| Distance | 19 km |
| Time | 5hrs 45 mins |
| Difficulty | 730m climbing – uphill was OK, downhill was treacherous |
| Good for | Gentle restart to walking; some decent views |
So we’re back again. At least Jason and I are. We weren’t put off by the 4 grey days in the Pyrenees, so we thought we’d knock off 4 more stages. of the GR11. That said, the further along the path travelled, the harder it is to find anywhere to stay, so stage 8 is actually being done twice, once in each direction, just so we can find somewhere to stay. Time will tell whether this is a daft idea or not.
We have been joined by Andreas and Dom for this years walk, replacing Luca and Andrew from last time. Here we are outside the bar and church at the start of the walk in Burguete, mimicking the photo at the end of last years walk.
Burguete has two interesting (to me) facts. Firstly it was where Ernest Hemingway’s characters stayed ahead of their fishing trip to Roncesvalles in the book The Sun Also Rises, a book Jason is keen on. So keen in fact that he has a tattoo of the cover artwork on his other arm to that which has the emblem of Madrid on it.
The second fact is that this is where the GR11 crosses the Camino Frances, the path from St Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in the north east of Spain – the Pilgrims walk. This has meaning to me as a good friend of mine, Nick, has just walked the path unaided and solo, finishing only a few days ago. He has blogged about his walk and other previous walks in his own splendid website http://www.letjog.co.uk.
Here you can see the red and white symbol of the GR11 path on a post to the right of the shell logo of the Camino.
The guidebook says that today’s walk was generally easy until a steep descent at the end, and so it proved. Here are the 3 others in front of a map of the days walk.
Much of the day was in woodland with limited views of the hills. This was a typical shot of most of the morning.
When the woods thinned as we climbed, some decent views of adjacent hills were possible.
The lunch stop showed we were at an intersection of different paths…
Jason and Dom enjoying some ‘bants’…
An interesting feature this year was that the paths regularly had barbed wire fences blocking the way. On closer inspection they were movable but they were not exactly friendly.
We saw absolutely no one else all day. No one. Nearing the end of the day we came to a village called Orbara which somewhat unsurprisingly had no one there. This is the group outside the local pub which was ‘cerrado’.
The intended destination of the day was Hiriberri but as there was no accommodation there we took a right turn and followed the road to Aribe. It’s a typical small village with a church, a bakery, a supermarket and not much else. Tomorrow we’d cadge a lift to the start point in Hiriberri.
Life Two 