Pieter's Adventure: No basking in Basque Country

16 - 20 September

I arrived mid-afternoon in San Sebastián, a city on the Atlantic Coast virtually adjacent to the French border. Locally the town is also known as Donostia (dono meaning saint) in the Basque language, one that has no real relations to any other language. Locals all still speak Spanish, however. I had arrived in Basque country.

After several months focussed mainly on the Mediterranean, the other side of Spain - the Atlantic side - was very noticeably colder, greyer and wetter. In fact in rained for almost my whole stay in San Sebastián, which had me digging in my bags for long-forgotten pants and drove some of the hostel residents out to buy more clothes.

To be honest, there's not a whole lot to see in San Sebastián. A short break in the rain one day allowed me to go for a walk around the beach and coast and up to Castillo de la Mota on Monte Urgull.

Coastal view with colonial buildings and Monte Urgull

View of main beach from Castillo de la Mota... Bet it would look amazing on a nice day...

View of Isla de Santa Clara from the Castillo

What would a European city be without a neat church photo?
Iglesia de Santa María within the Parte Viejo (Old City)

Despite my complaints about the weather, however, I did quite enjoy San Sebastián's main attraction - the pintxos bars. Pintxos (pronounced "pinchos") is the Basque word for tapas, and San Sebastián is the place to go to eat them. If you don't know what they are, basically they are small, tasty meal items, and a dinner would comprise somewhere between 3 and 6 pintxos, perhaps.

The hostel I stayed in was a friendly, family-run place that employed a young German guy to work for them, and almost every night he took the majority of the hostel guests on a pintxos tour of the city. The tradition is that at each pintxos bar you visit, you have one or two pintxos and one drink, before moving on to another pintxos bar, and you would eat at three or four of these places in a night. While they're expensive, they are also extremely tasty and amazing, and a very awesome way to go out for dinner. No reservations, no waiting for a table or your order to come - and no health and safety regulations on food display either!

I was also introduced to a new drink - red wine and cola. It was surprisingly tasty and very popular with locals, known as a kalimotxo. Maybe that helped me go around the world in darts later on from 6 to 20 in one turn...?

I ate pintxos for dinner all three nights in San Sebastián - what else could I do with such amazing treats on offer??!! Pity each bite costs upwards of €2-3...

A typical pintxos bar
You typically help yourself to cold pintxos from the plates, and order hot ones and drinks from the staff. When you're ready to leave, it's all about honesty - you tell them what you ate/drank.

During my time in San Sebastián, I'd been trying to work out how to get to Switzerland, my next planned destination. I had expected to train through France via Marseille, but prohibitive train costs led me to book a flight from Madrid to Geneva. That meant a few days to spare, so I headed around the coast to Bilbao for two nights.

Bilbao didn't seem like much of a destination except for one thing - the Guggenheim Museum. I didn't go inside - the exhibitions and cost both not to my liking! - but it looked pretty impressive from the outside for some fun photography shots.