Sabine was waiting for me at the tiny Bilbao international airport after spending six hours exploring the two shops and a restaurant in the facility. She’d also obtained a map from the tourist information centre and done some research. Since she’d made the decision to go to Spain and invited me I fully expected her to lead the way.
“So, what do you want to do?” she asked, handing me the Lonely Planet.
“I don’t even know where we are.” I turned to the large map of Spain at the front and Sabine pointed out the Cantabria region on the north coast, just west of the Pyrenees.
We discussed the options while waiting for the bus, but decided to check out the tourist information centre in town first. On the way into Bilbao proper, we chatted caught up on all the gossip of our lives and mutual friends. Sabine had started at P&G in Japan just a few months before me, and left a year earlier. Now she was living in London and I’d stayed with her a few times on business trips there. The bus let us off at a large roundabout in the city centre. On each of the six corners stood a beautiful old stone building, but the rest of city was uninspiring, filled with ramshackle grey buildings that could have been in Sydney or Chicago. The tourist centre was next door to the Guggenheim, and we just made it before they closed for lunch at 3pm. I quickly realised that Sabine’s Spanish surpassed mine when she chatted away with the guy behind the counter. She made a couple of mistakes that I picked up, and she had to ask him to repeat himself a couple of times, but most of it was beyond me.
“I didn’t get most of that,” she said modestly as we left, “but the bus stop is over here, and one goes at four o’clock.” I enjoy an unplanned holiday, but I prefer not to be stressed about getting home, so I suggested that we head out quickly and make our way back slowly, having a better look at Bilbao on the last day. Right now though, we had a bit of time to check out the famous Guggenheim, which everybody I’d spoken to had recommended – not so much for the contents, but for the architecture.
“It looks like the Sydney Opera House,” I told Sabine.
“What? It doesn’t even have the same shape.”
“OK, it looks like the Opera House has been exploded,” I explained, then added, “bearing the metal underneath” in anticipation of her next comment on the material used. It was original – I won’t take that away from Mr Guggenheim – but I prefer stone buildings.
The walk to the bus station took us through a beautiful park, sunk low and surrounded by trees to shut out the rest of the city. We saw three bridal parties having photographs taken in front of stone monuments with a backdrop of brilliant greens under a clear blue sky. Given what I’d seen of the city so far, I wasn’t surprised that everyone came here for the special occasions.
Sabine managed to get us tickets on the bus to Santander and for an hour and a half we drove through spectacular scenery. On my side of the bus I was treated to views of tall mountains and rolling hills dotted with sheep. Sabine, on the other side of the bus, had the map out and was memorising the name of every town we went through. Every now and then, she called out “Oh, look at that,” and direct my attention to the sparkling blue expanse of the Bay of Biscay, extending out to the Atlantic Ocean. “Look at how clear it is!”
The woman in the information centre at Santander station wasn’t very helpful, waving a hand in ‘that’ direction to indicate where we’d find a tourist centre. Sabine, who could formulate an entire sentence before I’d remembered how to say ‘excuse me,’ stopped to ask a businessman the way. He started to give directions, but seeing our lost expressions decided to take us himself. He kept up a lively exchange with Sabine along the way, and the only thing I can remember bringing to the conversation was “yo soy Australiano” (I’m an Australian). He pointed out a few sites that we would inspect more closely later – an old cathedral, the plaza, an old building now used as a shopping centre.
I liked the town, and my knees were complaining that they didn’t want to start hiking tomorrow, so I suggested we spend two nights here before moving on. Once we’d found a place to stay and checked in, Sabine, an avid photographer, grabbed her camera and we went for a walk. First stop was the cathedral, a rough stone building with minimal ornamentation, but an impression of great age. We debated what our guide had been trying to tell us about a door.
“I don’t even know which one he was talking about,” I said. “They’re all huge arches of solid wood. Was he trying to tell us that it’s a special wood?”
“I thought he was saying we could get in one of the doors. He might have even said it was around the back.”
We decided to test this hypothesis, but still almost missed a small side entrance to the cloister. Just as we were about to leave, some other tourists came out through it and we laughed at our blindness and ran through. Inside was a sunny courtyard with shaded around the sides by a high roof supported on rough stone pillars. Another bridal party had chosen this as the setting for their photos. It seemed that every Spanish girl of marriageable age had chosen this gorgeous Spring Saturday to celebrate this life event.
By now it was 8pm and the ‘marketplace,’ really a square, we’d walked through earlier was full of locals out with their children to enjoy an evening and chat with their friends, while their children ran around the fountains. They would be out until well after 9pm. Further down the street, in a smaller square, a bagpipe band was playing and people gathered for a carnival. A caravan was selling churros, long pieces of fried batter, squeezed into the oil in a Mr Whippy star shape. I ordered one and was surprised to find that they cut it into little pieces, but not so surprised to find that they shook half a kilo of sugar over the pieces. Carnival food is similar everywhere.
The next morning, we rose early and went for a walk around the coast. At our leisurely pace, with Sabine stopping to take pictures twenty times as often as me, and me stopping to lie on the rocks, looking at the waves below, it took most of the day. The beaches were covered with groups of people paired up and swatting tennis balls to each other with large wooden paddles. It was a fairly tedious and unenergetic sport, but that may have been the appeal on a lazy Sunday morning at the beach. Many times I got the impression that these groups were some sort of paddle tennis club, with members ranging from teenagers to frail old people of the sort I’d expect to see on a bowling green. Nearby, children had dropped their paddles in favour of building sand castles.
We walked east to a palace on a verdant peninsula. It wasn’t anything special as far as beautiful old stone buildings go, but the location was superb, overlooking the rich blue ocean as it did, and including in the view a small island lighthouse. The same peninsula held a small outdoor aquarium containing various seals and penguins in miserably small enclosures and a fascinating monument to pre-Columbus Spanish vessels. Three boats of only five metres length, one more like a raft, had been built to original designs and sailed from South America to Spain, about eight thousand kilometres, in simulation of real voyages. My American and European history is a little rusty, so I can’t explain how Spanish ships could have sailed to or from South America before Columbus discovered the continent.
The most surreal episode of the day came while we were waiting for lunch at an outdoor cafe by the beach. An old man came shuffling around thrusting a cigar box in the face of each customer. When he got to me, I realised that the box was empty. He was begging, not selling cigars as I’d assumed. I waved him away much as everyone before me had done, but he wasn’t so easily dissuaded this time. He pulled at my cheek in what he seemed to think was a manner that I would appreciate. I didn’t, and brushed his arm away, but he persisted. By the third time, I’d lost my smile and my patience and pushed his arm away roughly. The old man began shaking his fist in my face and spewing out aggressive Spanish. I thought he was going to spit on me before he left. It was a striking contrast to the hospitality we’d received from almost everyone we’d encountered previously.
After lunch, we walked north, further up the coast, towards a lighthouse that we ended up not visiting. Instead, we lay in the shade of some rocks looking at the waves crashing into the cliff below. Sabine found faces in the cliff crags, and between waves and crags, she took a couple of rolls of film. The walk back was surprisingly long, despite the slow pace we’d made in the morning, and it was time for a dinner when we got back.
Or so we thought. We chose a restaurant / bar that looked cheap but cozy and were lead out the back – to something more classy. Everything on the menu was around 20 Euro, twice what we were expecting to pay but it would have been very obvious if we’d left so we decided to enjoy it and consider it a lesson. Another lesson was the reason it would have been so obvious if we’d left. We were the only people in the restaurant. It was eight o’clock, but there wasn’t anyone else eating even by the time we left an hour later. Perhaps it was the food. My 20 Euro bought me an undercooked steak the size of a dinner plate and a smattering of chips. I sent the steak back twice, at the offer of the waiter who I could hear laughing with the chef about the uncultured foreigner. “That’s how we eat it here,” he explained the first time he brought it back. I tried. I really did, but the feel of the beef squishing in my mouth destroyed my appetite immediately.