Monday July 17, 29.9km/18.6mi
Col de Lizuniaga (24.5km/225m) (España) to Hill above Elizondo (54.4km/310m) (España)
There were six of us camped at the restaurant last night, and the other four left earlier than me and Lea. The restaurant opened at 8am and we wanted to get a cup of hot tea and a croissant. After our relaxing breakfast, we hit the trail which was a dirt road most of the morning.
There were plenty of views of the Basque country farmland along the way.
These horses here are not afraid of anybody and don’t run away, it’s very strange.
Today’s goal was to make it to the little Mountain village of Elizondo.
Yup, the horses here definitely look like cows. From a conversation last night, I’ve also learned that they are likely being raised for meat.
There were a couple of small wrong turns along the way with all the criss-crossing farm roads, but we were both enjoying the scenery of the farmland.
We caught up with the two Dans, and had a short break near this tree, which I called The yoga tree, because it looked like some sort of inverted yoga pose.
The afternoon went by quickly, and I was equally distracted by the nice scenery and trying to remember how to properly conjugate various verbs in Spanish.
Later in the afternoon, the clouds started to move in a little bit and the weather cooled down.
At the end of the day we descended toward Elizondo and left the bare hilltops, and entered a denser forest.
It’s so cool randomly seeing these old historic buildings that are like 400 years old.
Yep definitely a damp climate here, there was tons of moss everywhere.
Lea and I took a short little side trip to a cascade, which was pretty neat but not as big or deep as we had hoped. We were both looking forward to taking a swim.
While walking towards and away from the Cascade, we heard gunshots from far above on the hilltop. And then suddenly very small pieces of ceramic were raining down on us through the trees, which was quite alarming. We quickly figured out somebody was clay target shooting above us and the pieces were falling here on this popular tourist trail. We got out of there as quickly as we could, it was only another kilometer to Elizondo.
When we got to town we took a quick swim in the river, and then walked over to the main village center.
We met the police in a little village square and gave a report about the shooting incident. They took down all the information, which took a little while with me since I had to figure out how to say some very specialized words in Spanish that I would never use normally (i.e. “bala”). We met up with one of Lea’s friends, Luca, who would be joining her for the next few days. We had dinner and a beer at the outdoor dining area, and then hiked a kilometer out of town to camp. Another full day!