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The cycling was lovely along the cliff tops this morning. Fantastic views of the Atlantic, craggy rock faces and striking violet blue flowers as we trundled towards Hendaye and Spain just beyond. We shared the road with quite a few racing cyclists out training in the hills and enjoyed a descent with views over the Baie De Chingoudy, the huge bay that seperates France and Spain at the atlantic coast. Our arrival in Spain was a fairly low key affair. No flamenco fanfair, border photos or free straw donkey, we just bumped over a dodgy patch of road that presumably neither administration consider their problem then I noticed the signs were different colours and that I didn’t understand the road markings. We stopped on the pavement of a tree lined avenue to work out where we should be heading.
‘Are we actually in Spain now?’ Kez asked.
‘Errm.. Yeah’ I replied.
Being the land of siesta at around lunchtime the place was very quiet. Shuttered shops and silent offices mainly but I managed to find a small corner shop that was open and bought a carton of Don Simon grape juice and a packet of chocolate biscuit things that were like eating a large mouthful of sawdust covered in a micro layer of chocolate that served only to make your fingers sticky. Still without a camp site guide we decided to head for the nearest indicated on the GPS hoping it would be suitable. We heaved our bikes up a narrow concrete lane that wound us needlessly over a good portion of Mount Jaizkibel before arriving at the site which thankfully had space and was a reasonable price. I say space, but actually we were shown to a narrow strip of grass crammed with tents and managed to pitch in what could only be called a gap. Noisy drunken Spanish teenagers sought the attention of everyone by being generally annoying and messy in the corner, but it was the weekend and the site had a bar we could do some sitting in later. We took the shortish walk down into the town of Hondarribia where we enjoyed the view across the bay to France and discovered that we could have saved ourselves a lot of effort by catching a small ferry boat across the mouth of the bay for pedestrians and cyclists which might have been a nicer way to cross the border, but hey ho.
The girl in the tourist office explained that the town was having some kind of fiesta to do with fishermen, so all the shops would be closed today. We didn’t find any sort of festivities that would force shops to close, but I like their style anyway. We decided to eat in the bar tonight and stay tomorrow to explore the old part of town and find a camp site guide if the shops could be bothered to open on a Saturday. The site bar provided cheap beer, a relief after the extortionate price of a small frothy lager in France, and we ate a good ensalada mixta with patatas bravas, albondigas and redondos de ternedo which wasn’t too bad considering the overworked, curly haired sweaty barman did all the cooking.

We slogged our way up the rest of the hill and after a couple of tough miles I spotted a sign for a tourist office and left Kez at the top of the hill while I cruised down towards the coast to try and find a cycle route map. The girl in the office said there were no cycle ways because there were too many roads which made sense to me, so I slogged back up the hill, stopping briefly to watch some youngsters learning peloté, the game where the players wear wicker hook shaped scoops on their hands to launch a small ball at the wall with frightening force. Something like squash maybe, but scarier. Realising the only way around the coast to Spain was going to be the busy roads we pressed on through the traffic, delightfully cruising past long lines of cars and motorhomes in a narrow cycle lane on the main road. I was nearly forced into the verge as a bored driver decided to swing across the cycle lane to try and get out of the queues, but my squealing brakes alerted him to my presence and he wound down his window to shout an apology. I waved it off as we cruised on past and enjoyed the views as we coasted down to St Jean de Luz, round the huge bay before hitting some evil hills the other side. The fact that our little GPS doesn’t understand hills may become a problem as we get round into the rockier coast of Spain. Today was a good example as we followed its suggestion along a small road to lop off a corner of coast, but had to push and sweat our bikes up an evil incline to get over a ridge we could have avoided mostly by following the coast road. It hasn’t really been a problem up until now but with the landscape becoming a bit more serious I think I’m going to have to invest in a contoured map to help us avoid pain in the future. A few miles before Hendaye we came across a cheapish camp site opposite some fantastic rocky cliffs being some distance from the town and beaches meant it wasn’t packed, had proper grassy pitches and hedges and no cheesey disco, so we stopped. I had become quite exhausted for some reason and Kez managed all the chores while I lay on my back uselessly. Later we strolled along the cliffs marvelling at the crumpled layers of rock jutting up out of the sea to form huge smooth sections of cliff face that you could probably slide down relatively painlessly until you hit the jagged broken edges amongst the waves a hundred feet below. We managed to avoid that though, luckily.

Traffic filled streets, fast roads, nasty hills, roundabouts and traffic lights for us today as we continued South. Fighting our way past queues of slow moving traffic was actually quite a refreshing change as we cycled through Bayonne and Biarritz. We stopped to unwind at a small park with a war memorial and I had a quick walk around the streets looking for a camp site guide for Spain. Of course, being still in France the book shops only seemed to have guides to France so I gave up and returned to Kez with a baguette to eat with the large pork sausage and juicy melon in our food bag. It was hard work today with the heat, hills and stop start traffic taking its toll, and having got out of Biarritz and past some beautiful coastline, we gave up half way up a steep hill with a four star camp site sitting there invitingly. At €26 it was the most we’ve spent on a camp site but it was a relief to be shown to a grassy shady pitch bordered by colourful hydrangers and without any of the dusty sand we’d been pitching on lately. Free wi-fi, a pool, restaurant and excellent showers made us feel a little less guilty about the expense as we relaxed into the rest of the afternoon. The evening entertainment turned out to be a pretty decent pop rock band playing some good covers, albeit with a French accent. We’d probably stay a week if it wasn’t so expensive.

An early departure saw us heading Southward again on fastish roads until Lac Marin D’Hossegor, where we took the ‘Avenue Tour de Lac’ down the West side of the lake. We began to wish we’d stuck to the main road as the avenue dipped and climbed its way through multiple exhausting hills offering glimpses of the pretty lake between the affluent real estate and forcing cyclists from both sides onto a dangerously narrow cycle lane presumably so the well to do residents could play in their 4×4s without having to consider anyone else. We rested on a waterside path in the smart center of Cap Breton that ran along the river into a marina full of yachts while joggers and cyclists passed before finding our way back onto the main road and the decent cycle path that ran along it. Decent except for the narrow gateways at junctions that forced us to wheel through awkwardly and caused no end of problems for the cyclists with double child trailers.
We found the smart looking municipal camp site in the touristy beachy part of Labenne but were told they couldn’t take us until 3pm, and only then if a booking didn’t turn up. The receptionist in a three star site round the corner pointed at a dusty square near the gate when we asked for a night. We looked at each other and politely declined. It looked like the place where the bins should be, but strangely, as we were leaving she called us back and after some discussion in the office gave us a nicer larger pitch with a tree, which we accepted, sandy though it was. The beach was packed with people enjoying the hot afternoon sun and we gazed across at the jagged mountainous looking coast of Spain looming through the distant haze. Once again we watched the sun set over the ocean before a late dinner while a petanque competition on our site entertained the guests and a cacophonous disco at the expensive four star site across the road thumped techno beats through the evening air until late.

The morning was cloudy so we decided to press on today. Kez had a bit of a stressful time as our decamping disturbed a couple more spiders of the type that had ambushed her from the toilet roll yesterday. Luckily though I was available this time to leap on them with my size 11s as she squeaked and pointed out the unfortunate stripey forest dwellers. We took the road South deciding to leave the piste to the pootlers and pootled our way through Lit-et-Mixe and Vielle Sainte Girons. Although we were once again cycling with the traffic it was nice to be seeing the goings on in the towns instead of bypassing it all on the quiet pistes. We made good time and stopped for lunch on the shores of the Étang de Léon, another large lake with beaches and watersports, and more to the point, a very handy picnic table. We found our intended camp site and for the first time on our journey we were refused entry. ‘One tent for one night?’ I asked as usual in my best French.
‘Non’ came the simple reply. Apparently they were fully booked and I could quite believe it looking at the amount of kids running around. We sat down on one of the benches and decided on a new destination. The area was smothered in camp sites so it wasn’t a problem, but finding a cheapish one wasn’t so easy. We cycled a mile or two down the road and found two camp sites directly opposite each other. A three star charging €26 or a two star charging €15. We’re definitely more the two star types so we booked in and were lead to our pitch by a tired faced woman on a creaky bicycle. ‘Follow me please’ she said.
‘Are you fast?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Sometimes.’ she replied as we followed her inappropriate black lacy g-string up the dusty lumpy path. We were shown to a reasonably sized pitch with a shady tree which is good, but we were bordered by five other pitches with tents and a large caravan. One pitch had noisy French youngsters who were drinking some kind of spirit, clearly to excess and we felt like we were camping in a gipsy slum. Thankfully the boozers had a drunken tiff before passing out quite early and were quiet from then on. With our washing line adding to the shanty town atmosphere we decided it wasn’t so bad, just for one night.
We strolled down the road towards the beach which took us past noisy funfares, other crammed camping sites with mobile homes packed inches from each other and a noisy circus ring called ‘Toro Piscine’ which we’d seen hundreds of posters advertising for the last week or so. ‘Bull swimming pool’ didn’t sound much fun to us so we walked on over a huge sand dune just in time to watch the sun dip sedately into the Atlantic.