Part 3. Madrid, 23rd October.

Hmmm. I´m still not sure that I am cut out for travelling by myself. But generally it´s been good so far.

Things started erratically on the first day. I caught the train to Dover as planned, then the transfer bus to the docks. When I got there I discovered that there is a 45 minute check-in for the ferry. Which, it has to be said, is quite barmy, but I should have checked. Still, the full breakfast on the later ferry was probably as good as on the earlier one. At Calais docks I ended up getting a lift to the station with a bloke who´d just driven up from the Spanish border over-night and was waiting for his mate who should have been on my ferry but wasn´t. Even after battling with a French ticket machine for ten minutes to get a ticket (not the fault of my lack of French, but because the machine seemed to go on strike for a minute between each screen), I still managed to catch the planned train to Paris. Via the old, slow route. Which was a mistake. So, after leaving Folkestone at 7am, I finally got into the back-packers hostel at 5pm. Next time I´ll take Eurostar.

Bizarrely, a couple of days before, a friend who I´d travelled with to Africa twelve years ago, and is now happily living near Prague, happened to announce on Facebook that he´d be in Paris the same evening that I was there. So, after eventually working out how to use the free Velib cycles, and a manic twenty minute pedal across Paris, I met up with Jeff at Le Chat Noir, where he bought me a drink. A litre of beer that cost the quite shocking sum of eighteen Euros - enough to buy about 40 beers in the Czech Republic.

Day two started out wet and rather early. It was made even earlier by the fact I couldn´t sleep. A fact that may not be unconnected with the large kebab I had the night before. The 07:15 TGV to the Spanish border left Paris 23 minutes late. And arrived at Hendaye, five and a half hours later, still 23 minutes late. A futher four hours on the hard plastic seats of the narrow gauge electric EuskoTren saw me arriving in Bilbao. Walking rather oddly. It does have to be said that the scenery around there is fantastic. I suppose where Pyrrenees meet the coast is going to be pretty, but what surprised me was how green - and wet - it all was. I´m not sure why it surprised me, after all this is the Bay of Biscay, and mountainous west coasts tend to be a trifle damp in Europe.

It does have to be said that the Basque language (Euskara) looks bizarre. They have an odd fondness for the letter X. And most words seem to end in "ak". From what I can understand most verbs have very few forms. But they have an accompanying auxilliary verb that explains how many subjects are applying the verb to how many objects, when, and with how many indirect objects. Oh, and a Basque noun can have over 458,000 inflected forms. Well, that´s what it says on Wikipedia so it must be true.

Becuase it was still raining I didn´t see much of Bilbao. But I would like to return at some point. If it ever stops raining.

A relatively late start at 08:40 on day three for the six and a half hour journey to Madrid. Although that train was also delayed by 23 minutes. The Talgo train had some dodgy electrics - the internal doors took a lot of persuasion to work, and the temperature was about 5 degrees too cold for comfort for the first two hours and five degrees too hot for the last two hours. Still the three hours in the middle weren´t too bad. The Madrid hostel I booked was conveniently close to Sol metro station in the centre of the city. So I didn´t get too wet trying to find it.

Woke up this morning to find that it had finally stopped raining. And the sun actually came out for about an hour in the afternoon. But it was still bloody cold. Apparently Morocco has also been having really bad weather. Great.

Tomorrow will be another long travelling day - 6 hours train to Algeciras and a ferry across the straits of Gibraltar to Tangiers.

So, I´m off now to get some tapas.

Anorak tally (days 1-4):
15 trains (incl. metros)
3 buses (incl. transfer buses)
3 bikes (Paris ´Velib´)
1 ferry
1 car