially nights were cold, anywhere from 2 to 7 degrees. The small Kabana that Cammie and I shared had no insulation or heating. Just half an inch of wood between us and the elements. To cope we would sit in front of the fireplace in the main house until the very last minute where we would run back to the Kabana and into bed. Cammie was born of the mountains and so coped with a couple of big blankets. Used to a more tropical Australian climate I would bury myself five blankets deep only to emerge the next morning for a new day.


The 'Cabana' where Cammie and I slept.

Next post I will go into the events that happened over the course of my time at Can Jou that will ultimately define the path of the rest of my travels.

__________________
www.thegreatgallivant.com - video blog of my current year long trip around Europe on the F650GS Twin

I apreciate the work you put into your blogs,the video's are first rate ,Note to self learn more about editing video's ,yours are very professional ,will follow the rest of your travels with interest.Noel

Thanks heaps Noel!! really appreciate the feedback, it takes a while to do each blog, hence them coming out very slowly. So much is happened and I have so much great footage in the pipeline. When I get back to Australia in a month I will have much more time to edit. Plus I have a better pc back home to edit on, so I will be able to edit much faster. This little laptop that I am using at the moment, chokes every time I try and render footage, meaning each video blog is about 25-30 hours work.

I just got an email from Grant who has accepted my application to present at a HUBB meeting in Australia in 2013, where I am going to present what I have learnt from filming and editing and how I think that other riders can help push the format beyond just gopro footage and music as a backing track.

__________________
www.thegreatgallivant.com - video blog of my current year long trip around Europe on the F650GS Twin

I'd be interested in hearing you speak ,so where and when,i guess it's all on here some where.I'am fairly new to computers etc much to learn.would love to ride to the hubb meeting.Noel

Here is the latest video.



Noel, September next year in Dayboro.

__________________
www.thegreatgallivant.com - video blog of my current year long trip around Europe on the F650GS Twin