The Cheese was Amazing.

The hairpins were from Hell!

.

 
By our Minister for Communication and Lies - Domster

It was Scott that saw it first I think.

He had wandered back to our table from the campsite office looking excited and muttering about a great descent he'd just seen a photo of. I followed him back inside the office and there it was, pinned just inside the door.

It stood amongst the notices for pony trekking and yellowing A4 adverts for nearby restaurants, an advert in its own way, but the only one that caught our eye.

A sun faded poster of thirty-odd hairpins snaking sinuously down a very steep mountainside with death penalties if you got over-enthusiastic with your cornering. A white dirt trail cascading down the cliffs, broken by occasional scree runs and God knows what else.

It looked special.

It looked frightening.

It looked as though it had to be ridden.

We started to pick over the trail in the way that mountain bikers do. 'That section'll be tricky' one of us said 'But the rest of it will go won't it?' the other added, ignoring the obvious fact that we were staring at a blurred photograph taken from a vantage point at least a mile away from the actual trail. 'Still,' we thought 'It'll go'.

At the bottom of the picture was a caption reading 'Camino de Treviso', all that we needed was to find the damn thing.

However, all thoughts of the trail were pushed from our heads for a few days as Ash was helicoptered off a mountainside to hospital with a smashed wrist, dislocated shoulder and concussion after cartwheeling down the track at 30mph.

This served a rest day onto our plates and so, whilst Roger, Andy and Will went off to Santander hospital to visit our stricken comrade, Scott and I were left to our own devices.

We strolled down into Potes to be tourists, flicking through the postcard racks and looking dubiously at bottles of local spirits and mountain biking action men toys.

But, peering put at us from a rack of postcards was a familiar sight; a white line of dirt slicing a ragged tear down the side of the mountain. It had to be ridden.

We went into the shop and asked in our shattered Spanish where the trail was. The lady behind the counter pulled out a map and pointed to a small village with a thin spiders-leg of a line zig-zagging through the contours away from it and finishing in the La Hermida gorge, only a few miles from where we were staying.

The 'trail' on the map dropped 1300m in the width of my little finger. Gulp.

Later that day we pored over the maps at the campsite attempting to piece together a route from the trails marked on the maps. Eventually we stitched together a route on tracks we thought might exist (Spanish maps being slightly less reliable than Virgin trains), starting at a small village called Bejes.

As the team set out the next day and parked some 200m above the village I couldn't help feeling nervous. With what had gone on over the previous days and the precipitous looking nature of the descent I was certain that 'bad things' were waiting for us.

I'll skip the climb, an easy gradient spin leading to some fun sections of wide limestone track through the trees and finishing steeply up to a col. It was fun but not the reason we were here.

We haired down the road, tucked low over the bars roadie-style to the village of Treviso at the head of the descent.

Treviso was almost the quintessential Spanish mountain village; a collection of ancient red-roofed farmhouses, all jumbled stonework and enormous dry-rot riddled beams, with the occasional piece of ornate carving tacked on and looking as out of place as Picasso hung on a building site.

The village was laced together with rough-laid concrete roads that wound mazily between the houses. We descended through the village, tyres thundering on the ridged concrete, and pulled up at a small bar to take in a coffee and cheese sandwich, as 'the meal of the condemned man' before we headed on to the main course.

The descent proper began on a dairy milk-coloured trail peppered with snowball-sized limestone chunks.

At this point the rest of the track was hidden from view by the corner of the cliff that jutted across the path. But we got an idea of what was to follow with the first set of six or seven hairpins: foot out, skip the back end round, slam one foot back into the pedal and power out, before jamming the anchors on and unclipping as the next 180 degree turn loomed.

Gravel crunched under the wheels as the trail steepened and changed in character. We were now looking for lines through drop-offs and gullies, tyres fighting for grip in the drifts of limestone chippings. Then there it was.

 We rounded the edge of the cliff and below us the trail plunged into the gorge, sweeping back and forth in front of us. It stopped us all in our tracks as we peered down, tracing the seemingly endless turns. One in particular stood out in my mind; the track headed straight for the cliff edge only to fling itself away at the last moment.

As we stood there, Scott clicking away on his camera, a hiker came up the trail towards us and asked us in broken English 'If we know how the trail is'?

'Ermm no, not really' we answered sheepishly. 'OK. Good luck,' he replied and stood there waiting for us to set off so that he could watch us from his lofty vantage point as we tried to descend. Another type of local vulture we decided.

Awed at the trail below us and now even more perturbed than we were before, we set off again, our bikes skipping under us as we soaked up the rocks. Sweat dripped off me as I worked my way down the hillside, brakes squealing on overheated rims and fingers cramping as they clamped vice-like around the bars.

Concentrating and focused hard on staying upright and alive, one corner blurred into the next, minor and major obstacles came thick and fast, requiring 100 per cent concentration at all times. Keep the speed high and front light into the chippings, avoid the boulder field - take the drop off instead, less front brake into the next corner and keep away from that edge!

The walkers we met as we descended stopped and stood aside, either clapping and shouting encouragement or shaking their heads at our foolishness. Whether all this attention was down to our spirited descent or the fact that we had all decided to wear Hawaiian shirts that day I guess we will never know.

One particular part of the descent summed up the whole thing for me. The path here was quiet a manageable grade and around two metres wide with a chasm of a drop to the left. Some spiteful pixies had placed a metre round boulder hard up against the right edge of the trail, giving only a meter clearance on the left. I had seen it coming but was being as indecisive as a small boy in a sweet shop. What to do, bottle it and get off and walk or go for death or glory? A metre is a fair old width, but with that drop to the left it seemed that the closer and closer I got the smaller and smaller the gap became. I was convinced I was going to clip my pedal on the boulder and catapult myself off the trail and into a deep and early grave.

Oh well, eyes straight forward, hands off brakes and no thought except the trail beyond the gap. I held my breath as the tyres made terrible rasping sounds in the loose chippings as I rode on through.

I'd done it, a small but liberating victory over my survival instincts. I stopped to watch Scott and Roger attempt the mental battle that was 'the gap'. Scott bottled less than four meters away and he scuttled to one side to let Rog come through. The look of concentration on Roger's face as he rode through collapsed into a massive cheek-splitting-Cheshire-cat-Chelsea-smile of a grin as he pulled up alongside me.

But the hardest part of the descent was still to come.

The path became steeper and the hairpins closer and closer together. Eventually the trail was cutting back and forth every meter or making riding virtually impossible.

There were two options here; you could either hop the bike around the sharp corners trials-style, ignoring the precipice on your right-hand side or cut a straight line over the rocks and big drops that made up the hairpins.

OK, there were three options, you could walk through as well, but that would have been a nasty defeatist attitude to take, the sort of thing that your mother might advise you to do.

I chose the first option, but balanced on a step halfway through a bend I tried to swing the back of the bike round and lost my balance. As I toppled sideways towards the cliff I remember thinking whether I should throw myself clear from the bike or simply pile into the boulder to my side. In that split second some survival instinct kicked in and kept me with the bike and with a hefty thud I smacked into the boulder. It knocked all the air from my lungs but kept me on the path rather than at the bottom of the gorge in several damp, twitching parts.

Shakily I got to my feet and continued nervously down the trail. Until that point I had been descending reasonably well, but now I had definitely lost my bottle and was struggling where normally I would just roll through the obstacles. Arse.

We were virtually down now, practically in the gorge, but there was still fun to be milked from the teat of this momma!

A set of three or four dry, dusty, gravely hairpins presented themselves to us and all of a sudden it was Drift City as we threw the bikes into the corners letting both wheels skip sideways in dreamy fashion. There's something about nailing a corner perfectly that makes you smile and have delusions of being a great downhiller. Whatever, Will overdid it into one sharp bend, his front wheel digging in and tucking under as the bike began to drift, flinging him over the bars leapfrog-style.

Unhurt but embarrassed he was just dusting himself down and examining the fresh bacon on his legs when swearing floated down the mountain to us. A minute later Roger walked down to us, oozing jam from a fresh lesion on his leg; joining the victims of Treviso club, another trip over the bars apparently.

On again through some more rubble, flick the bike over the rocks, pumpfor the drop off, face taking on the usual jumping expression; grimacingor puffing the cheeks out, some yelping with the landing, up a short slope, legs straining with the big gear and the low saddle height, overan ancient bridge and then the final sprint through the rocks down tothe road, sliding right to the edge and flicking a shower of gravel across the carriageway.

We collapsed into the shade of a bus shelter, exchanging grins as we contemplated what we'd just done. Camino de Treviso 0, Team Banana Racing 1.

On the side of the building opposite a roughly painted arrow pointed back up the hill towards Treviso. There was no indication of the trail, no sight of it from the road, a hidden gem and no mistake.

Can we have rematch please? Best of three maybe?

The Camino de Treviso (or Rua de Treviso) is in the Picos de Europa in Northern Spain where Team Banana Racing were spending two weeks in some of the best alpinesque riding country in Europe. The trails, food, wine, climate and people are all wonderful and although the area is known for its climbing it is second to none as a mountain biking venue. Plus of course, the cheese is amazing.

The main tourist centre is Potes with plenty of camping, hostels, apartments and hotels but book in advance in the summer as it gets busy.

Drive is 10 hours at the very least from Calais (less from Cherbourg/Le Harve) and those motorway tolls mount up quickly. Fly Drive to Bilbao or Madrid for around £XXX. Alternatively spend 24 hours on a ferry to Bilbao or Santander from Plymouth or Portsmouth.

The Camino de Treviso can be found easily from Treviso village. There are only two paths out of Treviso, and the one you want goes down...    

'Click' for more images of the whole of Operation Amazing Cheese