May 16. Salamanca

 A long day today (after a few quite lazy days). We were on the bus at 7am for the two hour trip to Salamanca - first winding up, out of the valley, then across fairly flat green plains marked by scattered stork nests on constructed poles.

Stork Nest on a Church Tower

Salamanca turned out to be a beautiful university city full of medieval yellow sandstone buildings and an immense gothic cathedral. We got a fairly painless guided tour then wandered the streets for a couple of hours.

Plaza Mayor

After lunch we got more free time and walked to the Roman pedestrian bridge and then around some more streets. The drive back took three hours because the ship seems to be on a tight schedule and had already started downstream. After we boarded it kept going until sunset.

May 15. Vega Terron

 We spent most of the day continuing up the river. The river seems to be flowing quite quickly, but the ship makes good speed. We climbed three dams with each lock nearly as high as the one yesterday, so the process has become almost commonplace. We spent much of our time just watching the valley go by, with vineyards gradually coming to predominate over the forest. The river is quite narrow so the scenery is always close.

All of those factors mean the river must have been steep and pretty wild before the hydroelectric dams were built. I believe it's still like that upstream which is why the river isn't navigated much further by the cruise boats. At times the marked channel is so narrow that we have to wait for a boat coming the other way to pass.

Mid-afternoon we were bussed up to Castelo Rodrigo, a small castle ruin and hilltop village on the border with Spain. I wasn't expecting much of this (I'd hoped to see cave paintings but there weren't the numbers for that tour to proceed) but it turned out to be a very pretty little medieval village with wonderful views.

My the time we got back to the boat it had moved onto Vega Terron. This is as far as it goes and at this point the river forms the border with Spain, which is technically the country where we are moored for the night.