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Clare
Clare

Day 2: Bayonne

Our plan for today was a day trip to the town of Bayonne, which is situated around 100 miles to the south of Bordeaux, in the Basque region of France. I'd booked our train tickets in advance, so we had a specific regional train which we needed to catch this morning at 10.17. The train station is around a 50-minute walk from where we're staying, so we decided to take a bus. Luckily, there's a bus stop just around the corner which is on the route to the station, so that was pretty easy.

The journey to Bayonne took around 2 hours on the train, so it was after midday by the time we arrived. We'd noticed in the latter part of the journey that the train was getting pretty full of people who seemed to be identically dressed. They were almost exclusively wearing white, but with red neckerchiefs. It was rather strange but I assumed there must be some sort of local sporting event going on in the town today.

When we stepped outside the train station, there were red and white people everywhere!

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We began following the horde towards the centre of town.

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As we did so we noticed that the street signs here were in three languages; French, Basque, and a third language which we think may have been Gascon.

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We soon came to a large bridge across a river. We had to go through a security checkpoint here, with Tim opening his bag to show what was inside. He took the opportunity to ask what was going on today and was told it was the town's festival.

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That didn't make things significantly clearer for us, but whatever was happening seemed to be very popular!

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There were some pretty views as we walked over the bridge, which was taking us across the river Adour.

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The problem we found once we'd crossed the bridge was that we couldn't get much further than this.

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We could see the town centre, which looked really pretty...

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...but to get any closer to it, you needed to have a festival wristband. And we didn't have one of those!

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We tried walking in various directions but eventually had to accept that we were not going to be able to see any of the centre of Bayonne today - or find a restaurant to get any lunch - without wristbands for the festival. Tim queued at a ticket booth to buy some for us, and €30 later we were able to enter Bayonne.

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It was really beautiful along by the river...

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...though really busy here too. And we seemed to be almost the only people in town who hadn't got the memo about the dress code!

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We attempted to avoid the bottlenecks and explore some of the quieter streets of the old town.

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I loved the different colours on these buildings!

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Soon we found Bayonne's cathedral.

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This was a busier part of town so it was hard to get a good view of it.

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The square around it was pretty though...

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...and we managed to disappear off up some quieter side streets again.

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The festival seemed to involve a lot of brass bands. If you ended up on a street where one of those were playing, it was absolute carnage and you couldn't get anywhere! But the streets without bands were pretty peaceful :)

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The festival seemed very well-organised and there were lots of porta-potties throughout the town centre for festival-goers. Because this was France, there were also public urinals all over the place too :o 

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We reached the edge of the old town and what looked like it may have been the remnant of some town walls.

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The buildings here were really beautiful too.

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We were starting to feel hungry, so we needed to head back to a busier part of town.

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As we searched for lunch, we came across this side street decorated with mini Basque flags.

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There seemed to be lots of restaurants along by the river, so we walked back in that direction.

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On the way we encountered one of the marching bands. They seemed to be the only people not wearing red and white!

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It was pretty round here, but really crowded.

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We crossed over the river to the opposite side, which looked like it might be slightly quieter.

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Our luck was in and we managed to find a restaurant on this side with a spare table :)

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Tim bought us some drinks! Mine is an Aperol Spritz :D  Interestingly, all the restaurants and stalls seemed to be serving drinks in these kind of reusable plastic glasses.

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We had a great view of the river while we waited for our food to arrive.

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We shared two pizzas; one was a margherita, while the other was a Basque pizza (it seemed to be pepperoni with strong cheese!).

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After lunch we had another stroll around the town while we waited for our train back to Bordeaux.

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We found ourselves in a fairground area, where there were some pretty terrifying rides!

We enjoyed watching other people being brave, but decided to give these a miss and head back to the train station instead :) 

It was a fun day, even if it wasn't quite what we expected when we booked train tickets to Bayonne :D 




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