Admin, walking and some fishing

One of the many joys of what we are doing is the waking up to new surroundings each day. Spain had really come up with the goods.

A fine spot overlooking the beach, with an amazing sunrise. Today we needed to somehow keep online. This meant a bit of research and visiting some mobile phone shops.

We headed into town, Irun, as it was bigger than where we were staying. We took our little Mifi device with us.They don’t seem to have the equivalent of Carphone Warehouse in Irun, so we had to trawl around each of them, with their various levels of helpfulness and understanding their own products. The conclusion was that their deals were vaguely similar. Perhaps Carrefour would be better, ‘Oh no they don’t do sim cards’ the guy at Movistar told us!

Actually, they did. We bought two sims for €5 each and loaded on €20 to each card. For €1.25 per day you get 100mb, so we can swap cards to get up to 200mb per day, I still think we will need to be careful though.

This seemed the most flexible way forward. The credit would carry over when we popped over to Portugal and Morocco and even when we later returned back to Spain, as it wasn’t on a fixed monthly term. It would also mean we  wouldn’t be paying for the days we would not be using it, when in the mountains, for example.

Also while at Carrefour, a local petrol station gave a full top up for Dora, diesel and gas. We had heard that LPG, or autogas as it is called here, might be a problem. I think it has got more widespread, but we will still be careful. We have worked out that we use just over 1l of gas per day for hot water and cooking. The tank holds about 22l so that is three weeks, we will need to top up every two weeks to be safe.

All that admin had taken up the morning. What to do for the afternoon. We had a big walk planned for the next day, gleaned from one of the many guides Dora lugs around. It is actually a two day walk, could we slip in the first part of the walk this afternoon? I thought so.

We were close to the starting point. We parked up Dora and headed through a cute little village of Passai de San Juan. Its cuteness was amplified as it had a backdrop of some serious old docks and redundant shipbuilding areas of the adjacent Passai Antxo.

The first part of the walk was a boat trip across the Bahia de passais to Passai de San Pedro, a lot of passais going on here. Must learn what passais (passages in English) means!

The €0.70 was good value, especially as he came back to pick us up. He was a bit grumpy, I think he was expecting a tip.

Looking back at the docks, the clouds seemed a little miserable, however the temperature was still warm. Only t-shirts required.

We would get the opportunity to explore the village a little more the next day.

The other shore looked a little more remote.

The landscape was stunning, we had had a recent drought of good walks, but the outlook was promising. We would tackle this walk tomorrow.

An amazing dwelling attached to a lighthouse.

Memories of the dramatic cliffs of Lundy came flooding back.

These walks do not come without their dangers. These massive slugs are up for a fight, and they move quick too. We keep our wallets close to us as we carefully navigated around them fearing we could be mugged.

We ducked in and out of woodland glimpsing views of the coast and cliffs as we went, until eventually;

we saw San Sebastian in the distance. We have both been to the city before and it was getting quite late. We found a bus going in the right direction and twenty minutes later we were back with Dora and heading for our night time stop at the beach.

The next day saw us reaching once more into Dora’s underbelly to extract the kayaks. The wind had got up and there was a lively sea out there, but what the heck.

It did give an opportunity to try out the new equipment.

This certainly delighted Susana. I rescued a few leftovers from last night’s trout to use as bait.

A we set off. It was quite rough so we were confined to the bay. When we had ventured further, the rolling seas, although quite fun, were also intimidation. We headed back towards the shore.

And no success with the fishing either. Will have to try another day.

GDR

The afternoon proved to be more stressful for Gary. We are planning to climb Pico Aneto, the highest point in the Pyrenees. The peak has a glacier to cross before we attempt the summit. We have been preparing through watching a series of DVDs and, today, we practised some of what we have learnt. We put on our climbing harnesses, grabbed our ice axes, screw gates, slings and prusiks. In the car park, we practised our knots; bowline, figure of eight and clove hitch. It took me a while to get my head around these knots which drove Gary up the wall at times.

We then headed for the beach where we set up a scenario of one of us falling into a crevasse, setting up an ice axe belay and rescuing the unfortunate victim. At one point, Gary had to get out so he could help me to rescue him. This prompted strange looks from onlookers along the promenade.

SM