First uploaded on 2nd October 2024
San Sebastian (Donostia), Pamplona, Bilbao
It’s a sunny Friday afternoon in Bristol and Brother Frankie arrives to take the reins. Believing I was tight for time, I took a taxi to the station and met my super smart and beautiful girlfriend, Andrea. <- Brownie points.
The coach’s cancellation was announced not a moment before it was due to depart, but nae bother, we had plenty of time to get to London.
We checked in at our hotel directly opposite St. Pancras International and went for dinner next door. Pizzas, mine heavy on the artichoke.
The morning Eurostar to Paris was without delay and it felt like very little time before we emerged into France. 2 ½ hours station to station. Book in advance (take note, me) and it’s between £35 – £51 each way. There’s a table below showing our full timings and costs. We had four hours in Paris, just enough time in the “City of Love” to… visit a cemetery! Andrea had long wanted to visit the resting places of Julio Cortázar, Guy de Maupassant, Simone de Beauvoir and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre, and conveniently the Cimetière du Montparnasse is very close to the station we needed, to catch the high-speed train down to Hendaye near the Spanish border.
Now, what you don’t want to do on your outward trip is have a phone stolen (Andrea’s). Fears of identity theft and the general violation of it did sour that first day but the moving of our bodies, south and at pace, was going smoothly. From Paris to the Spanish border in 4h 50m, for 60 euros if you’re organised. Our next train, from Hendaye (France) that would take us to San Sebastian (Spain), was a tiny walk away. Cheap tickets were simple to buy, and we’d timed it perfectly… kind of. The train was very, very full due to San Sebastian being in the middle of its Semana Grande (Big Week) celebrations and with Andrea’s huge suitcase and our other bags we were taking up a lot of room. I think somebody cursed at me in Spanish but I didn’t understand it and so it doesn’t count. We made it to our hotel before heading to La Concha (The Shell) beach, to join in the celebrations. I don’t normally go in for fireworks, but it was a striking marker that we were “here”, fully holidaying.
We had the whole of the next day to explore San Sebastian, and isn’t she pretty?
The view after taking a funicular ride at the westernmost end of the beach(es).
From San Sebastian it’s a short, easy train or bus to Zarautz which is also very pretty:
And from there it’s a nice walk along the coast to Getaria, which is affectionately referred to as “The Mouse” due to its headland’s contours:
A day trip to Bilbao was also easy from San Sebastian, £15 return and about two hours by coach. Even if you’re not huge on modern art, an empty Guggenheim would probably be worth a visit:
On day five we travelled to Pamplona, Navarra, where Andrea had lived and studied for four years. 1h 15m by coach. We met up with Andrea’s sister and her partner, who had travelled across from Barcelona. Also a couple of Andrea’s professors, and some other friends. Another beautiful city, and again we lucked-out arriving during the late-summer fiesta season where there was music aplenty, annual traditions being played out, and circus performances in the park:
Countdown to the next bull run.
The Basque country is famed for its cuisine and I’m sure it’s excellent but for someone who believes he should be vegan but sometimes falls short – a flexitarian who doesn’t think that’s where he should stay – it was lacking. With research and planning you can get by, for example we really enjoyed the Garraxi Restaurante Vegetariano, in the Gros part of town, east of the river Urumea, but when you’re exploring, without set plans, it would have been better if restaurants carried at least one option.
To max-out the amount of time we could spend in Spain we decided to travel back in one day, and I didn’t end up with as achy a bottom as I’d feared. We woke up at 07:00, left the hotel at 07:40 to stroll down the hill to the station. We caught the 08:02 from San Sebastian to Hendaye which took 37 minutes. It’s not my normal read, but I was on Sally Rooney’s ‘Oh beautiful world, where are you?’. The TGV was there waiting for us at the closest platform, on time. Some more reading, a couple of walks to the café, some podcasts, time was flying by. Back in Paris we knew to get the M4 metro across to Gare du Nord which went smoothly, and the Eurostar experience at the Paris end felt less “airporty” than it did in London. We took the London underground to Victoria station and now we were starting to feel close to home. We were almost an hour early and unfortunately not able to get onto an earlier coach (we went to the desk first when, if we had gone directly to the coach, we may have been two of the three persons able to squeak on). Arriving on time at UWE there was just one leg to go, a taxi to home. We walked in a 21:45 UK time – from Spain in one very chilled day!
As mentioned above, it could have been cheaper if we had booked sooner. Certainly the Eurostar.
Why go by train? (Or by ferry, which leave from Portsmouth and Plymouth.)
“You only live once” is used as a call to get on and do it, to live free from constraint. We should strive to be free; from self-limiting beliefs and structural and political injustices, so that we can more easily have fun and feel joy. But we can be freer and happier if we decide to factor the chances of future generations inheriting a beautiful planet. Freedom and responsibility cannot be separated* and, unfortunately, flying is causing huge damage despite 80% of the world’s population never having flown.
*Inspired by Billy Bragg’s ‘The Three Dimensions of Freedom’.
Graphics from Flight Free UK, flightfree.co.uk
