That Old Bilbao Moon

by Tim Perrin
Photos by Terre Perrin

That old Bilbao moon,
I won’t forget it soon.
That old Bilbao moon,
Just like a big balloon.

Andy Williams used to croon that tune from one of my mother’s LPs when I was a kid. I didn’t know where Bilbao was at the time, much less imagine that I would ever be there. But, tonight I am in Bilbao, Spain.

It’s not at all what I imagined—when I imagined it at all.

From Andy’s song, I saw a quaint little town on the Bay of Biscay: romantic, small. Instead, I was greeted with a sprawling city of 350,000, one criss-crossed by freeways. Our hotel is near one of the biggest Ikea outlets I’ve ever seen which is attached to a shopping centre the size of lower Manhattan that is across the freeway from another mall the size of south Jersey. And it’s Christmas shopping time. Gee, is the traffic fun or what?

Now, perhaps there is a small, romantic, quaint core to Bilbao. We’ll try to find it if there is. I expect there will be. This is an old city.

But what is most noteworthy tonight is our trip here.

Today is Saturday. We left Bordeaux in heavy fog on Wednesday, intending to drive to Spain in one day. But, by the time we had driven from Bordeaux to the coast—about 60 km—it had turned beautifully sunny, so we took the scenic route through little seaside village, some of which go back to pre-Roman times.

There has been a definite shift in the architecture. We are seeing more sprawling houses and more tile roofs.

We eventually arrived in Bayonne after dark. Now, by the most direct route, this is a two-hour drive. By the Tim and Terre route, it took six hours—including a stop for perhaps the worst Tex-Mex food in my life. We ordered nachos. We wondered what wonderful exotic French cheese they were going to use on the chips. Would it be emmenthal? Something with peppers or olives in it? A goat cheese? What we got was a pitiful pile of “zesty” flavoured chips with a dribble of orange processed-cheese stuff that may have once been heated. It was disgusting.

But the weather had certainly turned; it was amazingly warm, at least into the low- to mid-teens, which for what we’ve been used to, is warm. There was a breeze blowing. It was a nice evening.

We both woke up on Friday hoping to take a ride on the lovely bike trails we had spotted around Bayonne the night before. We were to be disappointed. It was pissing down rain and hail—big hail. Overnight, it had started blowing so we should have known it was coming. In fact, I had commented that it sounded like a frontal passage. We walked over to the nearby Intermarché to do a bit of shopping and just missed getting caught in a deluge of rain and hail.

We went to Carrefour—a big superstore—and did a little bit of shopping and then headed down to see the beach at Biarritz. When we got there, the surf was magnificent. The same storm that had blown the night before was creative huge waves that were smashing against the rocky shore and throwing up huge clouds of spray.

We had, of course, left the camera behind—again! So, we went back to Carrefour and I bought Terre her Christmas present, a Canon 750 pocket camera. But it was too late to go back to the beach for any decent pictures.

Which brings us to today. We got a decently early start—for us, that is any time before noon. We went back to the beach and got some passable shots of crashing surf, but nothing like yesterday when the surf was higher, the sky was darker, the light more oblique, children obeyed their parents, policemen never took bribes, and Canada Post delivered a letter across the country in two days.

So we started lolligagging down the coast. By the fastest route, Bayonne to Bilbao is 1:34. We took all day, but what a day!

A few miles before the French border, we stopped at one 19th century mansion on a bluff overlooking the coast. It had been the home of Antoine d’Abbadie, described as a “explorer, geographer, linguist, and astronomer” by the French Academy of Sciences of which he was a member and to whom he left his little shack above the sea. He had built an observatory and invited astronomers to map all the stars in the heavens. The house is decorated with sculptures of crocodiles, boa constrictors, monkeys, and elephants. And he wasn’t afraid of a little dirt under the nails himself; he personally drew the first reliable maps of Ethiopia.

Ten kilometres later, our poor little van was struggling up a twisty road from Hendaye at the mouth of the Rio Bidasoa. The bay there marks the border, both geographic and political, between France and Spain. To the east, it is relatively flat. To the west, it is up, up, and up. We drove all the way to the top in second gear, rarely topping 30 km/h. But once up there, it was truly spectacular. My God, what scenery! At one point, we were driving along the ridge of a mountain crest. On our right, the land tumbled half a kilometre down to the crashing Atlantic. On our left, it fell precipitously into a river valley almost as deep. Across the valley, the 1400 metre peaks of the Sierra de Aralar were sporting winter’s first snows.

When we finally came down from the ridge, we passed through little towns situated on tiny bays with tiny harbors, tiny beaches, tiny streets, and names like Zarautz, Getaria, Zumaia, Deba and Lekeitio.

Every time I look at a sign, I feel like I am in Turkey. The Basque language is not even in the Indo-European family of languages and has nothing in common with Spanish or English. The Basque are one of the oldest peoples in Europe, possibly the oldest, probably direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people who first lived in the Pyrenees 40,000 years ago. They were here before the Celts, before the Phonecians and Cartheginians, before the Romans, the Visigoths, and the Moors. Many of them still live in stone houses—called caseríos by the Spanish—that were built by the forbears. Their ancient legal system or fueros were suppressed under Franco, but they have had their own regional parliament since 1975. Nevertheless, there is still a strong movement for independence for Euskadi, the Basque region of Spain.

The countryside reminds me of the northern California coast: rugged, and gorgeous, a total surprise. We have been four months in flatland: Holland, Belgium and western France. A “mountain” there hardly qualifies as a “rise” in BC. But here, we are definitely back into the hill country, the land that Terre and I both love, and even better it is right by the sea.

After our few days in Bilbao, we start into another stretch with SERVAS hosts. We will be two days 35 km south of here in Vitoria-Gastiez, then two days in a tiny village of 750 people. Then we expect to spend next Saturday night on the road before arriving at A Coruña on the northwest tip of Spain for a few nights. We will be spending Sunday and Monday with a nice couple with whom I have been corresponding in Spanish. In fact, I’ve been doing virtually all my SERVAS correspondence in Spanish—painfully slow and with much reference to both my dictionary and grammar book, but it is helping me get back into the language. And then we are meeting my clone. He is a young man in his 20s who, when I started to read his list of interests in the SERVAS directory, I would have sworn I was reading my own: computers, electronics, listening to shortwave radio, biking. But the kicker, the one Terre refused to believe, was that this young man plays the harmonica. Oh, it’s gonna be a hot time in Gallicia next Tuesday night!