Day 5 – La Rioja to Pamplona
Everywhere we had driven to date (I had driven since I seemed to be the designated driver) had been along the highway, with the aim of getting from point A to B to C as quickly as possible. Today’s highlight was going to be a walk through a national park and we were going to take the backroads to get there.
Yesterday, Yoni had been busy controlling world seaweed supply chains whilst Garry and I were off sipping (gulping?) Rioja wine, so he was determined to make up for it today en-route. Garry and I didn’t object and Mark had his computer to delve into. So not long after we left Santo Domingo, we saw a winery with a very funky, multicolored building. This looked interesting, we thought. The very spacious carpark was occupied by 3 buses and a few random cars. This looks less interesting, we thought. Turns out that this is a really famous winery, not because of the wine, which was excellent, but because the funky building was designed by Frank Gehry. That’s all well and good, but tours of the winery with explanations from the winemaker weren’t for three and a half vagrant tourists, but busloads of Spaniards or assorted Europeans. So we had to make do with sitting at the bar and tasting some very nice wine. Could be worse, I guess, but the winery grounds and the hotel really did look impressive. Oh well.
We didn’t need to travel too far from the funky hotel and winery to get to our next stop. Laguardia is mentioned in many guides as one of the ten most beautiful villages in Spain. And rightfully so. It was very much the sum of the parts: cobble stoned streets, perfectly preserved walls of the old town, amazing views of the plains below and cliffs in the distance. This was far above the quaint that we had been seeing in most of the other villages (not that quaint was bad). And to nobody’s surprise, the bars had amazing pintxos and local vermut, which was fast becoming our drink of choice. After doing Laguardia, we eventually decided it was time to look for another winery. Can you detect a pattern to this trip?
As I have already stated, we had agreed that today was backroads. But we still needed to navigate to get from A to B, even if we were happy to go via J, K and L. I have always been a believer in old school navigation. A paper map that gives you a perspective of the entire area, instead of peering into a 2X4 tiny screen that is reliant on full batteries, connection to cells and satellites, without getting jammed and having to reset and start all over again. There was much swearing by Yoni the navigator and the backroads seemed to get narrower by the turn-off. More than once we were forced to double back, due to vague instructions from either Siri or Yoni. Next time we’re getting a map. We stopped for five minutes at one winery where they were even less interested in us than the Frank Gehry. They were making much more money from the Segway tours through the vineyards than on us. As we passed a nondescript village, I spotted, without Siri’s help, a sign saying “Bodega co-operativo”. Bodega is one of the few words in Spanish we clearly understood, and co-operativo reminded us of our previous lives as kibbutznikim. (Garry is still living the life in his capitalist socialist paradise). What could go wrong?
And it turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. I can say with certainty that we were the first English speaking tourists ever at this winery, and most probably the only tourists of any type that had visited here. Yoni and Garry went in to see where the tasting room was. Juan, the sole worker who was there at the time, had a look of absolute shock. And I am understating it. We had dropped onto the planet from Mars and had landed here. But he wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip. He indicated that he would be happy to show us around, though how he communicated this I’m not sure, because he spoke less English than our 6 words of Spanish. But good will and a big heart speaks all languages, and he certainly had that by the bucketloads.
So where had we landed? In exactly what the sign said. A winery that is run co-operatively by the vineyards in the area. After harvesting, they all send their grapes here, where the entire wine making process finishes within a year, having spent a few months in stainless steel tanks and then piped straight into plastic bags that fit into cardboard boxes. Cheap plonk. We tasted the 2021 red, straight out of the tank and you know what, it wasn’t bad at all. No D.O.C, no reserve or grand reserve, but decent 8 month aged, alcoholic grape juice. Juan seemed very proud of his plonk and if that’s the way the local grape growers can survive, good on ‘em. I tried to ask if this wine ever sees an oak barrel, and he seemed to communicate that yes, it does see wood, but we couldn’t see any oak barrels anywhere in this giant warehouse. By the time we’d finished our tour, his side-kick, Ernesto, showed up. He was just as thrilled to have guests as Juan. So Juan, Ernesto, Yonaldo, Paolo, Marco and Geraldo stood around, drinking cheap wine in a barn, with no linguistic means of communicating, as if we had been friends for 40 years. We think Ernesto was Juan’s boss, but he wasn’t exactly the brain’s trust of the duo. He tried to give me his phone number so I could send him a selfie I’d taken, but he didn’t know his own phone number. I ended up sending the selfie to an unidentified woman (I guess, given her whattsapp i.d. photo), who must have been quite shocked receiving an unsolicited photo of six degenerates. In any case, Ernesto wouldn’t let us depart without opening up a bottle of their white. He did warn us that it wasn’t as good as the red. And he was right. It was bloody awful. Even he laughed at it when we pantomimed that it wasn’t much good. Eventually we got back into the car, happier with our authentic experience than any fancy winery we may have visited.
A couple of small (medium?) pintxos does not constitute lunch, so we were hoping to find a small bar in a wayside village that would be able to fix us something delicious. We found a nameless village, parked and walked into a bar. There seemed to be a menu, there were other people eating and the bartender was certainly serving the locals, but he simply ignored us. Not a sign of “wait a minute, I’m busy”, nada. We were made of air. So, after standing there like totem poles for 10 minutes, without the bartender looking our way, we simply got back in the car and drove on. Yoni’s Google Maps indicated that there was a hotel, bar and restaurant just past a turnoff down the road. Given that Google Maps had been to this point about as believable as an Israeli used car salesman, we were somewhat skeptical that there was going to be anything along this country tiny road that turned off the small country road. And yet, we were wrong, Google was right. We arrived to a country hotel and bar, full of local people enjoying great hearty local tucker, served by 2 ladies who looked, and related to us, as if they had been waiting for our arrival for four years. This was an unexpected joy, that gives the word “random” new meaning. Our second unforgettable authentic experience for the day.
It was getting on to mid afternoon already and we had a walk ahead of us before arriving to our overnight accommodation in Pamplona. (Another place name that Mark slaughtered). So we hurried as quickly as our inefficient navigating would allow, to Nacadero del Urederra. Over the past 5 days we had done a lot of wonderful walking through a variety of places. But none as magical as this. We started our hike with what seems mandatory in Spain; walking through a quaint village. We crossed into the national park itself, where a thick forest of beech, elm and oak awaited us. I was immediately thrown into nirvana mode. As nirvanic as this was, I couldn’t quite believe that this was really worth getting lost on every backroad west of Madrid. We started walking adjacent to a stream. Very beautiful, but still not justifying the grand loop. And then, a little upstream, we arrived to a pool. Suddenly, we were willing to get lost three time over. It wasn’t just a beautiful pool on a stream. The water was the color of the sky. Light blue, turquoise and opaque. And the pool above that, and the stream and the pools above that, were colored this same magical pale blue. Where were the pixies and fairies hiding? I have walked many streams in many forests, but have never seen water with these shades of blue. Is there a notch above nirvana? Because if there is, it’s here. After a couple of hours, we made our way back to the car and on to beautiful Pamplona.
Yoni has a friend, Miguel, who originates from this area and he insisted that we visit his favorite restaurant, AlHambra, whilst we were in Pamplona. He even rang the owner and determined the menu for us. He also warned us that it was a bit fancy. A bit fancy? Bloody Prince Charles would have found it “a bit fancy”. And yet the service was warm and inviting, not stern and official. I guess it helped that the restaurant owner herself looked after us. It may be true that as a rule we all prefer rubbing shoulders with locals over an octopus pintxos and local wine, but once in a blue moon, it is fun having all the cutlery changed after each of the 8 servings, being forbidden to touch the wine bottle (that’s the sommelier’s job) and being waited on hand and foot. Even the anti-fancy-restaurant wing of our foursome was overawed. It was a meal we continued to rave about until the very end of the trip.