It was a nice cool morning but the walk was quite boring with a lot of tarmac to begin with but after a while the track continued on a narrow dirt road that suddenly after a bend passed straight through a farm between buildings to the left and to the right. Suddenly a huge white Labrador came running straight at me without making a sound. I also saw a woman and a child standing to the right outside the main farmhouse looking in my direction. The dog snapped repeatedly at me from behind, taking hold of my trousers with its teeth shaking its head vigorously. I didn’t know what to do so I just continued walking dragging the dog behind me while urging the woman to call off the dog. She made a couple of lame tries to do so but Pietro, as she called dog, continued to defend the household against the intruder. I am convinced that Pietro applied the same methods on me snapping at my heels as he knew would work getting the cows to where he wanted them 🙂 After a couple of very long minutes Pietro decided that he had won and let me off the hook in order to return to his normal business.
The terrain became rather difficult from there on with a lot of obstacles to pass like barbed wire fences and ravines and I began to suspect that I had chosen the wrong path when passing a fork a while before being abused by the dog but I had no intention to go back and take a chance with Pietro once more so I strode on using my GPS and my compass to navigate safely forward through rocks, boulders, and fissures and soon I found myself facing a motorway from way up a hill and down there in the valley was Villanueva de Cauche, my halfway target for the day.
As in all villages in Spain no matter how small they are there always is at least one restaurant and this was no exception. I had a ham and cheese sandwich and a beer and had a rest for a while listening to the locals talking. In Villanueva de Cauche the GR-7 through Andalucía splits in two, of which one goes north of and the other one south of the Sierra Nevada. I continued following the track to the south mostly on tarmac but with magnificent views over the nearby mountains. My guide-book told me that there was no accommodation to be found in Riogordo but i went by a Casa rural a bit up the mountain and asked the people in there watching television all family together if they would have me but the answer were that they were closed for business and when I asked if there was any place to stay in Riogordo I got a no as an answer from one of the older women. But when leaving one if the younger women stopped me and told me that there certainly w-a-s a bar beside the public swimming pool in Riogordo that had rooms to let. I thanked her and went on my way downhill for several kilometers.
The place she had told me about had rooms to let but the problem was that this was on the one day of the week that the bar staff had their day off so the bar was closed. But there was a note beside the door with a phone number and ten minutes after having called I was installed in a brand new hotel room with all conveniences.
