Seville – Cordoba – El Viso del Alcor – Seville – Playa de la Redondela – Faro –Praia Falésia Açoteias – Portimão (0 km of cycling)

I’m dropping off Marous in Seville. She’s taking a plane to Turkey for a project, and I’m taking care of her little camper van for the next two weeks. She hops off the van into a train and all of a sudden, I’m alone with Billy – that’s her van’s name. A chill runs down my back. I’m afraid of everything that can go wrong and bra with this little bus that is almost twice my age. A couple of days ago the handbrake broke. Not a good sign. But at the same time, I’m so very excited about the days that lie ahead of me. This is the experience I decided not to go for when I sold my own van and bought a bike instead. Still, the van-life is something that I aspire to and definitely want to experience for once!

I decide to take Billy to Cordoba, a city I would’ve skipped on the bike. The first few kilometres I sweat from concentration and nervousness. Soon enough, I feel comfortable and relax a little. In Cordoba I find a nice little spot just at the edge of the city. I stay two nights and enjoy the relaxed attitude of this town. It ticks all the boxed I’ve come to expect from medium sized Spanish cities. Full terraces, medieval architecture, winding streets, green parks, siesta, and recently sunshine. Flowers hang from balconies and windowsills.

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I’m driving back to Seville. Before I get there I park the car somewhere in a tiny town half way along. I hang out with a couple of other campers and the local youth. I ride my bike around. I’ve already stayed in Seville a couple of days. But the reason I’m slowly making my way back is Semena Santa. It starts this weekend, the start of Holy Week, marked by Easter. I’ve seen multiple towns rehearsing these last couple of weeks, but have been told Seville takes the cake when it comes to the celebrations. During the whole week processions will carry immense religious statues through town into their respective churches. I watch them with Melanie, an Austrian girl I’ve met here.

The city is on steroids. Seville seems to have grown in size. The streets are packed wall to wall with visitors and locals alike. Everybody wears their best outfits. Dresses, ties and perfume flutter around me. The processions go on all day, multiple cross the city at any given time. There must be hundreds of people in each parade, carrying candles, playing marching music. But their outfits is what surprises me most. They look like KKK costumes, pointy white hats, longer robes and faces covered but for two cut-outs for the eyes. It scares me a little. When night falls, and the robes are more often black than white, the marches become macabre. Shrouded in smoke, illuminated by their candles, the silent marches move through the city like ghosts from the past. At night they also carry black crosses on their backs, often barefoot. It’s like being in the Middle Ages. Yet, on the side of the streets the bars bursting at the seams with tipsy day trippers, only silent when the statues and subsequently the bands pass. It creates a strange mix between a serious religious tradition and a not all that serious party. The contrast between sitting in a bar, having a beer while pop music is playing, and outside a line of hundreds of black robes pass with statues as big as apartments slowly float by behind the windows is… well… particular.

Once the processions – there must be dozens a day – start to be more annoying than interesting, the time has come to finally leave Seville. I’ve been in and around this city for about 2 weeks now, and honestly quite happy to move on. It’s a great place, but Portugal has a magnetic pull on me, and it’s been so close for so long now. Melanie comes with me for a day. We drive to a wonderful little forest next to a beach town. We enjoy the sand, sea and the summer, that has begun with a ferocity it might never end.

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When she leaves for home I’m alone again in the van. I drive around the Algarve, from beach to beach, parking on cliffs that overlook the beaches below, the next place always even more beautiful than the one before. Parking is easy, there’s an app with places and reviews that I will definitely adopt in my technological arsenal when I’m back on the bike. When the roads incline the little camper has a hard time. I’m sweating heavily and checking my mirrors obsessively when it won’t go faster than 60 kilometres an hour, while the rest of the traffic is zooming by twice as fast. I find other campers near me every night. It’s funny how a mode of travel influences the experience. It’s wonderful in the van. I appreciate the extra stuff I’m able to carry in this thing. The extra food and water for instance, sleeping on a real mattress is great too! Still, from time to time I miss my bike. The energy is very different. When I arrive somewhere with the van I’m tired in a very different way. I’m tired from concentration, not from a physical workout. Often, I’m not sure what to do when I arrive somewhere. Another swim, taking some pictures, read a book. On the bike I have both more and less time. It feels like the cycling itself is what I’m doing. In the van, the driving feels like a means to an end, on the bike the cycling itself is the end. And OMG I have to do dishes all of a sudden?!

I’m both more alone and more connected in the van. I’m more alone in the sense that I don’t really need anything from anyone. I have everything right here, and once I’m inside I’m cut off from everybody else. On the bike I use Warm Showers, I feel more in touch with locals when I make myself a sandwich on a tiny square in a tiny town. In the van I’m mostly in touch with other people with vans. Which is also pretty nice. And even though the camper community is very welcoming, most of them are retired, and the doors close early and the TV inside are often being watched. Where are the young hippies from the seventies? Maybe these older folks are them, never stopped? I guess I can’t really stop comparing the ‘bike life’ to the ‘van life’. I’m having a great time, but I’m quite happy I chose two wheels instead of four.

On my fourth day in the Algarve, on a beach parking at Portimão a dog eats my sock. And it will set off a whole new adventure.