Mototour 2007 - day 7

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MOTOTOUR 2007

Day 7: Day trip: Mundaka to Bilbao and back
Distance: 114 km (of 8,667 km total)

Today we took the bike to Bilbao. Stopping at the next town after Mundaka, Berneo, we found an open café and had brunch: coffee + Basque-style tapas again. Zak who has an eye for these things, suspected the place to be a mafia den, which is totally plausible since the characters inside the café and those standing guard outside could really have been straight out of a godfather movie!

Going to Bilbao, we took the mountain road. The landscape is very Pyrenees-like. Arriving in Bilbao we saw a very industrial city with a highly concentrated population. We found the Gugenheim museum, a futuristic, strangely-shaped building. Checked out exhibition of German painter, Anselm Kieffer: Dark! Very dark! But interesting with the audio guide. There was another exhibition of American sculptor Richard Serra: fantastic work! But the Guggenheim is only worth visiting if you don't have a modern museum at home. Stockholm's Modern Museum is just as fine. One great advantage of the Guggenheim is its size and that of its rooms: they can expose greater pieces of art.

Took the coastline road back to Mundaka. Stopped on a cliff where lots of “Bilbaoans” come after work to hang out. View is like southern Bretagne! Wild and steep! Following the coast, we saw sea-level clouds streaming in from the ocean and slowly covering the coast. When driving down from a peak, we found ourselves in thick fog with almost no visibility. We found our way back. The camping grounds were in the fog as well. Went from a very hot 30-degrees day in Bilbao down to 18 degrees at the camp site. Felt eerie...

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