Day 0. Pamplona – Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

Well, the time has come. My heart soul and I decided to spend another week of the Camino de Santiago. However this time, starting from the beginning of the French Way, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France.

We took the train from Barcelona to Pamplona on Friday evening and arrived at about 10pm at the hostel Albergue Plaza Catedral. I will not add many details about this part of trip because nothing much happened. Nice place overall but, geez! Those beds would really need some WD-40 lubricant. All beds! Other than that, the eating area is kind of small for the amount of people that are checked in and could use it.

Anyway, let’s go to today’s trip. Since it’s still considered “winter” by someone here, there is no direct bus from Pamplona to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (this year the bus service starts in March 25), so we had to take one bus from Pamplona to San Sebastián (1h 15min trip); from there another bus to Bayonne, France (1h 30min aprox) and from there a train to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (1h).

The thing is, we got off the first bus one stop earlier by mistake and had to take a local bus to get to our next destination. This local bus had 50+ stops and took 1h+ to reach our needed destination. obviously we missed the train 🙂 and the next one was 4 hours later 😅 so we had the take away lunch besides sitting on some stairs besides the river with some nice views. We then did some walking around the city and had an incredibly good vegan ice cream from an Italian ice cream shop.

At 7:20pm we arrived to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. We went to the pilgrims office to get the pilgrim passport and then to the hostel – Gite Bidean. A very-very cozy place with amazing people, Joe and Pascal. In this specific location, there is no kitchen for everyone’s use, but they can prepare something on request. Since we’re vegans, we had an instant onion soup with some boiled lentils from the supermarket. Afterwards we have a somewhat long but very pleasant discussion with the Pascal, the owner. I enjoyed the conversation a lot and it reminded me about our previous trip when we also encountered very nice owners in almost every hostel.

It was a long day due the bus issue but it was a nice day spent together. Can’t wait to start the journey tomorrow! We’ll not do the “Napoleon” route because it is closed due to bad weather, so I hope the “backup” route will be nice as well even though it has lots of asphalt roads.

Featured image by Jon Tyson (@jontyson) on https://unsplash.com/

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One response to “Day 0. Pamplona – Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port”

  1. […] day of the walk. As mentioned in the previous post, today was about the “backup” route, or winter route. Veeeerryyy boring, long distances on […]