Didn’t manage a run this morning. Too busy planning the next stage of the journey.
One lives and learns. A week before leaving the UK I checked the car rental rates for Bilbao, and was pleased to find that you can pick up a medium range vehicle for around £16 a day. Pretty good, I thought. Would it be even cheaper to book it locally? Yes, obviously.
Bongggg!!!! Sorry, wrong answer. Lose £200.
Early this morning I checked at the hotel reception, and found that the local Avis wanted about £250 for 4 days. A capsule of mild concern burst somewhere in my gut, but by midday this had sort of lathered its way into a great frothy wave of panic that threatened to overwhelm me. I can’t think of a much duller topic than car rental, so I’ll spare the details. But it took much longer than expected to get a deal much worse than I could have got in the UK. Two lessons here for anyone planning to hire a car abroad next year: 1) it’s much, MUCH cheaper if you arrange it at least a week in advance on the internet, and 2) be aware of currency fluctuations. Not long ago, £1 = 1.65 euros; now £1 = 1.38 euros. So it was cheaper to get a deal in pounds than in euros. In the end, I went to an internet café and rented a car online from a place almost next door to me. But it would have cost twice as much if I’d walked in off the street and booked it there. (But even online, it was still 50% more than I could have got it if I’d booked a week earlier.)
Crikey, that was the most boring paragraph I’ve ever written. I’ve just had to correct loads of spelling mistakes in the last half of it as even I fell asleep halfway through.
The one exciting moment came as I waited in the office for them to receive confirmation of the order. With a 3 hour siesta due to begin in 4 minutes, I had to get on the phone to Cleveland, Ohio to persuade someone to send a fax to the machine I was leaning against. The tension was unbearable. It was like the rugby world cup final all over again. Staring, dry-mouthed at the digital clock on the wall as the manager fidgeted impatiently with the office keys. Then, 28 seconds to go, the machine whined and squealed, and gave us our fax. Thank you Jonny Wilkinson. We’d never have made it without your inspirational example.
Five minutes later we’d swapped one sort of pain for another. Why do Spanish drivers just park in the middle of the road? Why are traffic lights ignored? Why do Spanish cars bother to have an indicator installed? What a waste of resources – their use appears to be frowned upon to put it mildly. Probably illegal in fact.
Twenty thin-lipped minutes later we’d effected our escape from Bilbao. Strange how your impression of a population can change once you get among them on the road.
Our destination was San Sebastian, about 80 miles further along the coast. But it took most of the day to get there because we opted to detour via Gernika, and take the tiny coastal road instead. But siesta was in full apathetic swing here too, so everything was closed. We even managed to miss the Monday market, the bombing of which by Hitler (at Franco’s polite request), killed two thousand civilians. Picasso’s great painting, Guernica, was really the only reason we wanted to see the place. The picture itself is in Madrid, but we were ghoulishly interested to see the source of its ghastly inspiration. An unremarkable little town, its siesta-empty streets giving it a memorable poignancy.
From Gernika we drove north to the coast, and followed the tiny, serpentine roads all the way to San Sebastian — or Donostia, to give it its Basque name. (It was interesting to see that almost every road sign in the entire region had the words San Sebastian painted out, leaving just Donostia. Welsh nationalists did something similar a few years ago.) Quite a hair-raising drive in places, the road narrow and precipitous, with no barriers to offer a second chance.
The city was dark when we arrived, and seethed with chaotic, rush-hour traffic. It took us a while to find our pension, the small hotel we’d pre-booked. The map was of limited use as the street signs are invisible in the darkness, and there was always an impatient hoot to hurry us on if we dared to slow down. Eventually we deposited the car in a subterranean car-park, and walked. Amazingly, in such a big city, we found ourselves just two hundred yards or so from our hotel.
The walk was brief but memorable. San Sebastian is built, quite implausibly really, along a stretch of wild and rocky coastline, and with the tide coming in and the wind up, we had the unusual sensation of spectacular, crashing breakers in the very heart of a major city.
The pension is slightly grim, though the fact that I say that is just another miserable reminder that I somehow got old and cranky while I wasn’t looking. When I think of some of the places I’ve resided in my time, the Hotel Kursaal in San Sebastian is luxury beyond reason. I wonder if India is still like it was in the eighties? Some of the ‘lodgings’ I stayed in, in those small, ants-nest-like Indian towns were literally nothing more than a concrete box with a concrete platform for a bed and one licey sheet that you could choose to use as a mattress or as a pillow or as a duvet. Sometimes there was an unspeakable hole in the corner of the room for you to shit into, and that was it. Why do I look back on those trips to India and Nepal with such nostalgia?
I suppose because nothing much mattered then, and I rather like the idea of nothing much mattering. Perhaps this is one of the things I like about running. Competitive runners must be full of anxiety, but not me. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps when I run, I rediscover that precious state of not giving a damn. Or is that one of those insights that I rediscover once or twice a month? It sounds sort of familiar.
Anyway, we are in San Sebastian, peering round a basic hotel room… It’s an unusual place. The hotel occupies the second and third floor of an apartment block; one of those old-fashioned places with the central lift and the sliding gates that you have to manually open and close, and that people never shut properly, rendering the thing unusable. There must be a special name for these conveyances.
One of the first things we discovered, checking inside the wardrobe (as you do), was a good quality running jacket and technical T-shirt. A remnant, I suppose, of yesterday’s San Sebastian marathon. The proximity of the race to our arrival is no coincidence. When I first booked the flights, there was an outside chance of doing the marathon. The plan was to arrive in Bilbao as we did, then collect a car and drive straight over here. Even when I’d abandoned hope of taking part, I was keen on the idea of coming over to watch it, but decided instead to save the running goodwill for a more crucial investment opportunity between now and May.
I wonder how the runner whose gear we found got on in the race? M, whose sense of smell is tragically acute, was confident they belonged to a woman. We handed them in of course. I’d no intention of stealing someone else’s running gear. And in any case the T-shirt was far too tight.
The evening was spent wandering the throbbing streets of the Old City. After an hour or so of meandering, we stopped off at a couple of tapas bars. I love this system. You wander in, order your Rioja tinto which comes in a beaker, and select a few of the savoury delights that line the counter. Tortilla wedges, chorizo, all sorts of delicate little sandwiches and rolls, cheese and olives and anchovies on cocktail sticks, paté… Each tapas (or pintxos as they call them here) comes with a small tissue that is scrunched up and thrown to the floor as the food is eaten. Then more Rioja is shouted up and the cycle continues.
Everything I read tells me that the Basques are different from the Spanish at large, in much the same way, I suppose, as the Scots are reputed to be different from the English. I can’t say I’ve noticed this yet. They’ve been just as friendly, civilised and manana-oriented as Spaniards everywhere. Nice people.
From the flags and photographs in many of the bars, we seem to live in a Real Sociedad environment all of a sudden. They must be nearby.
