The Bus Trip
One of the highlights of 2011. A road trip in the south of France that took me to the Cathar castles – Peyreperteuse, Queribus and Montsegur. But I am way ahead of myself.
After walking 1000km across Spain, my next destination was Maubourguet in the Haute-Pyrénées department in the southwest of France. I had been invited to spend two weeks with a friend of a friend, who owned a bed and breakfast. The deal was that I would pay €30 a night for food and board in exchange for a cultural experience helping her look after her guests whilst I practised my French. Something to look forward to.
I rang Madame from Santiago as I was lunching in one of the beautiful squares with Marco, my Italian friend.
“Hello Madame, this is Lisa. How are you? I’m just ringing to make sure it’s still okay for me to stay with you. I’m boarding an overnight bus to Irun later this afternoon and should be arriving in Tarbes sometime mid morning. “
“Yes, yes, so you had a good Camino? I have sold my house. I am not sure what you can do as I am not taking any more guests. But come anyway, we will somehow manage.”
As I got off the phone and explained to Marco that Madame had sold her house, I started to wonder whether it had been a good idea to purchase a flight out of Lourdes/Tarbes airport to Copenhagen which was my next destination after the bed and breakfast. Visiting Marco in Turin might have been a better idea.
At 4pm I boarded a coach from Santiago bus terminal bound for Irun on the border between France and Spain. It was a 13 hour ride with no rest stops and no toilet on board. I had bought a sandwich for dinner to eat on the bus which later I would find contained the saltiest ham I had ever tasted.
After the wonders of the Camino, the bus trip was a bit of an anticlimax. To this day I don’t know if it was the ham sandwich or some kind of lice or mite in the upholstery of the seats but my face broke out into a massive itchy rash accompanied by more itching on my legs. I was itchy for the whole trip and I looked as if a giant mosquito had bitten the right side of my face.
I found myself seated next to a man who kept spitting up phlegm into a paperbag. At one of the bus stops a couple of hours into the trip I asked the bus driver if I could use the toilet. When I returned the man spitting up phlegm was now sitting in my seat. These had been preallocated seats but I didn’t bother asking him to move over. I took the seat in front which was next to a man dressed in a suit who seemed normal enough. By this time, it was dark outside and the lights in the bus had been turned off, presumably to allow people to sleep. It was going to be a long itchy ride.
The bus eventually was full and I fell asleep only to find myself being woken up because the suit man was rubbing himself against me. How disgusting! And as soon as I woke up, he straightened himself out as if nothing had happened. There were no free seats left, everyone else seemed to be asleep and the bus driver didn’t speak any English as I had discovered on my way to the toilet.
So I fell back asleep only to wake to the same scenario again and again. The bus ride was turning into a nightmare. Eventually in the early hours of the morning, the suit man got off.
When we finally pulled into Irun, I had no idea how I was go get to Bayonne to catch the train to Tarbes where Madame was supposed to pick me up. The internet hadn’t been able to tell me my transport options from Irun to Tarbes and the best I could find was that the two stations were only about a kilometer or two apart on Google Maps. Perhaps I could walk.
I found a fellow pilgrim from the Camino – they are hard to miss dressed in their walking gear carrying a pack, as I was. I asked where he was going and he told me he was going to Bayonne. Perhaps I could go with him? We jumped on a train with no ticket and after a few minutes I found myself in France.
It was the start of the next chapter of my trip. 5am in the morning and the town was just waking.
I bought my tickets to Tarbes station and with 35 minutes to spare, I went across the road to the only cafe/bar that seemed to be open. Un cafe crème et croissant, s’il vous-plaît. I asked in my uncertain French. After being spoilt in Spain paying only a couple of euros for a coffee and toast, any sense of sleepiness I had from the previous night was quickly extinguished as I handed over €6 to the barman.
I boarded the train and the second class seat on the SCNF was a welcome change to the bus from Santiago. There were toilets on the train, it was clean and no one was sitting next to me. Two and a half hours later, the train pulled into Tarbes, one stop after Lourdes.
I found Madame in a white jeep - a sixty-something year old French woman with a good command of the English language.
