Difficult things

I awoke at the crack of dawn to find that the electricity was out at home. Selling your house without electricity is not, the real estate agents will tell you, a great idea. So I spent a very stressful few hours, with Minerva’s help on the ground, getting things back up and running. That stretched into the first part of my school day which just made an already lousy lesson intolerable.

All that meant I had two options for the afternoon. Either I was going to bury my sorrows in a huge meal (and glass of wine) or I was going to put my existing project into action and climb a hill.

There’s a large hill to the North of Pamplona that I’ve been eyeing off ever since I arrived. I see it every day when I walk to and from school and it’s forested slopes look like they would have a great view of the city. So the plan was to hike the hill – some 15km.

School finished and I got as far as the French Gate out of Pamplona when it started to rain. And then it kept raining. Walking in the rain is never fun – it turns a walk into a trudge, stopping is unappealing, and when you get where you’re going you can’t see anything. But I decided the project was underway so I was going to continue.

The first few kilometers are through Pamplona’s new town which serves as a useful reminder that you have to put the service stations and hardware stores somewhere. But then I came to the little village of Ártica and from there it was all walking in the forest.

Thanks to the rain I managed to get a bit lost. Being faced with the choice between backtracking and taking a hard path, I went hard. In this case ‘hard’ meant taking a path that went directly up the hill, not passing go, and not paying the slightest attention to the contours. By the time I reached the top I was very tired, very wet and wondering about my sanity.

What kept me going was not the view, because there wasn’t one in the rain. It was the fort at the top of the hill. Ezcaba is a huge fort built to help protect Pamplona. During the 1930s it was made into a prison housing the republican hard cases. Then, in 1938, 795 prisoners made a daring escape flooding down the mountain. Now let me tell you, as I just flooded down that mountain, it is a tricky and treacherous path and that’s without dogs and men with guns chasing you. 206 of the prisoners died, the rest except three were recaptured. In the end only those three made it to the French border and safety. The route they took is now a GR path. I have to say, Spain has too many stories like this from the years of dictatorship- they were not good times.

I enjoyed seeing the fort and the rain cleared enough for there to be a view on the way down. In fact by the time I got back to Pamplona the Sun was out and that’s a good way to end a tough day.