R & R, Basque Style

After two days in a row of hard riding and camping on the edges of farms and orchards, Krisztian and I are taking a day off at a campground outside Estella. There´s a group of New Zealanders and Australians on the site next to us, setting up for a large group of partiers who will be coming out for the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. We are going to bypass Pamplona based on a lot of rumors that it is overrun by tourists. Still, it´s nice to run into English-speaking people. We will probably go into town with them tonight to watch the Euro Cup finals, Spain vs. Germany.

When we watched the semifinals in Bilbao, it seemed that Krisztian and I were cheering more for the Spanish team than any of the other people at the bar. We quickly realized that it was likely that most people in the area identified as Basque more than Spanish and dont care so much. Now, at the campground cafe, it became apparent that Basques are much more interested in ROWING. A large group of men are hovering around the television to watch a number of Basque teams competing on some unknown, huge river.

You may have noticed that I haven´t posted any pictures thus far. There are a few reasons for that. First of all, all of the most dramatic scenes tend to appear when I am climbing up a mountain pass; if I were to stop then I would not be able to keep going. I never want to get off my bike and walk, it will feel like defeat. Second, I have never been too interested in taking photos of things that I am expected to as a tourist. Maybe that´s a bit pretentious, but I just feel like they have been taken a million times before. With that said, I have consistently seen a landscape of beautiful mountains rising above the clouds, medieval villages in which architecture is still functioning as part of the city walls, and extensive farms that seem almost placeless. The soundtrack my day tends to be cowbells, sheep, motorcycles hurtling by me at 160 km/h, or perhaps a logging truck or church bells.

Informal camping, as we call it, comes with a certain amount of fear. Though we have been told numerous times that it´s not a big deal to camp out on someone´s land, there is always the fear of not asking- whether because we don´t know where the farmhouse is or in fear of having to travel further before we find another suitable site. Yesterday, a truck drove across the farm, only about 4o yards from where we had set up our tents in the orchard. There´s no way to know if they noticed us our not, but we were well camouflaged and they kept on driving. Though I am by no means a claustrophobic person, being in a tent, where you can see nothing of the outside, can be frightening. It´s difficult to gues the distance of sounds such as cars driving by, voices, or even the less threatening sheep or cow.

Today we rest. Tomorrow, we ride 100 km off into the plains, in a leg of the trip through a much mors sparsely-settled area, and, thankfully, a much flatter landscape.