The end of the beginning

After four months of travelling we have finally left Spain. I'm sure France will be just as good, but still it's a little bit sad. Spain has a lot of rock - despite spending so long (nearly half the trip!) here we only explored a fraction of the country, and there's still so many climbing areas that we haven't visited.  It was starting to get a bit too hot for climbing though, so reluctantly we had to leave and head north.

Spain didn't seem to want to let us go either.  We meant to leave a few days earlier, but got delayed by an unfortunate series of events. The climbing shop that was resoling my climbing shoes seemed to have a stereotypically Mediterranean attitude towards being open during their advertised opening times.  Ryanair had a stereotypically Ryanair attitude towards cancelling our friend's flight (actually in this case it wasn't Ryanair's fault, but abusing them is fun...) And we had a slightly epic drive around Lleida province looking for a ferreteria that a) was open on a Saturday afternoon and b) had gas in stock.

We made it in the end though - I'm sitting in France as I write this! More on that later...  Leaving Spain definitely feels like coming to the end of the first stage of our trip, hence the post title. I've found myself mentally noting things we've done in the last couple of weeks as "the last time we'll do <insert thing here> in Spain". Here are a few of those 'lasts':

Last climbing in Spain:

Siurana village and cliffs (seen from Arboli)

After spending a lovely few days back in Barcelona with Maria, Chris and John, we headed to Siurana, near Tarragona.  Siurana itself is a tiny village perched on a hill, next to the ruins of a Moorish castle.  It's also a famous and extensive sport climbing area (one of the first true sport climbing areas to be developed in Catalunya).  We were joined for a few days by Simon, a friend from uni climbing days, and Liz, who climbed with us in Chulilla earlier in the trip.

Unfortunately, on my previous visits to Siurana I hadn't liked it very much - the climbing style involves small sharp holds, and the routes I'd tried tended to feel quite hard for the grade. I was a bit worried too about how my injured finger would cope. It had held up quite well to a gradual reintroduction of climbing, and after a few extra days of rest in Barcelona it was feeling really good. But for the type of finger injury I had, climbing on the small crimpy holds typical of Siurana was possibly the worst thing I could do to it!

It was not a promising start - I flailed like a giraffe on roller skates trying to toprope a 6b at sector l'Olla on day 1. On day 2 I failed to get more than 2m off the ground on the 6b+ "warm-up" route at el Pati because the savagely small holds at the start instantly tweaked my bad finger, and then got ludicrously scared toproping a 6b because it went a bit sideways. And it was windy. And I had a cold. I was feeling a bit miserable by this point, and was half considering just staying in bed for a few days.

Luckily, Liz had other ideas!  On day 3, she bullied me into trying a different 6b+ on toprope (I was just going to sit on the floor and feel sorry for myself but she was persistent), which turned out to be much nicer. Then we both had a toprope go on Crosta Panic, a 7a+ at sector el Pati, which is a level of difficulty I wouldn't normally have tried. I was quite surprised, both by how much of it I could actually do (at least, with a tight rope!) and by how nice the climbing felt - it seems like Siurana follows the pattern of several crags we've visited where it's important not to let struggling on the easy climbs put you off trying the harder ones.

Si pulling hard on Bistec de Biceps

The success of that day inspired me to keep on trying to toprope harder things (ie 7a/+, for me) over the next few days, both during the remainder of Liz and Si's scheduled visit, and Si's two bonus days when his flight home got cancelled.  I think their enthusiasm was infectious, and I was inspired by their efforts. Si did an impressively quick ascent of one of Siurana's most famous routes, Bistec de Biceps. And Liz was so, so close to redpointing Crosta Panic, which would have been her first 7a+, falling off the last move on the last day of the trip after having climbed for ten days straight without resting - a really good effort! Maybe, just maybe, if I tried that hard...

Overall, I left Siurana (finger still intact) in a much better frame of mind than when I arrived, and with the feeling that maybe it's not such a bad place after all!

Last food in Spain:

We stocked up at a supermarket on our way north, and I thought we should get something authentically Spanish for our last meal. Since Spain's famous for its pork products, we went for a selection of mini-sausages in four different flavours - chorizo, obviously, but also morcilla, longaniza and criollo which we'd not tried before. Verdict: tasty!

I spent a very long time in the cheese aisle too, choosing the perfect Last Cheese of Spain. I went for a mature, smoked sheep's cheese made with unpasteurised milk from local sheep - I thought this ticked an appropriate number of cheese-snob boxes! And some goat's cheese too because the first one didn't come in very big blocks.

Last water in Spain:
We filled up our water tank on the way north in Figols, a small village near Organya, where we'd spent some time previously. There was nothing particularly notable about this except that the fountain was shaped like a deer. This amused me.

Last view of Spain (almost):
This was the view of Siurana reservoir, where we spent our last night in Spain. Technically, I suppose, I did see other things in the 200-ish km between here and the Andorran border but I tried not to look at them too hard...

  

For completeness, this was the actual last view of Spain, as we were approaching the border with Andorra - it's nowhere near as good.

We were a bit delayed (again) getting to France by some entertaining-ness in Andorra (nothing bad happened but we now know how to change the wheels on the van!) We finally crossed the French border, via a mountain pass over the Pyrenees, late on Saturday evening. We were a bit tired and hungry by this point, so we just stopped the van in the first place we could, cooked our tiny sausages, ate and went to sleep without a clear idea of where we were. The next morning it turned out we were here:

Surprise view!

I like France so far!