Another reason we'd come to San Sebastián was its proximity to the French border since Rochelle had never been to France and wanted to go. I'd been before, in 2016, but it was fine by me since a) it was a part of France I hadn't made it to (I'd only come as far southwest as Bordeaux) and b) it meant I'd get to eat French food.
There once again don't seem to be trains between cities in this area, so we once again booked tickets with Flixbus to get us there and back again. The bus went from the same bus station we'd arrived at the previous night, so we already knew the way. After a quick breakfast from the bus station cafe we jumped on board and off we went.
Oh, a few pictures of San Sebastián on the walk to the bus station. It was cool, cloudy and grey - much more like the Europe I'm used to.
Yeah, I know.
Hilariously, we went into the first shop we saw and what was right in front of us? A woman with a Shiba Inu. So of course I took a picture.
We had tickets for a guided tour (more on that further down) later in the afternoon, so we set out to find lunch in the form of stuff we could get from the market.
We wandered around there for a while before picking up some things and heading to a nice spot overlooking the beach to eat it.
Biarritz has several beaches where you can surf, so we watched that for a while. There was another Australian there who we struck up a conversation with.
The beaches here are really nice. There are surfboard hire stores and 'surf schools' all over the place.
There these wee Citroëns all over the place. Only a two seater, and electric. Presumably you could strap your surfboard to the roof.
Us on the devices.
Me, doing my best to not let my annoyance show on my face.
Warm goat's cheese salad with croutons, plus a basket of bread.
Confit duck leg with herbed fries.
Pork in a honey mustard sauce with mashed sweet potato.
Dessert: a madeleine (no long-dormant memories reawoken, though), pineapple panna cotta, and a crème brûlée.
After we were done stalking random people and their adorable Japanese dogs, we went to catch a bus to take us into town; after getting on the wrong one (well, the right one; it was just going in the wrong direction) we hopped off and walked for a while through the back streets to get to another bus stop where we intended to catch another bus that would this time take us where we needed to go.
The first bus was very colourful.
The next bus was less colourful, but when it pulled up it connected itself to a charging station in a very futuristic manner.
Some bread, a slice of brie, a small hard goat's cheese, a local salami and a pastry called a basque creme (though we saw it elsewhere with different names; it's a bit confusing). It was excellent.
Then we were off on foot again for a while to kill time until the tour, which ended up getting moved half an hour, and then ended up starting later than the rescheduled time because the guy hadn’t shown up on time.
This is where things get…interesting. We - well, actually, it was Rochelle’s idea; I want that made perfectly clear - had booked a Segway tour. He’d been hard to get hold of online for details, and we’d come very close to cancelling because we weren’t sure what was going on. But we’d decided to go through with it.
Anyway, back in Biarritz, the guy eventually arrived in a Volvo station wagon. “Okay”, we thought, “we’ll be driving to where the Segways are.”
Nope. Out of the back of the Volvo came things that looked like the motor/wheels of a Segway, only much smaller and less effective-looking. “Wait, are these just those ones you stand on with no stick-thing to control them?”, I thought. Also no; he pulled out handles that just slid into slots and were tightened with wingnuts.
To say I was feeling apprehensive would be an understatement. It didn’t help that the guy didn’t speak very good English (despite this tour supposedly being in English) and was very much a ‘ah, it’ll all be fine - just go with it!’ sort of person.
As those of you know me would probably guess, that’s exactly the last kind of person I want in charge of putting me on a potentially dangerous wheeled vehicle and letting me loose. However, we’d paid for it and didn’t have a lot else we could do - so I let it slide.
Once he’d assembled the devices - I won’t call them Segways any longer because, as we discovered, they were some other brand entirely - he set about teaching us how to use them. This was mostly okay, apart from the language barrier, since when we did something he didn’t like, he’d yell out something in French and we’d then have to do a back-and-forth until we understood. Or, as was sometimes the case, just pretended to understand so we could get on with.
We’d ridden (actual) Segways before, in Australia; we drove up to the Clare Valley from Adelaide and stopped in the Barossa at Seppeltsfield winery just to do a tour there so we could ride them. We had intended to do a Segway tour in Prague in 2019, but accidentally picked the wrong (using feet only) tour instead.
These were a little different, and had very different wheels/tyres - but the principle is mostly the same and we picked it up okay after some practice. It was certainly enough practice to just be wheeling our way along paths and flat surfaces out of the way and - oh, now we’re just going to drive them on the road with traffic?
Uh, okay.
Since I’ve written this after the fact you know I didn’t die - but I didn’t feel that that was a given when we were on the tour. He tried to convince us that we would be safe on the road as the people in the cars would let us in and stop for us, but at no point was I confident that was true, and acted accordingly. My instinct (after many years of riding a bike in the city) when a car came up behind me was to get out of the way, and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t just doing what he was doing - “because I don’t want to fucking die” was my response.
I was feeling mostly comfortable about controlling the device - apart from when we were in traffic - but I did come off at one point when we had to go up onto the footpath at short notice; I’m not quite sure what happened, but I think it hit the driveway slope at the wrong angle and was tilted forward, which of course is how you make them accelerate. I lurched forward and chose to leap off instead of going with it, but managed to keep my footing and not fall over. My device did bang into his, though - he wasn’t totally happy about that, but we could see that this was hardly the first time they’d banged into something; they were scuffed up all over.
This did somewhat undermine the mostly-good mood I’d gotten into, but there wasn’t long to go before we ended up back where we started, and bid him and his knockoff Segways goodbye. It was definitely not the best tour I’d been on, and I would only recommend it to people with full disclosure of what it entailed, but we did have some fun and got to see a lot more of Biarritz than we would have on foot. We did get some lectures on the history of the city and the region, but our lack of French/his lack of English meant that probably wasn’t as informative as it could have been.
Oh, one other thing that did bother me; we stopped to look at a court where people play pelota, and (in French) he spoke to a guy about showing us the bat/racket and letting have a hit against the wall. The guy didn't look wildly impressed, but I guessed he was okay with it because he handed it over and we each had a go. Only afterwards did the tour guide guy tell us the local was unimpressed by this.
I mean, what the hell? You basically bully some guy into showing some clueless tourists how your sport works - when said tourists would have been far happier to not annoy someone just going about their day, and then you tell those tourists that they'd upset someone? It just made us feel bad, and now the guy probably has a bad opinion of Australians (since tour guide guy saw fit to tell him that's where we were from).
Ugh. I'm getting angry just thinking about it. Anyway, here are some pictures we took as we went around.
[There may be some that are essentially duplicates because I got Rochelle to send me some of hers as well.]
We stopped at a bakery at some point. This (I think) was called a basque beret. It's chocolate flavoured and very nice.
We were now on our own to wander about, which we did. The bus back to San Sebastián wasn’t until 9.30, so we were intending to have dinner here. Problem was, we didn’t have anything more to do and it was only 6.00 or so, in a town where most restaurants (or, at least, the ones we wanted to go to) wouldn’t be serving dinner until 7.00.
We tried one place because their online menu said they had confit duck (one of my favourite French dishes) only to find that they were only doing cold dishes as their ovens weren’t working.
But just around the corner from there we found a place with both duck on the menu and working ovens in the kitchen, and sat down there to drink until they started taking orders for dinner.
Too much? Almost certainly. Worth it? Definitely. Well, until a few minutes later that we realised we needed to at the very least walk quite fast to get to the bus stop that would take us to where we needed to meet the Flixbus to take us back to San Sebastián.
Except that where Citymapper wanted us to go to catch that was didn’t appear to be a bus stop. We did see the number 7 bus - the one we thought we needed to catch - coming the other way and flagged it down at a stop and the bus driver told us to keep going up the road in the same direction and we’d get to one where we’d get bus that would take us where we needed to go.
I thought he meant that’s where the number 7 (in the other direction) would be stopping, but the bus stop didn’t include 7 on its list of routes, so I was very confused and becoming somewhat more concerned. Not totally losing it just yet, since we knew we had at least half an hour to get to the pickup and it wasn’t especially far - a taxi or an Über would do it. But after re-checking CityMapper we found that a bus that was going where we needed it to go (Halle Iraty) would be coming in a few minutes and would get us there in plenty of time.
Why the pickup point for the same bus company and route is different from where we were dropped off in the morning (the airport) is beyond me, but that’s where we ended up - though there weren’t any signs for Flixbus anywhere we could see so we asked our bus driver where the Flixbus stopped and (after some back and forth in the two languages) were told where we needed to go. It was where most of the other people who got off the same bus walked to, so we were fairly sure that was it, but it’s always good to check these things if possible.
After a bit of a wait the bus came along; on we jumped to head back to San Sebastián. And that was our day trip to France.
Why the pickup point for the same bus company and route is different from where we were dropped off in the morning (the airport) is beyond me, but that’s where we ended up - though there weren’t any signs for Flixbus anywhere we could see so we asked our bus driver where the Flixbus stopped and (after some back and forth in the two languages) were told where we needed to go. It was where most of the other people who got off the same bus walked to, so we were fairly sure that was it, but it’s always good to check these things if possible.
After a bit of a wait the bus came along; on we jumped to head back to San Sebastián. And that was our day trip to France.
Oh, and on the walk back to the hotel it looked like this.
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