Day No. 9: Garlic, Surfing and Tapas

I presume Pamplona is not a very young city because when I arrived there was no one to be seen and it seemed almost deserted. I had missed the running of the bulls by two weeks, so the city was probably just relaxing from the thousands of tourists that must have flooded the place during the San Fermín festival!

Nevertheless, I spent two nights in Pamplona, as I’d met some nice people with whom I ended up exploring the city. It was a typical Spanish town full of churches and interesting architecture, but I was a little worried that they might have a vampire problem – they sold tons of garlic everywhere in the city!

They must have a serious Vampire problems…

I spent the next day riding through the Spanish countryside on great roads and with amazing weather following me all day. Arriving on the wrong side of Somo I ended up in Santander, so I had to drive all the way round and ended up having to stay at the only hostel I could find which turned out to be a surf hostel. This came as no surprise the next morning, given that Somo was a small town pretty much comprised of Italian surfers, so I figured it would be a great time to go surfing for the first time.

I spent an awesome day learning to surf and rode maybe 5 pretty big waves for about 50 metres. I have to say, I have crap balancing skills and I wasn’t the best and I don’t even think the instructor saw that I had ridden those waves, so he presumed I was hopeless and didn’t catch a single wave. Pretty disappointing, but at least I had fun and was starting to catch a great tan.

The next destination was Salamanca, a beautiful historic town that was centered around the university (with a frog as their mascot!). I ended up meeting some great people and went for some tasty tapas with them. Thankfully they both spoke Spanish, so we got to try some good food and met up with some more people that the guy had met the previous day. What can I say, Salamanca was definitely the place for lots of cheap drinks and awesome food, meaning that we ended the night in the early hours, Spanish style!

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