Day 3: Lessons in Geology

I woke up this morning and fitted a plastic cover over my backpack because rain was predicted all day until late afternoon. I stepped out of the hotel and a vicious wind ripped my plastic cover off. I went back inside to do some more engineering, then went over to Peter’s hotel. My cover survived. We had breakfast and then ventured outside. The skies were grey and the wind was ripping.

We managed to avoid rain all day, but once we passed the seaport down of Getaria, the going got very rough. There were steep slopes rising and falling off again. The earth was oozing water and the trail was muddy and slippery-worse than yesterday. But the ocean crashing against the earth made it all worthwhile. We hiked along several miles of the Basque Coast Geopark. The flysch cliffs arranged along the coast record 60 million years of unbroken deposition of marine sediments from the Cretaceous period through into the Pleistocene and Eocene stages of the succeeding Palaeogene period. (Okay, I confess I copied that least sentence from Wikipedia).

After slipping a sliding for 7 hours, we reached Deba. We had not gone as far as the day before but the steep ascents and descents on the wet clay paths made the going very slow. After a meal of pintxos in Deba, we decided to give our legs a break and take a taxi to our Casa Rural, the Pikua Landetxia and rest up for tomorrow’s journey inland to Marquina.