Sorry for the late post this week, but I haven’t really had wifi/computer access much recently. Mostly because we sleep in our car every night super late so we’re too exhausted to do much else except sleep. But enough excuses – this week was Semana Santa, or spring break as we know it in English, which means I rented a car with some friends and we drove all around the north of Spain, so there’s plenty of stories to tell. I was amazed at how easy it was to rent a car even at 21 here in Europe – it felt too easy, just because I am so used to stringent American rules about under 25-ers.
I started off the trip strong by missing my 7 am flight to Madrid last Saturday, by somehow sleeping through my alarm, which is something that I can’t ever remember doing in my life. It was incredibly frustrating, because I had planned everything else out so perfectly, but after my Bordeaux situation I more or less took it in stride and headed to the airport to find an alternative around 9. Luckily there are more flights BCN-MAD than BDX-BCN (let us say, around 20 per day?) so I swallowed the 150 euro last minute ticket price and got into Madrid 3 hours later than planned.
My travel mates for this adventure are a few friendly Canadian girls I met in Barcelona, who aren’t afraid of roughing it to save money, which is just my style. I like making fun of them for saying “oot” instead of “out”, but alas, they do not “eh” all that much. It was nice to be travelling in new places but still Spain, as that meant my phone data plan still worked and hey, we can use our Spanish! We acquired our shiny black new Opel Corsa (tiny as heck little stick shift car, the cheapest available for 5 people) and set off towards Salamanca, to pick up the 5th member of our group, who is a childhood acquaintance of mine who went to my elementary school way back when and is studying in Salamanca, a fact which I was only aware of because his mother and my mother are friends and commiserated about their Spanish sons recently. He’s an outdoorsy guy too, and responded to my “wanna come drive around Spain with me and some Canadians you don’t know over spring break?” with a simple “Yea, sound fun. I'm in”. Gotta love it.
On the way to Salamanca we stopped off at Avila, a walled city with impressive huge stone walls surrounding the old part of the city. It was cool but there wasn’t much in the city other than the walls.
Our Salamancan friend fit right in with the group, and graciously put us up for the night, showing us around his beautiful ancient city in the process. I wasn’t expected much out of the little town near nothing much, but I was impressed – it is chock full of beautiful history (the entire downtown is a UNESCO world heritage site) and beautiful young people, since it is somewhat of a university town. He lives with some Brazilian boys, and thus his Portuguese is coming along almost as well as his Spanish (Jealous!). It was great to catch up with him after so long – he regaled us with tales of his recent free trip to Israel via Taglit Birthright, which sounds like an incredibly sweet deal. All you have to do is show that one of your grandparents is Jewish and you are vaguely aware of the culture, and bam – ten days free in the Middle East. I looked up the program and found that the German government helps fund it as part of the post war "Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany", which I found rather intriguing.
After Salamanca we headed northwest towards Las Medullas, which I had found through pretty travel porn pictures on the internet. They’re a series of bright red cliff faces that are left over from Roman mining operations. They used ingenious canal methods to divert water in under the mountains and somehow sluice off the sides of the cliffs in pursuit of gold. To get there we followed Google Maps directions, of course, which took us up some cuh-rah-zey tiny single lane raised bridges over railroad tracks – they looked so ridiculous that we could not believe that Google was telling us to go that way.
While in Las Medullas, we cautiously entered a colorful shack with a lawn strewn with every flavor of lawn gnome imaginable in pursuit of food, to encounter a rather-too-friendly gypsy man with very few teeth who gave us homemade wine and bread/garlic soup that was actually delicious. His wife was a bit more coherent, and tried to show us maps of the surrounding region but could only seem to unearth picturesque posters of Las Medullas along with paintings done by her (admittedly skilled) 14 year old son. We extricated ourselves from that situation but were soon joined by another local – an ancient woman who seemed determined to hike to the top of the mountain with us, even though should walked about 20 feet a minute or so, it seemed. We didn’t want to offend her and gratefully escaped halfway up a steep muddy side trail she was unable to tackle, in lieu of the main one.
We slept that night on some tiny side road in Galicia that looked like it was next to a Christmas tree farm and arrived in Santiago de Compostuela in the morning amid pouring rain. Despite the wetness we managed to take in the huge church complex along with the charming mossy Gothic narrow streets. It was kind of cheating to skip the whole Camino de Santiago and go straight to the end via car, but we still got a feel for what the pilgrims were in for due to the abundant road signs advocating hostels and correct directions for the travelers along the way, as well as sporadic miserable looking backpackers swathed in rain gear trudging in our direction.
We realized our itinerary didn’t allow much dallying and skipping A Coruna in favor of the Galician coast to the east, which was worth the detour. The rain let up a bit right as we got there, and we were treated to stunning views of a craggy coastline dotted with pristine lighthouses and hidden beaches. We scampered around the lighthouses and wrestled on the beaches, to the confused faces of little local boys learning how to surf as well as a couple of lovers who remained lip locked for the entire 3 minutes it took us to return to our car in the tiny parking lot.
That night the rain returned in force, though we managed to find what we thought was a sufficiently dilapidated side road to spend the night and sent up our tent with the inside cozy and dry. However, around 1 am that morning we were roused by the Guardia Civil, who shined their cruiser’s lights on our tiny encampment and demanded “Identificacion!” Instead of fining us, they told us that this road was not safe because there are roaming bands of Romanians and gypsies who liked to prey on unsuspecting travelers in the area, and that we should follow them to a more secure location. Really?! We weren’t in a position to argue, so we hurridly packed up our tent in the dark pouring rain and set up again in their chosen spot, next to a beach park that already had a few scattered camper vans set up nearby. However in the process our tent got soaked, so that night was rather miserable for us boys out in the tent.
We rallied the next day and charged into the Picos de Europa, a beautiful national park in the Asturias filled with craggy mountains, lakes, and adorable little towns. Many of the peaks were coated in snow, so we had a few snowball fights among the mountain pictures, although sadly all the hiking trails were covered up. It seemed that every tiny town we drove by had a friendly little dog on the roof, which was …novel. It was fun to see snowy mountains and lakes in a European country other than Switzerland, although the overall effect was that of a dirtier Alps.
That night we arrived in Santander and met up with Carmen, a Spaniard who had nannied me way back in 1994 when she was working in the states! I knew she existed because my parents always talked fondly about our exotic Spanish nanny, but since I was 3 I can’t say I truly recognized her face. She was a fantastic lively host however, graciously through hosting us 5 dirty vagabonds in her little flat and letting us shower for the first time in days. We traded stories about my childhood and parents and commiserated over Spanish differences and what to see nearby.
In the morning we noticed that there was a group of ten or so people that were hanging out right outside Carmen’s building who didn’t seem to be heading anywhere fast, about which I asked her about at lunch. She said that one of her neighbors has an unprotected Wifi box, and that those people had all somehow discovered this connection (amongst all of Santander, no less!) and now hung out outside the building using their phones on her dollar and smoking. What a different world, that wifi is so precious as to warrant such behavior! In the US, I guess they would all end up at Starbucks…
We bid farewall to both Carmen and one of our travel buddies, as she had things to do back in BCN for the second half of Semana Santa and caught a flight from Santander. I was scared to see her go because she was the resident stick shift expert, whereas I had only spent around 2 hours driving a manual car before this trip. For most of the time we were doing long highway shifts, which I caught on to quite easily, but I had stalled more than a few times in sticky situations within cities on hills, and she had extricated us from them like a professional with no problem. Like the time I went down the exit of an underground parking lot (which for some reason was on the right), or decided to back out of a muddy possible sleeping location that was at a 40 degree angle.
Luckily, the others brushed up on their stick skills, and I got better as well, so that by the time we got into the Basque country we still hadn’t received any overly angry honks. It did put a damper on our within-car games however – up until then we had a rule that whenever we went through a tunnel we would all roll down the windows and yell for the duration of the tunnel, which is surprisingly cathartic, not to mention hilarious when it occurs mid conversation. But the Basque roads were so filled with tunnels bisecting the verdant green hills that we all quickly became hoarse and gave up.
Bilbao was cool, though, because of the Guggenheim (which turned out to be a letdown, actually; the building itself is more interesting than the art inside in my opinion. Modern art seems to be hit or miss) and because the buses all say “BILBOBUS” on them, because Bilbao in Basque is Bilbo. Basque is a cah-rah-zy language, by the way. To me it looked like some bizarre mix of Hawaiian and Afrikaans, due to its long words with many vowels and penchant for Z’s or K’s, respectively. I think my favorite word was “suhiltzaileek” (firemen), though really all of them are excellent. The language didn’t seem to be as well integrated into the culture as Catalan is in Barcelona – it was mostly just traffic signs that were in it, and we didn’t hear it at all in the streets unless we asked.
After sleeping in a super muddy rainy ravine road that night (with no Guardia Civil interruptions, thankfully-although our nerves were forever shattered due to that intervention) we head east to San Sebastian, which is well known as a favorite place in both Spain. I could see why, due to the coastal location with dynamic beachs and hills and close islands, although the day we arrived the sad weather didn’t help too much. It didn’t stop us from renting some surfboards and teaching the girls how to surf, though.
Here’s where things get interesting. We’re walking through the cute old town munching on some chocolate and surreptiously commenting on a passing woman’s rather low-cut shirt, when she comes right up to us with her man friend and asks me where we got the chocolate, rather excitedly. The conversation proceeds from there, driven almost entirely by her pressing questions, from how well we speak Spanish to what we are doing to how nice of a butt I have (the latter with some prompting by my friends, although pounced upon by her).
We wind up getting a beer with Laura and her friend, who is a super laid back Basque named Abram who told us he met her more or less the same way we had two week ago in Pamplona, and that she’s visiting for the weekend. One thing led to another, and we ended up spending literally the entire night (like from 5 pm onwards) out with them, and crashed at their spacious apartment that night. He has an ornate place within more or less the only skyscraper in San Sebastian, with a killer view out over the rooftops to the beach and the Jesus statue on the hill. Not bad!
Laura continued her relentlessly extroverted ways the entire night, aggressively befriending some neighbors in the bar who turned out to have a brick of hashish the size of an iphone and apparently a cocaine problem, respectively. But we only learned that a good ways into our conversation – they were decently nice people. The only other item of note for the night was how early Basques go out – by midnight all the bars and whatnot were already closing for the night. Stark contrast with Barcelona, where bars probably just start hitting their stride around midnight.
I couldn’t find the car keys at the end of the night, which led to considerable distress and a late night retracing of our steps by yours truly in an attempt to retrieve them, to no avail. Luckily turns out one of my friends had drunkenly put them into her interior pocket and forget about it, so that was nice to wake up to in the morning. After my Madrid missed flight, this barely even registered for me – true travellers takes catasrophes in stride – it happened, it sucks, lets focus on what can we do to rectify the situation now instead of remorse.
After some quality sunny beach time with Abram and Laura, we bid farewall and started heading towards Barcelona, which turns out to be the fastest if you cut through France. Google told us that, but it forget to tell us that we have no data coverage in France, so we had to wing it while figuring out how to get back over the Pyranees, which led to many heated repeated revolutions within French roundabouts debating which turnoff got us closer to the border.
We finally found the tunnel through the snowy peaks and emerged in Ordesa/Monte Perdido National Park, another site culled from internet research. After a chilly night on top of a foggy wet spur (finding places to sleep unmolested in the car is SO much easier in the mountains) we awoke to a gorgeous 360 panorama of snow kissed peaks. We celebrated our first sunny day in such stunning surroundings by dipping in freezing alpine rivers and hiking around ancient hermitage trails and waterfalls. It was interesting to see how European National Parks differed from American ones – there was very little in the way of visitor infrastructure, and some roads went right underneath cliffs constantly dripping streams down onto the asphalt, which meant you had to keep the wipers ready. Couple that with the wild surroundings, surprise tunnels, and one lane road, and the whole thing felt like a Disney land ride.
When darkness fell, we poked around a campsite but realized it would come out to almost 30 euros for nothing more than showers and running water, given as the spots were nothing more than patches of grass to park your car and pitch your tent on. So instead we used their bathrooms and headed farther into the canyon, where not more than 5 minutes time later we come upon a perfect empty cow pasture thing and parked behind a stone shepherds walls out of sight of the passing cars. Why on earth would you pay for a patch of ground to sleep on over the night when there are so many free, more beautiful and peaceful plots out there?
We woke up early to watch the sunrise come in over the valley, and it was as gorgeous as you would expect. Then we headed into the Park proper, which reminded me a lot of Zion National Park because a) they don’t let you drive your private car into the canyon to reduce emissions and b) it’s a huge gorgeous valley that rises up on both sides of you and is even more beautiful with snow. This one wasn’t as red, though.
Afterwards we paid for a canyoneering trip with an adventure provider, which is that thing where you wear padded wetsuits and rappel/clamber down a river. Our guide was a lanky mountain Spaniard named Fernando, who stared incredulously at our tiny Opel Corsa when we told him we had slept in the car overnight. I asked him equally as incredulously if he had never slept in his car, to which he replied “Siempre duermo en mi coche” and indicated a dusty white van nearby filled with a queen size bed, various adventure gear, and a homemade stove rigged up to a propane tank. He lives in his van! I got schooled on that one, haha.
Canyoneering was fun, though I think Fernando was overly worried about us the whole time due to the high water levels, due to it being spring and all. Then we all piled into our filthy, filthy car and schlepped 3.5 hrs back to good old BCN. Many, many digestive cookies, poorly made cheap supermarket sandwiches, and organic apples later, we're back.
Whew! Hopefully the big recap makes up for me being late – sorry about that – dilapidated rural roads don’t have wifi. I think if there is one thing I would say to prospective traveler vagabonds like us is: pick a road that doesn’t look used, and drive up it until you start thinking you should turn back because there’s no good options. Then drive for 5 more minutes, and every time we found an awesome spot at the last minute (except for the marauding gypsy-infested Asturias, watch out for that). And if you are thinking about a similar itinerary, spend more time in Galicia than we did – that place is sick! (when its not raining).
