:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

We rose early the next morning to make our way back towards Bilbao, first stop La Hermina. It was a sleepy village in the shady depths of the canyon, built on the edge of the river cutting its way along the base. It was only 7:30 and no one was around. Carrying our packs, we made our slow way up a road on the western side of the canyon, hoping to reach the sun – a decision Sabine later regretted because she didn’t have the opportunity to capture the image of the sun creeping down the canyon walls. I was more than happy, loving the chill morning air and the view of the first rays bouncing down to light up the village. Echoing through the canyon came the sound of sheep bells, or goats as we soon found out. We stopped at a lookout point, near an old run down shack and watched as an old man putted up the hill on a motor scooter. He stopped when he reached us and came over to talk, but his accent was heavy and he obviously preferred Basque. We managed to catch a few words that were either ‘I don’t understand a thing they’re saying,’ or, ‘they don’t understand a thing I’m saying.’ Either way, he was right. The only other word we caught in the 5-minute exchange was ‘goats.’

“He’s a shepherd!,” Sabine realised. “He’s looking for his goats!” She offered him some of the Madeira cake we were eating for breakfast, and said something else he didn’t understand. Looking at the sheer rock walls around us, I wondered what he was going to do when he found them. Eventually he got back on his scooter and puttered up the road again, and if he found them, we didn’t see.

Next stop was San Vicente de Barquere, where we would stay the night. The hostals were all out of town, but we had the best accommodation of our trip at a large house in the hills. A short walk further down the road would have brought us to a place probably just as nice and with views of the river, but Sabine wasn’t having any of it. My knees had responded well to the gentle walks and were growing stronger, but Sabine had developed a sore foot and didn’t like the idea of walking so far into town. The town itself was a disappointment, and wasn’t worth the full day we were there. It had the gorgeous castle I mentioned earlier, and a church higher up the hill – which made me wonder if it reflected the political power at the time they were built – but for most of the day the beautiful sea we’d seen surrounding the town was actually mud flats. The highlight of San Vicente for me was seeing the postman, dressed very smartly in a navy blue suit with a yellow vest. He was wheeling along something similar to carry-on luggage, also in yellow, and a quick look around showed that all the post boxes were yellow as well.

The next day was our last full day and we headed back to Bilbao, stopping in Santander on the way. We missed the lunch hour again – restaurants in this area didn’t serve food outside certain hours, but the hours weren’t marked and we never managed to be hungry at the right time – so we sat in the marketplace and finished off the salami we’d been eating the last few days, along with some bread bought fresh that morning. We’d spend our last night in Bilbao, and neither of us had any illusions that it would be pleasant, so we enjoyed these hours looking out at the ocean and watching the locals interacting in the marketplace.

Bilbao was a surprise. After a quick stop at the tourist info centre, we decided to stay in the old city where rates were cheapest. That end of town was entirely different to the grey mess we’d seen so far. Tucked into a bend of the river separating it from the new city, the place was vibrant in colour and life. We walked past streets of restaurants and bars before checking into an old building with rooms overlooking the street. We had a kind of closed in balcony, but with large windows to look out at the life below. Naturally, we weren’t content to watch it from our room, so we went for a walk. We soon discovered a market building, which was just closing for the day, but it was still obvious that it was divided healthily into sections. The basement (with windows at ground level) had only seafood, the ground floor had meat, and half the top floor was fruit and vegetables. The other half of the top floor was a large open seating area surrounded by stalls selling alcohol, much of which was being drunk in the hall. To reach the hall, you had to walk through an exhibition space, currently showing paintings of the city from previous centuries. By the time we’d finished looking at the gallery and enjoying the revelry, the sun was low in the sky. In the last hour of daylight, we walked up the hill to the residential area and found winding streets of town houses with balconies spilling brightly coloured flowers into the street. This was the Spain from photographs.

Back near our hostal, we found the town square, a large courtyard in a building taking up a whole block. We sat and watched the families out enjoying the evening – parents catching up with friends, and children playing with skipping ropes or riding plastic motorbikes. All the bikes were the same – we counted nine – which set us to debating whether they were rented

We caught the bus to Potes on Monday morning, Sabine once again noting features of towns we passed through and where they were on the map, while I just gazed at the mountains. We determined to get back to La Hermina and San Vicente de Barquere, two of the more spectacular towns. San Vicente was surrounded by water and had a gorgeous castle on the hill in the centre of town, while La Hermina was in a long canyon. I spent the last half hour of the trip craning my neck to look up the steep walls of the canyon to the sliver of blue above.

We arrived in Potes in the early afternoon and on seeing the crowds, including many foreigners, decided to rush to get a room. The place recommended by the Lonely Planet, Fogon de la Cuz, was just around the corner from the town centre and on the main road. Luckily, we thought, they had a room spare. We battled through the check-in process with the amiable owner who was preparing lunch. Whenever we didn’t understand something he’d try to explain it a different way, eventually pointing us up the stairs and saying ‘cinco,’ five. The room was bright and airy, an overlooked the courtyard. It seemed a good place to base ourselves for a few days.

It was market day, so we wandered through, not finding much of note except cages full of live chickens and a goat chained to a tree in the centre of the market. Lunch, the only meal we timed correctly in the whole of our stay, was greasy eggs, chips and slices of veal. While we waited for the food, Sabine showed me the options we had for walking. My knees, injured from cycling the previous weekend, were going to keep me from anything serious, but there were a number of walks and we could follow them as far as I was comfortable. The highlight was to be Fuente De, to which a cable car ran from the town at the end of the road (I forget the name), and from which most serious walkers ambled down a circular route to Espinama, the next nearest town. Today, with little time, we decided to walk up to Santa Catarina and San Miguel, two church ruins on the hill overlooking Potes. That walk turned out to be shorter than expected so, with a warm sun still high in the sky, we settled down to read for a while. There were only a couple of other walkers to disturb our peace, and the birds flitting around us added to the feeling of seclusion.

Back in town, we mistimed dinner again, spending half an hour in a pub adjacent to our chosen restaurant, chatting with the bar tender. I tried Orujo, a local drink like vodka, but coming in many flavours. Sabine had one with apple, and I started with a straight, then after dinner I tried another with honey. Each one was delicious.

For dinner I tried Pimientos rellenos con carne – red capsicum stuffed with mince and cheese. They were spicy and the best meal I had on the trip, not counting the next time I had them a couple of nights later. Sabine ate some sort of seafood risotto that she found disappointing, but not so bad that it stopped us from going back to the same place for the next two nights. I decided that I liked the idea of going back to the same place, against my usual style, because you got to know the locals and the people behind the bar better, watching them, even talking to them, over a few days. An old guy was the main regular here, and he stood up to come and talk to us for a while, happy to help us struggle through our Spanish. A pretty girl worked behind the bar – another good reason to go back to the same place – and when she wasn’t busy, would join the chat. I often asked about the bands that were playing on the Latino TV channel in the bar, wanting to get some Spanish CDs while I was here.

“That’s Las Orejas de Van Gogh,” I told Sabine when a familiar band came on. I’d bought their debut album in Peru a few years ago.

“Why two ears? He only lost one.” My knowledge of European history and it’s people let me down again. Sure enough when the title came up at the end, it was La Oreja de Van Gogh. Another favourite was Olga Tanon whose husky Spanish tones draped themselves over rock influenced by everything from flamenco to techno music.

Sabine and I were both worn out, as we were every day, so we retired at about 10pm and didn’t see if the parties really did go on late into every night as the rumours say.

The next morning, Tuesday, we got up early to catch the 8:15 bus to Espinama, but never saw it. It seemed it only ran in season – July and August – and it was only May now. The taxi couldn’t take us either, because he had a school run to do. He’d be available if we came a little earlier tomorrow though. The following day turned out to be cloudy, so we decided to leave Fuente De until Thursday when we had a better chance of catching the views. So Tuesday and Wednesday were spent doing a couple of half day walks directly from Potes. The crowds of Monday had evaporated, and it now seemed we were the only people in town. Even the locals had been from the surrounding villages and only come down for the market. The tourist information centre was closed for repairs, so the only person we had to ask for advice was our hotel owner. He suggested in very expansive gestures and strongly enunciated Spanish that we go down the road, and take the path straight ahead. “Don’t go right to Santander,” he said, swinging his arm out to the right while shaking his head. “And don’t go left to Palencia,” another swinging arm and headshake. “Go straight ahead, up a little path between the houses. It’s a difficult climb, but the views are pheNOmenAL,” he said throwing his head back and making big circles with his arms. I’m not sure if we ever made it to the point he referred to so enthusiastically, but we climbed for a couple of hours up long steep hills, then turned to look up the valley of Potes towards Fuente De. The clouds blocked our view of the distant mountain, but what we could see – lush green, steep hillsides cutting into the valley on both sides, and the river winding its way down between them – was spectacular.

That evening, sitting in our room, we heard another couple of travellers arrive and check-in. It was clear they didn’t speak any Spanish and weren’t very interested in trying. “It’s 24 Euro per night. You can have room 7.” It was the familiar voice of the owner, and he’d spoken in English.

Those pheNOmeNAL views couldn’t compare to the walk up to Fuente De, though. On Thursday morning, we met the taxi driver, who greeted us jovially. “Hi! I thought you’d found another way up.” We assured him we hadn’t and that we were very keen to go today, despite the clouds still hanging around. He told us more about the area on the way – that there were about 150 villages in the area, but that the children all came to school in Potes; that the old lady there is 99 and has walked up the road every day of her life, now only managing about 300 metres each day. Then he dropped us at Espinama, showed us where the track started, and drove off. We’d chosen to do the walk backwards because neither of us like walking downhill, and there was no way my knees were going to take that kind of stress. That meant we had the road to ourselves, and we set off into the freezing mists with optimistic thoughts of clear skies ahead. What we got was much better.

Our first steps up the mountain were just after 8am and we didn’t reach the peak until after midday, but both of us were captivated for the entire trip. Sabine managed to take about four roles of film in those few hours. At first, our view was limited to the hills immediately around us, and the only sounds were the occasional gurgling of a nearby creek and some cow bells. Then the mists started rising and we saw sheep and cows on the hills ahead, and higher up on all sides. At one point, we had stopped to hazard a guess at which direction the peak would be – not easy given our two-inch square map – when a gap opened up in the mist to reveal a small section of sheer, grey rock with snowy patches above us. Our gasps echoed through the valley, causing the sheep to bleat in surprise. Sabine’s camera whirred, as she took five shots before the mist closed over. That was to be the first of many peeks of what I came to think of as killer whales playing in the mist. For the next three hours, we kept an eye on the mists around as various pieces of the craggy peak were revealed. Finally, as we neared the last stretch of the walk, we broke through the mist, and like a Christmas present, finally unwrapped after days of exploratory shaking, the panorama appeared around us. Fuente De was a mountain of snow-capped rock, settled on a range of moss-covered peat.

We made our way around the peak to where the cable car was, and found ourselves in the middle of a crowd of people, all showing mild excitement at the view. Sabine and I nodded smugly to ourselves, knowing that our experience of Fuente De was extraordinary and that we’d earned it. We took the cable car down, walked the road back to Espinama and waited for the bus. I was delighted to watch a couple out in their garden until the bus came. Their property was on both sides of a small creek, and a quaint bridge lead from the house to the garden on the other side. They’d raked it into neat but irregular ditches, and were planting seeds for this year’s crop.

Sabine went to ask in the pub next to the bus stop when the bus would leave. “At ten past one,” they told her. “Or twenty past. Or perhaps half past.” We decided we liked the pace of life here. When it left, the driver put up the school bus sign and picked up about twenty children from the villages along the way. It turns out we’d missed the bus on Tuesday because it was a school bus that we’d ignored. We also learnt that schools take a break between noon and 3pm each day and the kids are sent home for lunch to the 150 villages from which they came.

Sabine was waiting for me at the tiny Bilbao international airport after spending six hours exploring the two shops and a restaurant in the facility. She’d also obtained a map from the tourist information centre and done some research. Since she’d made the decision to go to Spain and invited me I fully expected her to lead the way.

“So, what do you want to do?” she asked, handing me the Lonely Planet.

“I don’t even know where we are.” I turned to the large map of Spain at the front and Sabine pointed out the Cantabria region on the north coast, just west of the Pyrenees.

We discussed the options while waiting for the bus, but decided to check out the tourist information centre in town first. On the way into Bilbao proper, we chatted caught up on all the gossip of our lives and mutual friends. Sabine had started at P&G in Japan just a few months before me, and left a year earlier. Now she was living in London and I’d stayed with her a few times on business trips there. The bus let us off at a large roundabout in the city centre. On each of the six corners stood a beautiful old stone building, but the rest of city was uninspiring, filled with ramshackle grey buildings that could have been in Sydney or Chicago. The tourist centre was next door to the Guggenheim, and we just made it before they closed for lunch at 3pm. I quickly realised that Sabine’s Spanish surpassed mine when she chatted away with the guy behind the counter. She made a couple of mistakes that I picked up, and she had to ask him to repeat himself a couple of times, but most of it was beyond me.

“I didn’t get most of that,” she said modestly as we left, “but the bus stop is over here, and one goes at four o’clock.” I enjoy an unplanned holiday, but I prefer not to be stressed about getting home, so I suggested that we head out quickly and make our way back slowly, having a better look at Bilbao on the last day. Right now though, we had a bit of time to check out the famous Guggenheim, which everybody I’d spoken to had recommended – not so much for the contents, but for the architecture.

“It looks like the Sydney Opera House,” I told Sabine.

“What? It doesn’t even have the same shape.”

“OK, it looks like the Opera House has been exploded,” I explained, then added, “bearing the metal underneath” in anticipation of her next comment on the material used. It was original – I won’t take that away from Mr Guggenheim – but I prefer stone buildings.

The walk to the bus station took us through a beautiful park, sunk low and surrounded by trees to shut out the rest of the city. We saw three bridal parties having photographs taken in front of stone monuments with a backdrop of brilliant greens under a clear blue sky. Given what I’d seen of the city so far, I wasn’t surprised that everyone came here for the special occasions.

Sabine managed to get us tickets on the bus to Santander and for an hour and a half we drove through spectacular scenery. On my side of the bus I was treated to views of tall mountains and rolling hills dotted with sheep. Sabine, on the other side of the bus, had the map out and was memorising the name of every town we went through. Every now and then, she called out “Oh, look at that,” and direct my attention to the sparkling blue expanse of the Bay of Biscay, extending out to the Atlantic Ocean. “Look at how clear it is!”

The woman in the information centre at Santander station wasn’t very helpful, waving a hand in ‘that’ direction to indicate where we’d find a tourist centre. Sabine, who could formulate an entire sentence before I’d remembered how to say ‘excuse me,’ stopped to ask a businessman the way. He started to give directions, but seeing our lost expressions decided to take us himself. He kept up a lively exchange with Sabine along the way, and the only thing I can remember bringing to the conversation was “yo soy Australiano” (I’m an Australian). He pointed out a few sites that we would inspect more closely later – an old cathedral, the plaza, an old building now used as a shopping centre.

I liked the town, and my knees were complaining that they didn’t want to start hiking tomorrow, so I suggested we spend two nights here before moving on. Once we’d found a place to stay and checked in, Sabine, an avid photographer, grabbed her camera and we went for a walk. First stop was the cathedral, a rough stone building with minimal ornamentation, but an impression of great age. We debated what our guide had been trying to tell us about a door.

“I don’t even know which one he was talking about,” I said. “They’re all huge arches of solid wood. Was he trying to tell us that it’s a special wood?”

“I thought he was saying we could get in one of the doors. He might have even said it was around the back.”

We decided to test this hypothesis, but still almost missed a small side entrance to the cloister. Just as we were about to leave, some other tourists came out through it and we laughed at our blindness and ran through. Inside was a sunny courtyard with shaded around the sides by a high roof supported on rough stone pillars. Another bridal party had chosen this as the setting for their photos. It seemed that every Spanish girl of marriageable age had chosen this gorgeous Spring Saturday to celebrate this life event.

By now it was 8pm and the ‘marketplace,’ really a square, we’d walked through earlier was full of locals out with their children to enjoy an evening and chat with their friends, while their children ran around the fountains. They would be out until well after 9pm. Further down the street, in a smaller square, a bagpipe band was playing and people gathered for a carnival. A caravan was selling churros, long pieces of fried batter, squeezed into the oil in a Mr Whippy star shape. I ordered one and was surprised to find that they cut it into little pieces, but not so surprised to find that they shook half a kilo of sugar over the pieces. Carnival food is similar everywhere.

The next morning, we rose early and went for a walk around the coast. At our leisurely pace, with Sabine stopping to take pictures twenty times as often as me, and me stopping to lie on the rocks, looking at the waves below, it took most of the day. The beaches were covered with groups of people paired up and swatting tennis balls to each other with large wooden paddles. It was a fairly tedious and unenergetic sport, but that may have been the appeal on a lazy Sunday morning at the beach. Many times I got the impression that these groups were some sort of paddle tennis club, with members ranging from teenagers to frail old people of the sort I’d expect to see on a bowling green. Nearby, children had dropped their paddles in favour of building sand castles.

We walked east to a palace on a verdant peninsula. It wasn’t anything special as far as beautiful old stone buildings go, but the location was superb, overlooking the rich blue ocean as it did, and including in the view a small island lighthouse. The same peninsula held a small outdoor aquarium containing various seals and penguins in miserably small enclosures and a fascinating monument to pre-Columbus Spanish vessels. Three boats of only five metres length, one more like a raft, had been built to original designs and sailed from South America to Spain, about eight thousand kilometres, in simulation of real voyages. My American and European history is a little rusty, so I can’t explain how Spanish ships could have sailed to or from South America before Columbus discovered the continent.

The most surreal episode of the day came while we were waiting for lunch at an outdoor cafe by the beach. An old man came shuffling around thrusting a cigar box in the face of each customer. When he got to me, I realised that the box was empty. He was begging, not selling cigars as I’d assumed. I waved him away much as everyone before me had done, but he wasn’t so easily dissuaded this time. He pulled at my cheek in what he seemed to think was a manner that I would appreciate. I didn’t, and brushed his arm away, but he persisted. By the third time, I’d lost my smile and my patience and pushed his arm away roughly. The old man began shaking his fist in my face and spewing out aggressive Spanish. I thought he was going to spit on me before he left. It was a striking contrast to the hospitality we’d received from almost everyone we’d encountered previously.

After lunch, we walked north, further up the coast, towards a lighthouse that we ended up not visiting. Instead, we lay in the shade of some rocks looking at the waves crashing into the cliff below. Sabine found faces in the cliff crags, and between waves and crags, she took a couple of rolls of film. The walk back was surprisingly long, despite the slow pace we’d made in the morning, and it was time for a dinner when we got back.

Or so we thought. We chose a restaurant / bar that looked cheap but cozy and were lead out the back – to something more classy. Everything on the menu was around 20 Euro, twice what we were expecting to pay but it would have been very obvious if we’d left so we decided to enjoy it and consider it a lesson. Another lesson was the reason it would have been so obvious if we’d left. We were the only people in the restaurant. It was eight o’clock, but there wasn’t anyone else eating even by the time we left an hour later. Perhaps it was the food. My 20 Euro bought me an undercooked steak the size of a dinner plate and a smattering of chips. I sent the steak back twice, at the offer of the waiter who I could hear laughing with the chef about the uncultured foreigner. “That’s how we eat it here,” he explained the first time he brought it back. I tried. I really did, but the feel of the beef squishing in my mouth destroyed my appetite immediately.