GR10 Day01

An early breakfast at 7:30 which was nothing special.  We packed and left about 8:40.  The route took us beside the sea, then started climbing through the old town (which looked fairly new).  We were soon into the country, crossing under the motorway linking France to Spain.  We followed an alternative route so rather than going up, along, and down a ridge, we contoured along on another path before rejoining the GR10.  We stopped here after about 3 hours of walking and were more than halfway to our destination.  There were lots of raptors overhead but we couldn’t decide whether they were buzzards or something larger.  There were great views looking north towards Biarritz and the long sweep of the Atlantic coastline.  We started descending and I said, looking at the map, “there’s a village ahead”.  Christine replied, “don’t get your hopes up, there will be a few houses and nothing else.”  As we entered the village, we were amazed by what we saw.  The road was in France, but on the Spanish side there were supermarkets, whisky shops, drinks outlets, cigarette shops, a giant petrol station, and a few clothes shops.  There were no houses, but a few Spanish restaurants and the French side of the road was lined with restaurants which seem to be built from wooden shacks.  There were various carparks, with about 1000 cars in total.  We saw numerous people with their supermarket trolleys full of alcohol.  We walked through “the village” and were back into France proper.  We had another steep climb, and then descended on a nice trail.  From here the trail got a lot worse and we were either picking our way round patches of mud, walking through mud, or walking carefully over large stones as we gradually descended.  There was another climb before our final descent, again very stony, down to the end of the stage and our accommodation for the night.  We were having a drink when a Danish couple arrived.  They said they had been on the trail for over 11 hours as they kept getting lost; we took about 7.5 hours including stops.  We had an excellent meal of pintxos, which are the Basque equivalent of tapas.  An early night and hopefully we can still walk tomorrow!