Wasting time

I got up about 11 and walked into town for lunch. After that I walked back towards the hotel and was going to wander up what I believed, from the sign, to be the access to the first bit of that trail round the island I mentioned the other day. I then decided I'd go back to the hotel and get a bike and go up on that instead. So I did, although the walk back was only another 800m it seemed to take forever.

It was very uphill along that road and I was knackered almost immediately. I clearly still haven't recovered from yesterday. (The "billowy portions", as I believe PG Wodehouse called them, were particularly painful from the word go, even when I was outside the hotel.) I kept going past small groups of people who were obviously planning to walk along that trail. Eventually I got to the top of the road, where there was a sort of water-collection plant, and an obviously foot-only steep-ish path going upwards through some trees. So I turned round and came back.

And I managed to have a minor accident on the way down. I found myself going down a steepish hill, somehow locked the back wheel, tried to steer and found myself plowing into some fortunately relatively soft bushes at the side of the road. There was an element of that "time slowing down as you have an accident" quality. All things considered it could have been a lot worse. I laughed my stupid head off once I'd stood up and found I was essentially intact. My glasses had come off but I found them and they hadn't even been broken. Considering I could have ended up sliding across the gravelly, rocky surface of the road or colliding with a tree I think I got off lightly. In hindsight I half suspect that if I hadn't been trying to brake I would have got away with it, but who knows. The chain had come off, but being the mechanical genius I am I managed to sort that out.

A bit further down I was going moderately fast but a little bit more under control down another hill when a guy walking up waved at me to stop. I managed to stop but it was nearly a repeat of the same incident (I would have been fine if I hadn't needed to stop for him, I think), I ended up sort of half-skidding the bike round as I stopped in what might have looked like an annoyingly cool way but was actually just my desperate attempt to halt under some kind of control in his vicinity. He wanted to know (in Spanish, then we switched to English) if this was the way to somewhere I'd never heard of. I told him there was a water treatment kind of plant at the top and some sort of trail up into the hills and that either satisfied him or he decided I wasn't going to be any more use to pretended to be satisfied. I feel slightly bad about us having to revert to English, but in my defence I imagine my pulse was racing somewhat after the accident and the struggle to stop to talk to him, which would hardly be conducive to expressing myself clearly in a foreign language.

I got back to the hotel having only been out for about an hour. GPS says I did 5.8km with a max speed of 38.7km/h, the latter of which sounds suspiciously the same as it said yesterday, so I am not sure I trust that. But 5.8km is vaguely plausible anyway.

So I was back at the hotel by about 4:15pm and it's a lovely day outside and I've been here since, reading a bit and wolfing down the chocolate I had put by in reserve for the ferry trip (so I will have to buy some more tomorrow). It feels a bit like I'm wasting the day, but I just can't/couldn't face either going back out on a bike (not because of the accident, just because I'm obviously not physically up to it today, as I was feeling knackered almost as soon as I started earlier) or walking back up that road to the the water collection plant place and climbing up that foot-only trail. I may do that tomorrow, although no doubt the weather will suck then. As I say, it feels like I'm wasting time and the nice weather, but sod it. I keep dithering about maybe going back out but I'm not going out and it's 6:30pm now and it's just a little bit too late, although it doesn't really get dark until about 10pm.

I'm not planning on going out tonight, I will stay in the hotel, I've already eaten for the day and as I said it wasn't enormously fun being out last night. I may go down to the hotel bar and have a couple of drinks later, I don't know, but nothing major. This probably adds a bit more to the feeling of wasting the day, but as I say, sod it.

I have to go into town tomorrow morning/midday-ish to buy some replacement chocolate and to have lunch, because I don't plan to be out tomorrow night as I have to be up early for the ferry on Saturday, so I won't be able to have dinner in town. Weather permitting I think I might then come back to the hotel to drop the chocolate off and then try walking up that bit I cycled up today and higher.

I don't think I'm going to do the tour the 'taxi' driver told me about last night. It is slightly tempting but my gut feeling says I'm better off even just dithering around in a vaguely outdoorsy way like I am today. I've seen a reasonable amount of scenery and if I do get anywhere high-ish on that walk tomorrow I will see more, and I doubt the rest of the island is so enormously different.