The Slow Traveller: Bilbao to Salamanca

Ed Gillespie – the Slow Traveller – is travelling around the world without flying. GreenTraveller is keeping tabs on Ed’s progress to show how he manages to get from A to B to Z, the green way.
Route 2: Bilbao to Salamanca, Spain…

How Ed travelled:
By train via Miranda de Ebro

The nitty gritty:
Depart Bilbao: 1400hh
Arrive Salamanca: 1933
Train no: 00413
Ticket price 28/16 Euros (‘Tourist’/‘Tourist child’)

See Renfe for further details on times and ticket prices

Ed suggests using this link through to the excellent Die Bahn site for up to date European rail timetable information as well as the invaluable Seat61

What Ed said about this trip:
In Bilbao we felt properly in Spain after the horrors of the ferry. We spotted a full page story in the El Correo newspaper about the crossing, it was clearly a major local event (big news days obviously few and far between in Bilbao!). We munched oranges in the sun on the river bank opposite the wildly glinting curves and coils of the Guggenheim. To paraphrase the advert for a well known chocolate bar the Guggenheim was ‘shiny on the outside, empty on the inside’ (they were in the middle of a major rehang so there wasn’t much to see). We ate tapas of every description; garlicky bocquerones, tortilla, ‘mini-breakfasts’ (a fried quail’s egg, on a slice of mushroom, on a slice of Serrano ham, on a piece of bread…hmmmm), plump gambas on a stick and various fried fish and ‘lingua’ (which we suspect was tongue) all delicious and washed down with our first Cruzcampos and Crianzas of the trip.

Beyond the classic Casco Viejo (Old Town) Bilbao is a handsome if workaday sort of place. We caught the train to Salamanca in the afternoon, which for the first leg of the journey was just a huge engine and only one carriage, giving it a strangely impotent look. The route wound it’s way up the river valley of Bilbao into the mountains, the valley floor a hive of industrial activity; scores of vast great sheds and steel works jammed onto every spare inch of the land adjacent to the river. Then suddenly we were in countryside that resembled the Yorkshire Dales.

The train was extended to a more, ahem, impressive length at Miranda de Ebro where a stag party dressed as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves also boarded having been caught peeing in the planters next to the station. From there the landscape changed again to acres of scrubby evergreen tree plantation around Valladolid, the strange, bushy trees looking like those the Lorax spoke for in Dr Seuss’s classic book. Then we were on the vast Castillian agricultural plains, almost perfectly flat and featureless with the occasional small fortified town breaking the fertile monotony.

As the sun set fiery red on the horizon the topography began to undulate a little into gentle hills once more and we arrived in Salamanca. Typically we had managed to coincide our visit with a major concert, and the first Pension we tried (opposite the station as we’re leaving at 4.50am for Porto on Sunday) assured us that accommodation wise there was the option of her nasty, tiny room at premium rate or nothing! We took our chances and headed into town. Several full Pensions later the youth hostel seemed a good idea. We worked our way through the stunning Plaza Mayor where a huge classical concert was playing and not having a map we asked a group of wizened old dudes the way to ‘Calle Escutto’. One of them then offered to escort us and chatted away constantly in thickly accented and entirely incomprehensible Spanish to us all the way there.

The hostel of course was full, but they put us in a Habitacione just round the corner. We’re the guests of a sweet old lady in her flat, complete with religious weeping Madonna images on the wall and a crazy 70’s light fitting on the ceiling. Why would you want to stay anywhere else?!

Read about Route 1:
Portsmouth to Bilbao

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You can also follow Ed’s trip, step by step, on his blog lowcarbontravel.com. You can see Ed’s route highlighted on a Google Map of the trip maps.google.com