Leaving Paris for Algeciras

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Our Eurolines bus took us halfway across Europe from the Paris suburbs to the Spanish port of Algeciras, beside Gibralter on the Southern tip of Spain. We passed through endless French countryside in the evening, stopping in a peaceful lay-by in the shade of some windmills where plums were ripe on the trees beside the road. As night closed in, we crossed the Pyrenees to San Sebastian, where the old man sitting beside me departed, on his way to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls. He had travelled all the way from Germany by bus to do so.

By morning we are near Vitoria, and change buses in an annonymous bus depot in the middle of the countryside. By midday we pass through Madrid, and it becomes oppresively hot. Lunch is taken in the shade in a lay by. 40 degrees, with a hot breeze. We climb the Sierra Nevada in the evening light, going through Malaga as the heat wanes. Kids on the bus start getting impatient. Some of them have been travelling for 24 hours by this stage. It’s 4am by the time we reach Algeciras, just enough time for an hour’s snooze before catching the ferry to Africa.

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Photos

La Tour Eifel
The night before we left Paris

Our eurolines bus
With me sleeping beside the tyre, somewhere in the South of France

40 degrees plus
Feeling the heat near Madrid, midday