Booo hooo hooo, Waaaa waaaaa waaaa

That’s all I seem to hear now from Australia, complaining that I've been travelling for 3 months and haven’t sent any updates yet. Well FINE. If that’s what you want, that’s what you will get. But be it upon your heads!

The begin:
It began at the beginning, where all good things should begin. With everything loaded into the car (and not much breathing space left) Liam and I drove out of Marseille in the direction of Spain and Barcelona. After weeks of me finishing work and Liam relaxing, cooking and climbing we were on the way for 3 months of adventures. As we drove out of Marseille and into the Pyrenees we come to our first bazaar story.

Bazaar story 1:
On our first night out of Marseille we started the long drive over the Pyrenees, but darkness was quickly falling and we looked for a place to pull over and pitch our tents. After about 1h of searching we realised the Pyrenees were not as abandoned as we thought and were about to give up when we saw the glimmer of a camp fire on the side of the road. It was a nice German couple and we setup camp with them. So up went the tent, and we started cooking dinner. Soon a guitar came out of the camper and soft strumming followed. Then they started singing softly…something was a little strange…and then the dreaded phrase “I know a native American Indian song that is really easy, I think it would be nice if we sang it all together” …HIPPIES…we had stumbled up a band of travelling hippies . All in good fun we passed the evening drinking wine and singing Native American spiritual chants with not too much frowning at our pork sausage dinner.

Barcelona

The next morning we pushed on to Barcelona where we met up with Gareth and Bec. Being now in a completely foreign land Liam and I tried our hand at traditional Tapas. Walking into a back alley bar we got ourselves a beer and scoped out the exotic menu. After many minutes of discussion we selected 2 items a “bull blanc” and a “bikini” and braced our self for a plate of elephant gizzards or such. We were unfortunately disappointed when a toasted cheese sandwich and a Devon roll were presented to us. However, from this time onwards we had a much higher success rate. We spent 4 days drinking until the early hours, eating tapas in the afternoon and having traditional Spanish dinners at 11pm. During the day we walked and walked through the city, exploring ancient back alleys, drinking beer, eating tapas, and looking at all Gaudi’s architecture. Some of the highlights were drinking Sangria at 68c a litre (this breaks the “don’t drink alcohol that is cheaper than the price of petrol” rule), eating rabbit buried in piles of cooked snails, finding a bar where you have your own beer tap in the middle of the table (and the bastard Gareth wouldn’t let me go in).

Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the best know of Gaudies works"

Monsterrat

Next we moved on to Montserrat, a little tourist village 50km from Barcelona, which due to some navigational issues in Barcelona took us 4h to drive. We arrived to be confronted by a massive barricaded gate and huge tourist trap. After negotiating with security (in Spanish) we established that there was a camping ground inside and we drove on through past the souvenir shops and expensive cafes. Thus we were astounded to discover a tiny little climbers camping ground run by an awesome Spaniard who in his time would have been one of the best climbers in Europe. The rocks here are smooth conglomerate towers that are astoundingly impressive. We spent 4 days here with phenomenal sunsets every night. One night we sat down with the camp site owner, we ended up drinking until late into the night and talking philosophy with him. However, the interesting part of this was that he spoke only a little English and French and we didn’t speak any Spanish, but we managed to understand each other. The highlight of this place for us was climbing Cavall Bernat a 220m free standing pillar of rock that we aide climbed (that is standing on equipment as you go). A phenomenal experience where you have 500m of nothingness below you as you haul your way up a featureless vertical rock wall.

Liam on belay half way up Cavall Bernat"

I should also mention now the interesting language situation that developed. Catalan (the language in Barcelona) is a half blend of Spanish and French but try as I might I could not speak it and whenever I did try I would end up speaking French. Luckily I could understand it and Liam didn’t speak French so wasn’t inhibited by this. This resulted in the interesting situation that I would translate the Spanish into English for Liam who would then respond back to them in Spanish…Oh I should also point out our Spanish was learnt from listening to a 30minute language guide in the car as we drove into Spain.