Day 23 : reaching the top of Mount Everest

Day 23 : reaching the top of Mount Everest, originally uploaded by raoul_dewinne.

As the saying goes, the last mile is the longest one. After having surmounted the Cruz de Ferro yesterday, we were still believing the Swedish guy who predicted that it was the toughest part to overcome. With that comforting thought we took off on day 23. Right away uphill - as usual. The climbing profile in my guide book indicated that we had to overcome a height difference of 784 m, which sounds impressive but doable since we had roughly 50 km to get over it. But contrary to what the mountain profile showed, this ascent was not a straight-line-smooth climb: it went up and down and up and down and up and down again - as usual. Sure it went always more up than it went down, but the downhill part was each time too short to recuperate from the previous climbing.

At a certain point we must have missed the Camino road since the road that we followed didn't reach the altitude as indicated by the book. We started to believe our self-created illusion that on this road we would not have to climb so much, it may even be a shortcut... It was past noon by now and in this believe we decided to have a quick lunch. If the restaurant people had told us at that very moment how much and how far we still had to climb we would have taken a taxi or hitch-hiked home, for sure we would have called it a day. One thing I learned at least on this exhausting trip: retired Swedish saylors are not so good in fortune telling ;-)

In complete ignorance, hope kept us going, hope that every top would be the absolute last one... in vain. After every climb, yes, there was some descent, but then there was another climb - even a steep climb. And so it went on for the first 50 km. The first absolute top that we reached is called O Cebreiro, it is not simply named Cebreiro, no, it is 'O' Cebreiro - by now we understand why. But after the Alto O Cebreiro (1300 m) came the Alto de San Roque (1270 m) and then came the Alto do Poio (1335 m)... Every descent was frightening us, rolling down is usually big fun, but this time we didn't want to go down any longer since going down meant going up again and we simply couldn't keep up with it any longer!

And then, finally, at last, thank God, came this long expected descent, but - you won't believe it - the wind was sooo strooong that we had to pedal hard in order not to grind to a standstill... Unbelievable, this headwind... With our clothes blown up by the wind we both must have looked like a Michelin Bibendum, unfortunately we did not run on Michelin tires otherwise it would have made a great commercial. Anything we did so far cannot compare to this, there are actually no words for it - the Pyrenees were Peanuts...

Numbers don't lie. Today we biked 80 km in order to overcome a total ascent of 1134 m! In fact, since we left Tours 3 weeks ago, our GPS calculated that we have so far conquered a total ascent of 9597 m, which equals more than climbing the Mount Everest by bike, starting from sea level !!! We deserve to go straight to heaven - even first class - and if heaven doesn't exist, I'll invent it... since I had promised my wife :-))