Third time lucky!!
Trip Start
May 10, 2007
1
4
Trip End
May 14, 2007
Pamplona, Spain
Thursday, May 10, 2007
But the website says that it's only three Euros!
The guy gives me a weary look, picks up the phone and dials the person
at Continental-Auto's head office. What does it say on the webpage?
Nothing. No information about how much it costs to take a bike on a
bus. And yes, I know I shouldn't complain, I know that this is the
first time I've been asked to pay to put a bike on a bus, but I'm
starting to kick myself that I didn't just wheel the bike through and
throw it on the bus like I did last time, when I went to Burgos. And
the extra money brings the price of the bus ticket up to damn near
forty Euros, which would have made the bus as expensive as the train.
But I really don't want to argue; I just want to go. The weather is
finally nice, the forecast is positive and I'm going somewhere I've
never been before. Please, God, just let the bus go with my butt on it
and no snoring pensioners beside me.
*******
The trip from Madrid to Pamplona takes about five hours and goes
through some fairly dramatic countryside before you roll up into
Pamplona proper. Pamplona is one of those cities which is chocolate-box
cute, and deceptively small: wandering down the streets where the
encierro (bull-running) takes place, it's surprising to think back to all of
those broacasts of the San Fermin festivals, where everything just looks
that much larger. Wider. Like, you see the streets on TV and the bulls
running down and it just doesn't look like the kind of street where you can
walk down the middle and touch the buildings on both sides of the streets.
So how the hell do they manage to fit in half a million drunk tourists and
fifteen bulls...?
El Perla doesn't have any answers, but he can tell you that San Fermin
doesn't come off as being as touristy as you might think. "You see the
drunk foreigners and all these people who come for the encierro, but
it's a real neighborhood festival," he explains, scooping up pintxos and
serving cold glasses of crisp, fruity rosé wines from Navarra. "You get out of
the centre and it's still the same festival, the same party, no matter
what neighborhood you go to. Everybody takes part. It's not like in
other cities, where the locals abandon the place and take off. I mean,
some do...but everyone participates here. Which is pretty remarkable
considering that there are only about a hundred thousand people who
live here, and during the sanfermines it gets up to a million and a
half people..."
So how do they manage to fit all those people in calle Mercaderes, and still have room for the bulls and runners?
"Beats me," he says, shrugging. "I watch it from home."
