A Week in Sunny Spain

Sun, sea and sand, that’s what’s in Spain isn’t it?? Well one of those is right... There wasn’t any mention of snow and fog when we decided that the Spanish Pyrenees for the summer expedition.

Arriving in Spain late at night, we found the really comfortable metal seats which we would attempt to sleep in that night, which included being woken up by the police at one point.

The morning bought with it our first experience of the heat and humidity and our attempt to work out the public transport, this the start of our 5-hour bus trip to the mountains. The small village, which was supposed to be a small town with lots of shops, which would sell gas... which there wasn’t (problem number 1). Then problem number 2 arrived, getting a taxi to the start... many numbers there where, none that worked. Eventually after talking to many locals, we found a taxi and at our destination, we found a new stove and gas for it.

A short walk took us away from “civilisation” and a clearing in a forest where we all collapsed and decided to stay for the night.

The next day was an early start and a late finish with much snow and cloud to slow us all down. The many rivers on the way gave Josh his quote of the week “I’ve got wet feet!”. Once again, the end of the day came when we found a piece of flat ground with a stream next to it.

Cowbells woke us up the next morning. Our destination, Refuge Pinet, the direction we started walking in... Downhill but not the right downhill. This slight detour was good in one way, we missed to horrible decent that we should have come down which could have lead to us being very wet. But bad as the day was going to be long anyway, so a slight change of plan when on top of Port de Artigis looking over at the next valley which we would need to go up which was very steep, lead us to staying in a unmanned refuge in the valley we were already in.

 

The next morning after a much nicer nights sleep than the previous nights, we made our way down the valley and up the next never-ending valley to Refuge Pinet. Where we stayed the next night and had what seemed to be the best meal ever!

Sunday, Summit day. A day of Josh saying, “It’s just round this corner/over this ridge” and each time being wrong. The decent down and back in to Spain was long and over yet another snow slope unfortunately the most unstable of the week from the amount of people in front of us. During this decent we met one of the few people of the trip that actually spoke English, turns out that he was a Spanish bloke who for some ridiculous reason decided that moving to North Wales would be a good idea. We passed each other several times eventually meeting up again at the end of our very long day at the Refuge Vallferrera, where we would stay the night because once again, we couldn’t be bothered to move any more, and he told us that he was keeping going to where we would be finishing the next day!!

Monday morning we overslept, after saying that we would be going at 8 am and then waking up then. Having had a very slow morning, we made our way to Areu. Where once again we came across the problem of taxis being non-existent again, after Josh spending ages on the phone trying to get a taxi, when one magically appeared in front of us.

Out of 4 stoves carried with us only 1 which we had gas for.