A few days away: Hondarribia

After our untimely eviction from the Socoa coast road we stop in Hendaye which appears from our map to be on the France/Spain border. 

Looking for somewhere to pull up for coffee I drove right past a welcoming parking place complete with patisserrie. Fortunately there was a combination roundabout/bridge right in front of me. I drove around/over it and back into the car park. We made coffee and bought a couple of croissants and rummaged around digging out passports as you never know if you are  going to need them these days. 

We tore ourselves away from the charms of the car park and this time I went straight across the roundabout/bridge and discover that the border seems to run right through/under the middle of it. For the second time that day we are in Spain.

Hondarribia is a couple of clicks up the road. The guide book says it  is old/cute/picturesque etc etc and it certainly is handy,  so we head off there. Parking up on the waterfront I cross the pavement to have a look at the water and the front. Something the guidebook failed to mention was that the locals like walking on water and sticking their bottomsout at visitors:

Now that's the sort of information I want in a travel guide.

In fact the Hondaribbians seem to have a very strange relationship with the wet stuff and have wheels fitted to all their boats:

Want to stop your boat getting stolen? Take the wheels home.

We wander up to the old fortified town. At first glance it looks as though it hasn’t changed for a thousand years:

But move  a few feet and it's the twenty first century:

 

Time travel, brilliant!

There is a Parador (posh hotel) in the main square. I imagine the conversation: 

                Guest: I’d like a room, do you have any?

                Receptionist: Yus, Guv (or Basque equivalent), we have 439 rooms.

                Guest: Great. I’d like one with a view.

                Receptionist: Sorry, that room is taken.

Meanwhile, down at the Sunday morning boot market there is a decent trade in domestic detritus including children's books. They like to educate as well as inform so include a broad selection of titles from which the children can learn useful phrases for those special moments:

 

While looking for the harbour we discover a special road for dogs, El Via Perros, which runs along along a section of the waterside:

In his book Chariots of the Dogs, Erich von Daniken cliams that sometime in the distant past, ancient Hondarribia was visited by canine creatures from the future and that the simple fisherfolk, made the Pavement of the Dogs in hommage and decorated it with drawings of the wonders to come. I thought it was the usual E von D mystical bollocks...

..but you can't argue with that.


Verdict: Old/cute/picturesque etc etc - and just a bit wierd.

A few days off: The Soca / Hendaye coast road

After the excitement of Bayonne and Biarritz we stopped on the coast road which afforded a fine cliff top view of the sea.  There is a parking place for people to get to the cliff edge, admire the view, and a sign which pointed to a coastal path which herself suggested would make a good walk. 

We went a few hundred metres along it until we reached a little bay and looked at the rock formations, drift wood, bits of flotsam, jetsam, shells and other dead animals one finds on most seashores. Heading back up the beach I turn back towards the road, she is inclined to continue along the path. The look on my face seemed to say ‘I’d rather sit in the sun with a beer’ (I am rather good at that particular expression) which prompted her to suggest that we do the walk tomorrow morning before heading off. This is a compromise I am happy to accept. Many a slip and all that.

Back home, Tricia runs a local walking group, the Amblers. It comprises walkers who do not want to yomp over hill and dale but prefer to stroll from a car park to a tea shop a few metres away but taking a diversion of several kilometres through fields and things. That way they park, walk, have tea and their cars are just a short stroll from the tea table.

Personally, I don’t get the ‘walking’ thing. When I hear of people going on walking holidays my first thought is ‘Why?’ For me walking is a way of getting from one place to another if you don’t have a car, bike or tractor. It is a means, not an end. I have tried many times but the best it ever gets is ‘OK’. While we are at it I don’t really get the tea shop thing either. A bar yes, tea shops don’t do it for me. But I digress.

We decide that this parking place is suitable for an overnight stop. It As the evening proceeds we do the beer thing, have something to eat and wonder what the hell is going on in the fields up the road where blokes in high visibility vests are building what look like toilets and putting up flags in an big field. I suggest that it looks like preparations for a boot market which could be part of the fete which is advertised for the next day. Tricia then becomes convinced that they will close the road and evict us from the lay-by at silly o’clock at night. I manage to persuade her that we will be fine and that the boot market . I only take one photo of the view (above) and spend the rest of the evening watching a mouse-like rodent of some sort scuttling about in the field next to the road.

Cut to 7am. We are spark out. It is still dark. There is a VERY LOUD knock on the door, a man in a high visibility vest says they are closing the road for the fete and we have to go NOW! 

The chagrin of being completely wrong and herself being completely right is mollified by the fact that we do not have time for the walk – shame.

Verdict: It is an ill wind indeed that blows no good.

Watney's Red Bleedin' Barrel

Just popped down to the déchèterie which is our local authority amenity recycling facility - formally ‘le tip’ - to recycle some bio mass when I happened to glance into the encombrant (general shit) container and saw this:

Anyone around in the 1960s will recognise it as the dispenser of a particularly unpleasant but ubiquitous alcoholic beverage which we were forced to drink for fear of turning teetotal.

Happier memories are conjured by the Monty Python Travel Agent Sketch which repeatedly referred to it in a derogatory manner. The ale drinkers among us took this to be support of the highest calible in our battle for real ale.

Of course the Campaign for Real Ale won the keg-beer versus cask-conditioned-ale battle and this hideous concoction was finally seen off for good in the 1970s.

I can only assume that some bloke has had this tap hanging around the house for years and died. Mrs Some-Bloke (after a suitable period of mourning) threw it out. Which was a bit short sighted:

Sold for £104 (plus delivery)

A few days off: Biarritz

Continued from Bayonne...

Oh Dear! I am not having a good day and having driven the few miles from a disappointing Bayonne, Biarritz does not lift my spirits. Maybe I am tuned in to Spain and the fringes of France are causing some interference with the ‘mmm – lovely’ sensor.

We struggle through closed roads and twisting alleys to the Corniche (that’s the sea front to you lot). 

It is more enclosed  than it looks  in this picture and for a small bit of beach it is liberally scattered with people in black wetsuits. 

They may be surfers or they may be poseurs, difficult to tell when they are on dry land. And stopping anywhere to get a better look or take a better picture was just impossible. 

I grabbed this view of the Corniche from the road leading along the coast which shows the rocky outcrops which enclose it and make it look a little more interesting.

Further along was a small bay which looked like a private beach on the grounds that there were only a couple of people on it, but everyone else may have been at lunch…

  

 

Or maybe it was because it was raining.

Of course driving a vehicle with the handling characteristics of a 20 foot shipping container made negotiating the narrow streets of this historic town, squeezed in between the sea and some very precipitous cliffs, less than a pleasure which may have added to its inability to captivate me. 

Artists impression (or is it a serving suggestion?)

Verdict: Time to move on.

A few days off: Bayonne

Not a lot to say about this town. It seems to consist of an endless ring road [Well, technically they are endless. Ed.]  linking out of town shopping centres. I am sure that if you could find the town it would turn out to be lovely and a great place to live, raise a family and all the other things that (yawn... can't be bothered to finish the sentence).

From the little I saw, this sign outside one of the Bayonne InterMarchés just about sums it up.

 

Then we went inside. 

Who would have put money on finding three Hyundais in a row?

This shop name looks like an English word but isn't. I can only think of two contenders: repulsion and expulsion, neither of which are exactly appropriate names for this sort of outlet. Also turns out to be a medical term meaning 'pushing out at the front' - subtle or what?.

Freud also uses it to refer to 'drive' or 'instinct'.

You choose.

Verdict: Time to head for the glitz of Biarritz.

A few days off: Campsite 1

I have managed to stay away from anything resembling a holiday campsite since a trip to Camber Sands in the early 1970s where signs nailed to the trees read “Please Park Prettily”.

It is of course a gross generalisation, but people who stay at holiday campsites talk endlessly about their bloody caravans, stabilisers, nose weights, gas bottles, sat-navs, curtains, carpet and kitchens and other domestic detail. Of course I do have these conversations, but they are about me and my gear and so are interesting [You may want to think about this - Ed.]

Some sit outside their 'rigs' meeting their neighbours and being almost offensively chummy while they cheerfully barbecue luxury foodstuffs into carbon. Others prefer staying inside watching 'Belgium’s Got Talent' or whatever on staellite TV.

And they appear to enjoy writing to The Caravan Club  Magazine with appllingly written tales of life on the road: "Hubby reversed the old caravan out of the garden at No 23 and primed the toilet with CrapGon toilet fluid as I ironed the sandwhiches in preparation for our great adventure..." They also seem to like complaining about other caravan and camper users who do not share their values.

When travelling in the UK I tend to keep myself to myself, stay in lay-bys, up quiet lanes and in dark corners on industrial estate. This does not quite meet the holiday requirements of  herself, who prefers somewhere from which one is less likley to be evicted in the wee small hours.

Having left home later than intended heading for Spain, we thought a good place to stop for the first night might be Ondres on the French Atlantic coast. It was reputed to have space on the beach which, while not a campsite per-se, was camping-car friendly. It turned out to be a section of the car park reserved for camping cars. Despite being the end of the season it was around half-full.

Having arrived at dusk we had two options, stay and make the best of it or go and find somwhere else in the gloom. Sancerre cooed soothingly from the fridge and a  single malt hummed moreishly from a cupboard. We stayed.

There was a fee of €7 for the night but the coin-operated barrier was knackered presumably knackered after a busy season going up and down.

A notice said that the barrier was broken and that the Gendarmes would come and collect cash. This turned out to be only one third true - it was, they didn’t and they didn’t. 

We sat outside in the moist warmth, sipped Sancerre and said bon jour to all and sundry. They said bon jour back to us and walked their dogs, or stayed in and watched TV. For all I know angry letters were written to Le Journal de Camping Car

In the morning we emptied the waste and refilled the fresh at the fluid managemnt point. Well, you have to take advantage of these facilities when you can before heading off on an adventure...

As I reversed out of bay number 23, complete with gleaming toilet,  I suspected that I would be seeing a couple more campsites before the week was up.

Verdict: a fine Sancerre and a very acceptable single malt and €7 to spend on something else. Now, where's the address for the Caravan Monthly letters page...

A few days off: Not waving, but frowning

I have owned a number of vehicles which seem to attract wavers (see below). I have had a Frogeye Sprite, two Morris Travellers, an MG Midget, VW Camper and a Series Land Rover, all of which granted me honorary membership of some invisible owners’ club.

Wherever I went in these vehicles, people in similar vehicles would wave as we passed. I could not imagine having anything in common with anyone who would think we had anything in common just because we had something as insubstantial in common as a type of vehicle (if you see what I mean).

And now I have a camper, what the French refer to as a camping car. It is a little strange that they have chosen to use two English words rather than come up with their own word as they do with so many other things. I favour the word Bivouacture, or maybe the ChapiteauCV... [ Use the comments box below for your suggestion for a suitable French word.]

Regardless, the French LOVE camping cars - almost as much as they dislike caravans, which are considered fit only for itinerant fruit pickers. In a camping car you can park up and stay the night almost anywhere for a few Euros, or less. There are waste water dumping stations in many small towns (we have one in Lauzerte) where you simply stop above a shallow basin, open the valve and all your washing up water disappears down the drain. 

There are several downsides to camping cars like the speed (lumbersome) handling (cumbersome), fuel consumption (frightening) and cornering (noisy if you have forgooten to stow everything properly). But the most annoying thing is that when you drive one of these things other camping car drivers wave at you. I have met a few people who have campers and they are as varied as any other given group of people, but I KNOW that the wavers are not ‘people like me’ – they can’t be.

Basically, ‘wavers’ are what Kurt Vonnegut called granfalloon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon) and having read Cat’s Cradle at  age fifteen I have a long standing aversion to such relationships. Notwithstanding all that, I have many friends and contacts I have met through my work and who I wave at while driving around simply because we work in the same industry, which is granfalloon-ish – so what do I know…