Tour de France

Check out my prior blog entry about Lourdes before reading this one...

The Lourdes train station, my plan was to get a train or bus to another town (Bagnerres de Bigorre) where the Tour de France was to finish the next day. The only problem was that even though this town is only 25 minutes away by car, there is no bus that goes there. You have to take a 15 minute train up to Tarbes, wait 2 hours, and then take 45 minute train down to Bagnerres de Bigorre. No problem, except that the last train home to Lourdes comes back at 5pm, and the Tour riders don´t cross the finish line until 5:30pm. Since there´s no point in going to all that effort and not seeing the Tour, I sit to formulate a plan. Immediately upon sitting, I meet two other Americans who are also in town to watch the tour...James from Michigan and Ryan from Salt Lake. We decide that the next day, Ryan and I will rent a car and drive ourselves to Bagnerres de Bigorre (James will do his own thing hitchhiking up one of the mountains to watch there). The car seems like a cheaper option with more freedom than does a train, bus, and taxi combo because no one seems to be able to tell us how much a taxi back will cost, or IF we would be able to hire one. Plan set, we head out and buy some cheap French wine, some cheese, a baguette, a red pepper, some dark chocolate, and some water and cruise back to my hotel to watch the Tour on TV....turns out it is broadcast IN ENGLISH!!! Yeah!!

That night, after the guys leave my room and I hit the sack...all of a sudden in the middle of the night I wake and itch like crazy. No way. In this nice hotel I am getting bitten by something in my bed. I leap up and find bites all over my arm and feet!! I go downstairs and demand to have a different room. They comply. I throw all my crap into my bag and switch rooms, tired and furious. The next a.m., I wake before sunrise to get ready to meet Ryan to rent the car. While loading my pack, I reach in and...OUCHHHHHHHH....pull my hand back out with a deep slice in my index finger that is oozing blood. (Last night in my haste to switch rooms, I put the knife I used to cut my apple into my bag upside down...lovely.) I´m a real sight now...bug bites all over my arms and feet, a deep cut that won´t stop bleeding. I wrap a (clean) sock around my finger after I wash it out and I walk to meet Ryan.

We get to the car rental place and it is closed for the day! Shit!! The lady yesterday didn´t tell us it was closed Sundays! So we decide to do the train-bus-taxi option anyway and we go in to buy our train tickets. I buy mine, but Ryan has a Eur-rail pass and he left it in his hotel. We have only a half hour until the train arrives, enough time we think for him to run back to his hotel and get back in time to board the train. He asks me to watch his bag...I say no, that if he´s late I don´t want to be responsible for his stuff. He leaves...meanwhile, I'm still holding my hand above my head because my finger is still bleeding, and it´s now 2.5 hours after the time I sliced it! I begin to fear I may need a couple of stitches, and I´m about to go on a train to a place I´ve never been, not knowing how I´m going to get back, and perhaps needing to find a doctor while I´m in this unknown place, on a Sunday. It´s getting closer and closer to the train´s departure time and Ryan isn´t back yet. Finally they are boarding my train and he´s not back yet so I have to make a choice...I decide not to go. It just feels too forced at this point and I think I might have to find a hospital or a doctor soon. One good thing...I actually was able to get 90% of my train fare refunded...this is the only train station that I have ever seen that would refund money. I leave.

Finally, as I'm getting ready to go find the hospital, my finger stops bleeding. Could it be the holy water? Earlier, figuring I had nothing to lose, I went down and held my finger under the holy water faucet (see my prior blog entry about Lourdes) for about 30 seconds. Coincidentally or not, it stopped bleeding an hour after I anointed myself with the miracle H2O. All in all, I spent about 4.5 hours with a sock wrapped around my finger, applying direct pressure, and holding my hand on top of my head until it finally quit bleeding. I am a born skeptic, but maybe, just maybe, I did get my miracle in Lourdes.

So I spend the day watching the Tour in my hotel room, itching, bummed that I can´t get to Bagnerres de Bigorre to watch the finish of today´s stage in person. Afterwards, I go out to the grocery store...a 20 minute walk. It´s closed. Sunday. So I walk all over town looking for a restaurant that DOESN´T cater to every tourist from every country and serve every possible ethnic food including hot dogs, hamburgers, lasagne, quiche, pizza, paella, fish and chips, sandwiches, crepes, pastries, and various mystery mayonnaise-saturated foods. You know how you want to eat at a restaurant that actually specializes in something? Well, you won't find it here in Lourdes. And, can´t a guy get something with vegetables?? (This is a problem all over Spain and France.) Finally I end up in a place that will serve me a salad with lettuce, tomato, hard boiled egg, and diced ham. This is the most natural food I can get, even WITH it marinating in a gallon of mayonnaise dressing. If only I could say "on the side" (or anything else) in French.

Oh yeah...before I watched the Tour and after a quick detour through the cathedral, I visited the CASTLE!!! Now this was one of the coolest places I saw on my entire trip. I have no idea what the name of it was, but it was the awesomest old castle, on the top of a steep hill right smack dab in the middle of this mountainous town, overlooking everything. Turns out that in its early days around the year 1000 it was built as a military fortress. Later when the fortress wasn't needed around 1500 or so, the royalty made it their personal residence. Later around the 1700's, when the royalty moved on, the city of Lourdes turned it into a prison. For the last hundred years or so it's been open to the public to tour. The views up there were STELLAR!!!

Next day...up at 5 a.m. Stake out my spot in Lourdes on a sharp corner where the Tour riders will have to slow significantly before they pass. At least I will get to see them for longer since they´re slowing down. It would be nice to be up on the mountain to watch (better scenery, slower riding, and better Tour action in the mountains), but alas the roads are closed and I didn´t have a car last night to get up there and try to find a spot to park precariously on the cliff´s edge to sleep and wait. All day long I wait, from 6 a.m. on...about 12:30 the caravan begins to come through. The caravan is all the sponsor cars coming by throwing out free stuff to the spectators. Some of it is good, some of it is shit, some don´t have anything to give away, some just have sexy girls dancing in the backs of big vans/trucks. It is a spectacle, watching everyone scurry for the crap getting tossed into the crowd. I have a spot on the railing, in a perfect position to see the riders pass, but not so perfect as to get any of the cool stuff getting thrown out to the crowd. Wait...I do catch a cool pen (yeah a pen, my Tour de France PEN) that I set at my feet by my water bottle, until an old lady reaches down and steals it from me. Bitch!! We have an argument in English and French and neither understands the other, but both of us are pissed off. I tell her she just stole my pen. She intimates that she just reached down and found an unclaimed pen. Oh well, let it go, Den...let it go. Finally, at about 2:15 the first riders come through...about 15 of them. Then, about 30 seconds later the other 165 of them come flying by...and it´s over. That's it?!?! My three days of getting here, my bed bug bites, my inability to get to where I really wanted to be to watch the race, my sliced finger and trail of blood left all over Lourdes, my hundreds of dollars spent...all for less than a minute of Tour action. And I would do it all over again. I was THERE at the Tour de France. I SAW it. And I got one sweet photo of the race.

By the way...turns out that Ryan never did make it back to the train station. He got back to the hotel and realized he didn´t have enough time to make it back so he was sitting in front of his hotel figuring out what he was going to do that day. Turns out, a car of one of the Tour sponsors was loading up right in front of him and they offered to take him to Bagnerres de Bigorre. Of course he went. He watched the tour at the finish line, with two hot American girls, one a triathlete, saw the riders get their daily awards at the podium, and then was able to hitch a ride back. That bastard. :) He did tell me that when in Bagnerres, he spent about 2.5 hours walking through the crowd, up and down the street on both sides, looking for me, and he had the 2 American girls looking for me too. At least he tried to have my back. :) Thanks, Ry.

After they pass, I race back to my hotel to watch the final hour and a half of the stage on my hotel television. It's a great finish...one guy somehow musters up the strength, the heart, the force to push ahead of everyone, straight up that insanely steep finishing hill to claim the stage victory. Thrilled to have seen and learned so much about cycling over the last 3 days, I am also thrilled to leave Lourdes and get my ass back to Spain. I need out of tourist hell. Tomorrow morning I will head back to San Sebastian and then out to Leon, Spain and Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

On my last evening in Lourdes, as if to remind me that nothing can go right here, I go out to eat (same fresh iceberg lettuce/egg/tomato/ham/mayonnaise salad) and after eating my meal and a small dessert, realize I've forgotten my wallet. How do you explain that you have no money for the meal you already ate when you can't speak their language? Guess my mime skills are sufficient as not only do I not end up in a French jail cell, but I have them all laughing, slapping me on the back, and high-fiving me by the time I leave. And yes, I did walk back and pay my bill later that evening. :)

The Running of the Bulls.......what the?!?!

So, the Running of the Bulls takes place every July 6 - July 13 in Pamplona, Spain and the 8-day festival is called the San Fermin. Every morning at 8pm, a number of bulls (6-8??) are released at one end of town and they run as hard as they can through the streets of town until they get to the end of the course, which just happens to be inside the stadium where bullfights are conducted. At the start of the run, a loud gun goes off to tell everyone in town when the first bull has been let out, and shortly thereafter another gun goes off to let everyone in town know that the last bull has left the holding pen and that they are all now running in the streets. The bulls run through a street course with no exits (it's either tall buildings or erected barricades holding them in), so they can't get out.....and neither can the people that have chosen to take part in the run. The bulls go forward, and if anything gets in their way, they go over it or through it. They just run until they're in the bullring and there's nowhere left to run. It sounded moderately dangerous to me, and pretty thrilling to watch, so I hoped I could get there to see it during my Spain trip. I knew before I left for Spain that San Fermin was known worldwide and that getting a hotel room that week in Pamplona would be next to impossible. I tried looking onilne for a dorm bed in a hostel sometime during the festival, but the cheapest I could find was $300 for one night (and, for obvious reasons, no one on couchsurfing.com was offering a free couch for that 8-day period). Needless to say, I didn't book the bed and decided instead to just go to Spain and see how things all panned out.

All over Spain, in the first two weeks or so that I was in the country, I kept hearing about the Running of the Bulls...how crazy and death-defying it was from one person, how fun and totally NOT scary it was from the next. Many people were telling me to run (anyone can run that wants to) because it was the experience of a lifetime and not nearly as bad as the rumors make it sound. However, the closer I got to Pamplona, in both time and distance, the more the majority started to shift and I started hearing more and more stories of people getting gored and trampled or having very close calls with really big, scary beasts in really tight spaces. I was considering running, but logistically it was going to be tough because I didn't have a room or a safe place to leave my stuff, nor did I have someone that I knew and trusted to watch it. I figured I'd just play it by ear.

As it turned out, Pamplona is essentially on the way from Barcelona to Lourdes, France (where I was ultimately headed to watch the Tour de France bike race). So, as I was doing throughout Spain, I went online to the RENFE website (Spain's official train website) to buy a train ticket. Pamplona is 7.5 hours from Barcelona by train, and I happened to find a train that left Barcelona at 10pm and arrived at 534am in Pamplona. Sweet! That meant that not only could I get to Pamplona, but I could avoid trying to find a hotel room or a dorm bed there by just sleeping a little on the train ride. Then, I could see the run with the bulls at 8 a.m., hang out for a while, and get on a bus heading out of town somewhere toward Lourdes.

It all started out pretty well. I bought a little more expensive ticket in which my seat was one of six in a private room with a door that closed. As it turned out, there were two rows of three seats that faced each other. When I boarded the train and found my seat, I was the only one in there. After a few minutes, two other girls came in. One girl was from Pamplona and spoke really good English, so she could give me the scoop on what to do there. (I hoped she'd invite me to stay at her house so that I could stay an entire day instead of just a few hours, but she never did and I didn't want to push it.) The other was Brazilian and was able to speak both Spanish and English with me. Both were really nice and friendly. We made small talk for the first 45 minutes or so, and then we when we were all friends, we decided to fold down all 6 seats so that they made into three beds. There were three of us so it was perfect...except that as we were making beds, another girl came in. She came in late so she didn't bond with us - she just sat in one seat in the corner next to me while the rest of us still got horizontal and squirmed around trying to get comfortable. At first we were all trying to be polite and not touch each other....after a short while, that became way too much of a hassle and everyone's legs were thrown over everyone else's in an attempt to stretch out and get some sleep. It must've looked pretty odd (or impressive, depending on how you think of it) the way we were all stacked up together. Anyway, the train stopped now and then and it was pretty windy so there really wasn't a lot of sleep happening. At some point, though, I realized that I must have been sleeping because I groggily woke up to a really grouchy old guy and his wife coming in, flipping on the lights, and demanding that we put all the seats upright because two of them were theirs. He was right, so we complied, but so much for the sleeping on the train idea. We rode the last couple of hours in the dark, wide awake, trying to sleep, sitting upright without any leg room. It kind of sucked.

Upon arrival in Pamplona, the local girl from my train cabin offered to take me downtown (a short cab or bus ride away or a 20 minute walk away), but I'd have to wait an hour for her sister to get there. I didn't have an hour to spare so I thanked her and went on my own way. The reason I didn't have an hour was because I'd learned that the long-distance bus station on the other side of the small town had "left luggage" room so I could check my stuff in and go reclaim it later after the festivities...and then I'd already be at the bus station so I could get a ticket out of town going somewhere toward Lourdes. Perfect!!

Usually I would have just walked downtown, but I was tired that morning so I was trying to flag down a cab, along with a few other folks I met outside the train station. No cab would stop for us and we were getting pissed, and no buses were coming to the city bus stop that we were standing at in front of the train station. Just as we were about to walk to town as a group, a city bus came up. Given that it was filled with a bunch of local-looking people dressed in all white with red bandannas around their necks and red sashes around their waists, we knew the bus would be going to the right place (that white/red outfit is what everyone wears to San Fermin). We got on the bus and in 5 minutes we were downtown. I got off and asked a local where the bus station was. After another five minutes on foot, I was waiting in line in the 'left luggage' room of the bus station. Unfortunately, it took quite a while to get to the front of the line and leave my junk and by the time I got out of there and walked back downtown and figured out where I needed to be for the festivities, I had missed the window of time to be allowed to get into the course to run with the bulls and they had locked the course gates. I guess the decision was made FOR me to not run....I had been seriously considering it but hadn't yet made up my mind.

When I got down to the course, I was near the end and had no idea where the beginning was. The place was already JAMMED with people and I knew if I farted around looking at different places to see where the view was best, I'd soon not have any view at all so I stayed put. There was an approximately 5-foot high wooden barricade set up to hold the bulls in, and a few feet behind that was about a 6-foot high second fence on which people were seated or standing, craning their heads to get a view. I'm taller than most Spaniards, but with the people standing on the fence I still couldn't see a thing - all this way, all this effort to get here and I can't see?! Screw that!! I had to think quickly. I saw a dude standing on a plastic dumpster, alone, looking out above the chaos. I walked up, introduced myself, asked him if I could hop up there with him, and soon I had a new German friend named Stefan with whom I was able to take in the event. We let a few other dudes up there with us, but after a while, we had to keep kicking people off or pushing them away or telling them no..whatever worked. In a crowd like that, you stake out your spot, you don't move, and you hold your ground, trying not to be too much of a dick if you can help it.

Do you know it isn't easy to stand for over an hour on a plastic dumpster with a flimsy lid with six other drunk partygoers? I feared that the dumpster fall would be more devastating than any bull goring that happened to take place concurrently, but fortunately I never had to find out. It turns out that the spot was pretty decent and I got a few decent photos (see above). You can see from the photos that there were a lot of people and they were scaling walls, lamp posts, etc. to try to get a better view. There were a couple of ambulances just waiting around, and there were passed out people everywhere. Did I mention that San Fermin is pretty much the biggest party in the WORLD!? I have never in my life seen so much drunken debauchery, honestly (and to be sober was, in fact, a bit sobering). From my sweet, standing, dumpster view, there was one chivalrous guy below who had a passed out friend's head resting on each of his feet, just so that his buddies wouldn't have to lay their heads on the pavement. Of course, if you saw that pavement, you'd understand why. Everyone had told me NOT to go to San Fermin in flip flops because the streets were disgusting, and I really didn't get it until I saw it. There was piss, vomit, broken glass, and trash everywhere; it was the most disgusting thing I've ever seen, and yet somehow the whole event was still charming and electrifying. The streets were so littered that every morning after the bulls run, the fire department comes out with their hoses and hoses down not just the streets but the BUILDINGS, from the ground to about 6 feet up!! They flood the place with so much water that you need to be really careful that you don't get near the roiling, boiling mixture of said piss, vomit, broken glass and trash that flows downhill to wherever they collect it all.

Ultimately, the gun went off and we knew the gate had opened. Then 20 seconds later another gun went off so we knew all the bulls were running. Keep in mind we were about 200 yards from the finish of a 3-mile run and we could see the end but wouldn't know the bulls were near us until they were right in front of us because there was a big building blocking our view to the left. Within about 2-3 minutes, we could see the people up on the balconies beginning to fidget and pointing their cameras down the road so we knew the bulls were near....and then, just like that, the runners on the course that were waiting right in front of us started sprinting away...then a few bulls entered the picture.....some people outran them and made it into the stadium before the bulls did (they got ridiculed and people threw stuff at them for being pansies and not running WITH the bulls)....and amongst the rest there was a lot of scurrying, pushing, shoving, jumping, screaming, avoiding, etc. as the bulls charged through the crowd...and then, calmness. Slowly all the people on the course that had run with the bulls came walking past us, cheering, singing, yelling, drinking, reveling. Stefan and I just looked at each other. Was that it?! I only saw 3-4 bulls, and it didn't look all that dangerous....but click on the lowest photo above to see how big those bulls actually were and how close those big bodies and horns are to the people running in front of them. Ok, maybe I'm glad I didn't get the chance to run. :)

Stefan and I jumped down and said "adios" to each other. I quickly walked over to the stadium and walked into the stands. No one charged me money or asked for a ticket - it was like controlled chaos and no one cared who went in the stadium or how many went in. People crowded the aisles when all the seats filled; it was a fire marshal's worst nightmare. But I was there in the middle of it, checking it out, holding my camera high above others taking video of what was happening below. All the people that had beat the bulls into the bullring or those who'd run with the bulls and gotten to the stadium quickly enough to be inside before the gates shut were now actually IN the bullring. What they do is they let one bull at a time out into the crowd. The bull really has nowhere to run so it just runs at people, who stay in its path as long as they can until they jump aside at the last second, hoping not to get gored, trampled, or thrown in the air. People just want to touch the bull, to get close to it, and to not get killed. Most succeeded. No one died or got seriously hurt, but I saw a number of people tossed in the air the like ragdolls by a well-placed bullhorn, and I also saw a number of people trip and get stampeded by a thousand pounds of frightened mammal. The ambulances took away far more people with alcohol poisoning than with bull-inflicted wounds, I'm positive.

After a little while, I didn't need to watch bulls running around helpless in a sea of people anymore, so I left and I walked through the course and through town watching people party their asses off, at 810 a.m. All the bars were open and they were PACKED. People were wasted drunk, dancing, yelling. People were passed out everywhere. I meandered and just took it all in. I bought a t-shirt. I ate a popular Spanish breakfast, churros and chocolate (basically fried dough dipped into hot, thick chocolate milk the consistency of pudding). I didn't feel like going on a beer bender. Maybe if I'd have been with someone else I'd have felt a little more festive and wanted to party. I know if I'd have had a room, I'd have been able to relax and stay longer. As it was, I was glad I saw San Fermin, and equally glad to get the hell out of there.

Maybe I'll go back next year. If I book now, I can probably find a dorm bed for only $200 a night...