The good
Just when we think France can’t treat us any better, we pull into Biarritz and begin the reconnaissance for potential campsites. Usually this requires some imagination and often some audacity too (anything that doesn’t have a sign with a picture of a campervan with a red line through it is fair game; and okay, sometimes there is a sign, but it never looks exactly like ours); which is why we assume our eyes have been deceived by a mirage when we first spot the oasis.
Metres from the beach, an easy walk from the heart of Biarritz, and signs indicating it is only for campervans; regular vehicles prohibited! And, there are power-outlets so we can plug-in. And a dumping station. All for free! Gotta love France!
Immediately after parking, we get ribbed by a good-natured pom, telling us we are far too young to be ‘on the tour’, and that we should be working. I reassure him that we have already paid enough tax in England to fund his pension for the next few years.
So Biarritz is home for the next three nights; riding our bikes along the cliff-tops, running along the foreshore, afternoon drinks watching the sun set.
We also finally encounter a fellow vanner who isn’t of retirement age; an English lad known as ‘Fish’, who’s been living on the road for nearly 12 months. We chat for a while; he seems a nice guy. He tells me that one of the other guys camped in the park is celebrating their birthday that night, with a fire and a few drinks down on the beach, and invites us along. Eager enough for some company other than our own, I tell him we’ll be there.
That night, before we’d joined them, I hear Fish arguing loudly with someone else. I look out the window and see him storm back to his van, only to reappear brandishing a hand-gun like he was Dirty Harry. After some more vigorous debate, and having a loaded firearm aimed at his face, Fish’s opponent must have conceded the argument, because he departed rapidly with squealing tyres as Fish launched flying-kicks at the side of his vehicle. Having left my Kevlar vest back in London, M-A and I decided to stay in that night.
Finally, and reluctantly, we leave Biarritz. We don’t travel far, but we do say au revoir to France for now, and hola to Spain.
San Sebastian was always going to struggle to provide us with a campsite on a par with Biarritz, but the one we find is still quite impressive. On the promenade that runs around the headland; it is pay-parking but free overnight. And it doesn’t explicitly say you can’t camp there, right? The only problem is that it is too water-front. The spray from the waves crashing against the rocks provides salt-water rain all night.
San Sebastian looks spectacular. It has urban beaches like nowhere I’ve ever seen. It seems you can walk out of an office building and step onto the sand. When first arriving, we join a crowd watching an unsuccessful rescue attempt of a sailboat, capsized and beached right on the Playa de la Concha.
We climb up Monte Urgull, and enjoy the views of San Sebastian and the Isla de Santa Clara from atop the castle walls.
The next morning I get my first surf of the trip, at the Playa de la Zurriola The water is colder than I expect, and I’m grateful for the thicker wetsuit I borrowed from Sean. My fitness is terrible; my arms quickly turn to custard. But the surf is clean, and there are only a few other surfers out (no one in Spain wakes up before 10:00). I’m eventually reluctantly forced to return to the beach to regain some feeling in my feet; now I understand the booties other surfers are wearing.
Coffees by the beach warm us up, and then we say good-bye to San Sebastian.
Good times...
The bad
We shouldn’t have even been there. The only reason we headed to Bilbao was to visit the Guggenheim museum. But as we enter the city’s outskirts, we realize: It’s Monday. Museums are closed Monday.
The mission should have been aborted then. It wasn’t.
Having vowed never again to enter urban areas in the van without a clear destination in mind, that’s exactly what we find ourselves doing. Attempting to find a parking-space, we turn down a lane. That the cars parked on both sides of the lane were all facing toward us didn’t tip us off. The car travelling down the lane towards us did. It was a one-way street, and our way was not the way. I press the clutch, grab the column-shift and push it away and down; into reverse.
Situation update: Maybe 20cm of spare width either side of the van; Only side-mirrors (the central rear-vision mirror simply looks into the living quarters); Approximately 30 metres back to the intersection; An angry-looking taxi-driver a metre in front, impatiently inching his front-bumper towards ours. I slowly reverse, my eyes repeatedly switching between the two side-mirrors, constantly adjusting the steering-wheel, trying to maintain that sliver of air between either side of the van and the parked cars. We make it back to intersection. Confident now that I’ve cleared the narrow lane, I turn the wheel sharply, swinging the rear of the van back onto the larger, two-way road we had turned off. Just as I’m about to halt the reverse and drive off forwards, that moment every driver dreads.
M-A shouts, simultaneously with the slight jolt I feel.
I quickly check both mirrors but can’t see any obstacles. M-A, who had exited the van, returns to report what I dreaded and expected; ‘You’ve hit a car.’
‘How bad?’ I'm scared to ask.
‘There’s some damage, but it’s OK.’ I fail to see how that can be a valid outcome.
Two vultures ladies who had witnessed the incident are already circling.
Situation update: We’ve just hit a vehicle; we are now sitting in the middle of an intersection; two ladies, one old and the other ancient, are in our faces and yammering Spanish; the taxi-driver still can’t get past, and is looking even less impressed.
I assume that these ladies, like almost everyone over a certain age, see it as their duty to uphold law and order; vigilantes with perms and too much lipstick. M-A remains to convince them that we aren’t fleeing the scene. I attempt to, not flee the scene, but slightly relocate; to a location preferably not in the middle of an intersection.
I quickly re-encounter our original problem: the streets are narrow and there are no parking-spaces. I have moved away from the intersection, finally allowing the traffic past. Having turned down another one-way street (after carefully checking the one way is my way), and travelled about the same distance down it that we had down the original lane, the cars parked either side had narrowed the road to a width that was clearly insufficient for the van to fit.
Situation update: I have left M-A alone at the scene of the accident; I am faced with either attempting an even more daunting reverse (and look how well the last one turned out) solo this time, or sitting and waiting for traffic to come behind me and block me in, creating a lovely jam, and making me the least popular person in Bilbao.
This is one of those moments where you hope to wake-up, startled, and realize it was all a nightmare. I click my heels three times, ‘There’s no place like home’.
I open my eyes. Fuck, still in Bilbao. The only option is reverse again. I hate that gear.
Again I play the game. Again I think I’ve won. Again as I swing back onto the two-lane road where M-A is still talking to the ladies, CLUNK. No way. This cannot be happening. This is the worst day ever. I jump out as M-A runs over. I’ve hit a small bollard. Fortunately, it was just the tow-bar. No damage done.
I double-park some cars, but at least manage to get the van into a position where it is not blocking traffic, and we can deal with the situation.
The ugly
I believe we are good people. We intend to do the right thing. The problem is we’re not sure what the right thing is. Do we call the police? It is only a fender-bender. We rifle through our paperwork, looking for our insurance documentation. The two ladies are writing a phone number down; I assume it is for the local police station. We can’t find a phone number for our insurance company. Another man approaches us and speaks to us, in Spanish of course. From what we can interpret, he says the car is illegally parked (it definitely was), got what it deserved, and that we should make like Speedy Gonzales.
The little guy sitting on my right shoulder, dressed in shining white robes, and wearing a golden halo says ‘You have a couple of options here: You can call the police; you can wait by the car until the owner returns; or you can leave your phone number and email address, along with your registration and insurance details’.
Another little dude, with red skin and horns, sitting on my left shoulder and carrying a pitchfork interjects ‘Are you fucking crazy? Do you really want to deal with the police? Do you really want to spend the next five hours waiting for this chump to return to his car, only to have him call the police, and have to wait another two hours? Sure, leave your phone number; he’ll call, you won’t be able to understand a damn word each other is saying, and he’ll call the police and give them your registration number. Then you’ll have to explain to them why you fled the scene of an accident. Listen to the man. “Arriba arriba, andalay andalay!”’
He also mentioned killing the two old ladies and storing the bodies in the van, but I cut him off there.
So M-A puts on a show for the witnesses, scribbling away on a piece of paper before folding it and securing it under the windscreen-wiper. Cue the chase music. We get back in the van and make the slowest getaway in history. I ask what she wrote on the paper. ‘Hello’.
We assume Bilbao’s entire active police force is pursuing us. Why doesn’t the sat-nav have an ‘Anywhere but here’ button?
We make it a few blocks away. It’s not the police that halt our escape, but our guilt. I pull over, and tell M-A that I can’t do it. I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. She agrees, but we’re still unsure what to do. ‘How much cash have we got?’ M-A asks.
We scrape together €150 and decide to leave it on the victim’s windshield. Obviously there are plenty of flaws in this plan, but at the time it seems our best option. We return to a spot a few hundred metres from the scene, and M-A goes and places the money in an envelope next to her original note. When she returns, she mentions that the original note had moved.
‘You didn’t take it?’ I ask incredulously, as if I’m a veteran of these situations. I run and grab the original note; luckily as it turns out. It seems the two ladies had been unimpressed with M-A’s original manuscript, and had replaced it with their own. Written in Spanish, I can’t read much of it, but I certainly recognize our registration number. ‘Rude English’ also seems to make an appearance.
We wait in the van a little longer, concerned that someone else may take the money. The driver returns to the vehicle just as we’re about to give up. He finds the envelope before he sees the damage. We can’t see his expression, but I imagine he may be slightly confused. He does a lap of the vehicle and notices the damage. One more lap, a bit of a look around, then he gets in a drives off.
We do the same. Propelled by paranoia and guilt, we make a bee-line for Portugal; in our minds pursued by a bigger police convoy than O.J. Simpson’s Bronco.
We agree to never speak of Bilbao again.
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