Across Euskadi to Bilbao

Zagan the motorhome’s sat high on Monte Kobeta, in a stunning position overlooking the valley city of Bilbao in the Basque (Euskadi) region of Northern Spain. Although there’s an official aire 10 metres to my left, it costs €15 a night, while the owners conceded to Phil we could stay in the neighbouring car park for free (N43.2593831, W2.9633335) if we didn’t need electricity, security or a service point. This is what almost every motorhome around here is doing. Weird, but true. Sadly, a fellow motorhomer’s taken this liberty several steps too far and literally crapped on it, dumping their toilet in the otherwise lovely park alongside us.

Free parking alongside the motorhome aire in Bilbao

Leaving San Sebastian, after a hearty run along the promenade and back through the old town, Phil and Jules set off first, with a mission to find LPG on the way to the aire at Zumaia. I feel responsible in a small way for their low gas situation, since I’d accidentally told ’em a blatant untruth: “yeah, the first time we came to Spain there were about 20 LPG stations across the whole country, now they’re EVERYWHERE!”. Well, they’re not everywhere. In fact we’ve only seen a single station flogging the stuff, and Phil and Jules ended up trying about 25 stations before eventually getting their system filled two days later after a few cold nights and cold showers. So there is LPG in Spain (we’ll work off the mylpg.eu database when we need to hunt some down), but it’s by no means ubiquitous folks.

Half way there a text message declared the aire at Zumaia to be closed: Phil and Jules had arrived to find it barriered off, presumably for the winter. The last time we came this way we stayed at Lekeitio, a port village with a free aire a short walk from the centre, so plans were adjusted and we both headed to this new spot. This part of the world, though, isn’t flat. There’s very little of it which is anything other than a hillside, much of it still covered in woodland, forcing the road to buck and twist about the place in order to make any progress at all. It feels remote still, and it’s not hard to imagine an old clandestine gathering of ETA in any of the creaking, white-washed farmhouses spread among the creases in the landscape. Ju’s suggestion we use a section of toll road to cut out some of the continual swinging on the steering wheel started to feel like a very reasonable one indeed by the time we were past Zumaia, and heading on towards Lekeitio, as my back started to ache in sympathy with the ghosts of road builders.

The road became narrow in parts, shifting between a corniche stood out over the Atlantic before abandoning the sea for the trees, following a soon-familiar pattern – left alongside a tiny valley, over a small stone bridge at a suitably narrow section of watercourse, then right back along the other side before turning left again and so on. The knot in my back grew a little larger and tighter with each wee bridge. When Ju announced we’d a mere 12km of this left to go, I let go too, giving up and pulling over to hand over the reigns while I attempted to assuage the angry crowd of muscles in my left shoulder. Ju did a magnificent job of hustling Zagan through the final section before we offloaded ourselves in the Lekeitio aire (N43.365509, W2.503344).

The free motorhome aire at Lekeitio

The last time we were in Lekeitio, I found it oppressive, probably having read a little too much about Basque separatism before we arrived and sensing eyes on me, accusing me (with high accuracy) of knowing not a single word of Basque. Men sitting on the port wall appeared to take me for a shandy-drinking Spaniard and uttered some undecipherable, and likely innocuous, words as we passed. The large fishing boats were painted proudly in Basque colours and one of them had what looked like a silhouette of Che Guevara, the great Communist revolutionary, adorning the bow. This time round, I got exactly the same impression: these guys don’t wanna be Spaniards. The port’s a lovely little spot though, crowded apartment windows fluttered with washing, reminding us of the squashed, ancient alleyways of Palermo. Out in the ocean traditional boats were being rowed out to sea, reminding Phil and Jules of the gigs they race back in Cornwall. A painted sign in the town suggested these boats were used for a very different purpose to the Cornish ones: while in England they were used to pilot boats along dangerous waterways, here one was shown chasing down a whale.

Pleasure boats in the Lekeitio marina

After an in-van pintxos night plans were aligned to bring us to Bilbao. Along the way we drove through Gernika-Lumo, the town infamously bombed to rubble in 1937 by the fascist planes of Germany and Italy, loaned to Franco during the Spanish Civil war. These days the town looked a pleasant enough spot, with nothing obvious (at least in a drive-by) to suggest the horrors endured. Even if we’d stopped I’d be surprised to find much of significance to discuss the horrific events. Spain’s approach to dealing with the past has been to formally pretend it never happened. The pacto del olvido, ‘pact of forgetting’ is enshrined in law here: no-one wants to deal with the war, what caused it or the crimes against humanity committed during or after it. Tens of thousands of murders have effectively been wiped away, although of course they can’t have gone from the memories of the locals.

Bilbao’s in our 20-odd year old Rough Guide without a single mention of the Guggenheim, since it didn’t exist when the book was written. We know it’s there though, of course, and we were excited to be able to see it, tiny and shiny in the distance from the aire. For €1.25 each we nipped on the local bus down into the city and walked a few hundred meters to see it. Standing in front of it feels, like any such magnificent and famous iconic image, a little unreal, like having stepped through the screen of your TV. Once we’d taken some photos, we found ourselves reaching out to touch the metal surface, like oblong scales on a curved back, almost to get the sensation we were really there.

The Guggenheim, somehow silver and awash with colours at the same time

We opted not to go in, as the website for the museum didn’t suggest there was much we’d want to see, but were treated to sculptures outside

Our GoPro managed to gobble the whole place into a single shot: it’s a huge building

After a wander around the old town and a cheeky pintxos and hot chocolate in a bar strewn with napkins (it seemed the done thing to thrown your rubbish on the floor), we climbed back aboard the bus which strained its way back up the hill to the aire. From up here we were treated to one hell of a nighttime view across the lit-up city, just incredible. Almost as incredible: Peter and Holly who we met in Norway some months back are here too! They were staying in the aire and gifted us the WiFi code so we… JESUS!!!! It’s BLOODY WORKED!!! Ju was up until 2.30am trying to get the damn plastic little b*****d to actually load a map and after another 4 hours this morning fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, GOOODDAAAAMMIIITTT, fail, fail, it’s finally worked. You. Beauty. And it’s even got Spain in it. Woo hoo! Break out the Champers folks!!! Yes,  ahem,  we used the WiFi code to get our TomTom back up and running again.

Bird of prey which flew over the aire yesterday, fooling us at first into thinking it was a kite – childrens toy kite, not the bird kind.

Right, time to burn. The sun’s clouded out today, it’s a good driving day. The plan is to head south to the west of Madrid the next few days to get us in position for a Mediterranean Christmas. That’s about 700 miles and at the rate we normally move, a month. We’ve ten days to do it, so we’d best get a wriggle on. Just before I go, a few more photos from Bilbao:

Catch you later folks, cheers, Jay