Europe @ 2.4 km/h (42 page)

1301-1310 km

The train to Biarritz never gets there. At Bayonne, 10 km short of the seaside resort, the conductor tells everyone to disembark. A general hubbub ensues, and a ramp appears from nowhere to carry me down to the platform. What’s gone wrong? Nothing to worry about, says the conductor. The stationmaster at Biarritz ends his shift at 6 pm and, since our train would have pulled in at ten past, no one would have been there to wave the red flag, so we’re alighting here and every Biarritz passenger will arrive in a taxi, free of charge.

I see on a magazine billboard that Monaco’s Prince Albert II will wed next year and wonder if anyone else has recognised the mathematical sequence that will create. His mother, Grace, weds Rainier in 1956; she dies tragically 26 years later; her son weds his sweetheart 26 years later …

From the lookout on the well-named Rue Perspective the Atlantic is one colossal force of Nature in the raw. At this southern extremity of France the Côte des Basques is craggy and colourful, Biarritz architecture
simpatico
. You can actually see where it breaks away at a right angle — where France ends and the Basque Country, formally in Spain, begins.

For half a century Biarritz has attracted surfers from all over the world. Down by Miramar Beach, on the coastguard information board, someone has chalked up next to Observations, ‘
Bonne
journée
.’ (‘Good day.’) Somehow I don’t see the half dozen surfers I saw enter the water ten minutes ago, now reduced to two hardy souls, agreeing.

Wheeling along Prince of Wales Boulevard, I stop for a chat — the sort of thing that happens easily enough away from big cities — with Ida, 78, who is dressed in a tweed outfit of smart cut. A lifelong resident of Biarritz, Ida — whose childhood memories include life with a family of White Russians her mother took in after the Bolshevik Revolution — says she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. At the thought of those vanished days, she casts a look of keen regret. ‘The beautiful people have gone.’

Not while she is still here, I think, but try to redirect her thoughts from past to future — my immediate future. What does she think of Spain and the Spaniards? Ida gives the topic serious consideration before issuing her
pronunciamento
, ‘The Spanish have a love of life. You will find they dance, sing and play music at the drop of a hat.’

I receive a fantastic farewell from France, a country not always easy to comprehend, even if French is what I have in mind when I tell people I speak one-and-a-half languages. The whole Biarritz
auberge
team take me to the railway station and see me off to Hendaye, on the Spanish border. I take it that by turning out
en
masse
they are not saying a final goodbye, merely
au revoir
, but that may just be my parting impression.

ANDORRA

Time spent: 3 days

Distance covered: (to, from and in country): 407 km

Distance pushed: 15.8 km

Average speed: 2.679 km/h

Journey distance to date: 20,329 km

1263-1265 km

The minibus to Andorra leaves at nine in the morning: three days later the return journey commences at 5.30 am. Only a stroke of luck decrees that in both directions the bus departs close to where I dwell.

This speck on the Continent lies almost 200 km by road from Toulouse, southward and upward into the Pyrenees. As woodland replaces pastures half an hour or so before we reach the border post, we pass through the hamlet of Foix. Traditionally the Count of Foix was Andorra’s joint head of state, along with the Bishop of the See of Urgell which includes territory on the southern, or Spanish, side of the border.

Since 1993, Andorra — occupying just 464 sq. km, not much more than 20 km by 20 km, making it Europe’s fifth smallest country — has been a ‘parliamentary co-princedom’, a gesture to the democratic age that hasn’t pleased all Andorrans, as we shall see. Now the co-princes are the bishop and the French head of State, at the time of writing Joan Enric Vives Sicilia and President Nicolas Sarkozy.

An official map of Andorra makes a droll error in stating, ‘The country extends over an area of 464 square metres’. It’s not quite
that
small. But being located between Spain and France has served it well. A co-principality since the 13th century, Andorra is the only country in the world with Catalan as its official language. I am surprised to learn that only 40 per cent of Andorran residents are ethnically Andorran.

There are two post offices in the capital, Andorra la Vella, which lies two-thirds of the way across the country from where we will enter — a whole 37 km from the border, or less far than from the centre of Melbourne or Sydney to the
nearest
outer suburb. At one the staff are Spanish-speaking; at the other, French-speaking. Inexplicably, it’s €11 cheaper to post a Christmas present to Australia from the ‘Spanish post office’. Not for the first, or the last, time I find myself asking, Where but Andorra would this happen?

And where but Andorra would the owner of a
pensión
— after assuring me over the phone that the price for a single room was €31 a night — move me on arrival to a double room because it would be more comfortable, and then ask, ‘How much do you want to pay?’ Flustered by this rarely conferred power, I stammer, ‘Twenty-six euro a night?’ to which she counters, ‘We’ll make it twenty-five.’ Done deal.

My first impression as I push through this capital of 20,000 residents is of a clean modern town so small it makes Monte Carlo look sprawling. Andorra boasts 2000 shops that, according to the city map, ‘have very long opening hours and are not closed at the weekends’. Indeed one suspects that the tills in Shopper’s Paradise would never stop ringing if the Government had not legislated ‘dates of compulsory closure’.

At times you get the impression that Andorra is one gigantic (well, not
exactly
gigantic) duty-free shop masquerading as a nation. Yet a senior Andorran official protests that this country is ‘an independent nation, not just a department store’. Only upon leaving do I learn that in a corner of the department store (or independent nation, if you must) a bomb is ticking.

1266-1272 km

You know a place is not really jumping when the main news in the national paper is a 25-year-old story.
Bon Dia
‘leads’ today with heavy unseasonable rains turning the streets of the capital into an all-engulfing torrent of water — on 7 November 1982.

I turn to the sports pages. Andorran culture is predominantly Spanish, with the odd nod north. For example, Andorra has its own rugby XV. That they’re not very good hardly dents people’s pride in being part of the competition (in south-west France). Nor are its soccer team world-beaters. But who could expect them to be, given that the nation’s population of 82,000 would fall well short of a capacity crowd at any of Australia’s biggest stadiums?

In Catalan ‘fire brigade’ is ‘bombers’. To see a red van with flashing blue lights and BOMBERS painted in large capitals on its side can be disturbing.

Casa de la Vall (Valley House) must be the most relaxed, as well as the smallest, of the world’s parliaments. (The debating chamber would measure no more 10 metres by 3.) The Conseil-Général has been in existence since 1519, meeting in private homes and churches until it moved to the Casa de la Vall in 1702. Of course this was not a full-blown democracy — neither bishop nor count would permit that. But it was, and remains, closer to the people than many a foreign assembly.

At the adjacent secretariat, Caroline makes an appointment for three o’clock this afternoon, noting it in her personal diary. Where else but Andorra could you approach the parliament with so little protocol? Just as I’m heading down the stone path, up comes a serious woman of 60 or so, her hair in a bun, feet clad in sensible shoes, leading a two-person TV crew from Lithuania: a pert presenter and her shaggy-maned cameraman.

Roser Jordana — the country’s director of tourism, it emerges — lets me tag along. She is brisk and businesslike; you can tell she has done this shtick so many times that her mind may be clicking over to her next meeting even as she chaperones us through the old stone building.

‘Animals were stabled in the foyer in the old days,’ she announces and, if the Lithuanians are impressed by this fact, they don’t show it. We enter the chamber of the legislature’s president, or
syndic
, adorned with frescoes donated by chapels throughout the land. ‘The session starts with the ringing of a bell, which ushers in the Mass,’ she says, indicating an altar at one end of the debating chamber. ‘We are a Catholic country. They [the politicians] are supposed to pray to the Holy Spirit to give them clear thinking.’