Riding in the heat

Well, not the best beginning of the day. It turned out that the one and only road heading south was a four-lane highway and that even this road was not a scenic one, going a few miles inland, no view of the coast. Luckily, there were two service roads next to the highway (so eight lanes altogether...), still, this is not a biker's dream. To make matters worse, there was a sign, proclaiming that Reggio di Calabrio was 475 km away...what does one do? I thought of just closing my eyes (well, not a good idea), I mean just heading for it and trying to make 200 kilometers a day, just riding and riding. This plan quickly dissolved, not only due to the heat, but also due to the fact that the service roads often swerved off to nowhere, sometimes they just ended. In summary, I was quite confused as what to do next. The road was outlined with cacti and fruit plantages, I remember when two elderly ladies gave me a big bag of apricots seeing my suffering, as I wasn't having fun, not at first.

Again, the solution was to go for the uphill: even though it was mighty hot, I left the coastline after some 30 km's, I arrived at Bernalda, finding some Roman ruins. The uphill was taxing, the sun was just killing me, I seriously thought of giving up my ride.

The scenery got more interesting in Montalbano Ionico.

In the evening, I experienced one of the worst head winds and all of this on a main road, with cars swinging by. I was doing some 3 miles an hour or so. Not the best ending of the day either. I wanted to reach a city, called Colobraro, but as it was even more uphill, I just crashed in a forest, put up my tent and quickly went to sleep.

Interestingly, back then I did not wild camp a lot - in contrast to my more recent France trip (Salzburg to Bordeaux).