you’ve accepted that ‘x’ is a bit like ‘ch’ in cheese.
What you will struggle with and one of the reasons the Basques have often been dismissed as unintelligible, is that the language is agglutinating, which really is as bad as it sounds. A noun has suffix after suffix attached, extending the word to an excrutiating length, but it is this language that really differentiates the Basque from both French and Spanish neighbours and the language that defines much of how this ancient culture maintains its distinct sense of belonging.
Family and community is everything; all the houses have names and Basque families identify themselves by that sense of place. I wonder, as I ride between these incredibly neat farmsteads and villages, whether my Bandit shouldn’t have a name to give it more
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purpose or to help me bond. I reckon a bike with a personality handles better, so even though the mountains in the area are less dramatic than the central Pyrenees and therefore the vertiginous drops less severe, I’d hate to screw up a corner and barrel over the edge. Yes, maybe I’m mad. The local Basque architecture sits very
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32 The ROAD
differently in a landscape that, certainly on the French side of the region, looks a lot like mid Wales. The buildings ooze a pride in their appearance that any visitor to most of France or Spain will know, isn’t really embraced elsewhere. Red roofed, whitewashed and edged in stone the colour of the window shutters and known as Basque rouge, their appearance is strangely Germanic and almost alien at first, but the pride emanating from the communities is unmistakable. The red colour is apparently that which closest matches the cattle blood that used to be painted on the buildings and which I’m sure smelt delightful.
Balconies explode with colourful arrays of flowers and every settlement sports a wall that looks like the remainder of a long demolished building, but is in fact a pelote court, for a game rather like squash but without the racquet. The distinctive red, green and white of the Ikurrina, or flag of the semi- autonomous Basque region, is everywhere too.
Autonomy was granted in 1979 but the infamous campaign of violence by ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna), which began in 1961 for absolute self-determination, continued regardless. An absolute cessation of violence was announced this October, as the cultural Basque expansion seems to have overtaken the call for political nationalism, so
go get on your bike and see the place and don’t worry about the bombings anymore! The Route du Cols could be loosely described as the course of the D918 starting near Biarritz, keeping to the French side of the Pyrenees all the way to the Mediterranean, though it darts off the beaten track on occasion and gratefully so, as the region never fails to surprise.
I chose to cut across to meet the Route at ‘St Jean Pied de Port’ and even heading toward St Jean via Leitza and Elizondo, provides any rider with one of those jewels of a road that is a constant serpentine, neither climbing nor falling dramatically, but always changing, always rewarding and always challenging, in the heart of a region that is like no other and where you can almost guarantee that stopping for sustenance will delight the palate as Basque food is globally acclaimed. Crossing the official State border into France via the Col d’ Ispeguy, (or Izpegiko Lepoa) at only 672m, the difference is dramatic. You are still in Basqueland, but the broken, degraded, very poorly maintained French side of the pass is certainly entertaining to ride, after the beautiful tarmac and strangely denuded agricultural hillsides of the Spanish territory. There aren’t that many north-south crossings of the Pyrenees and the Route du Cols, some may say, really only skirts the northern edge of the Range as it runs west- east, but any negativity expressed about its credibility as a mountain route, really misses the point. Yes, it isn’t a succession of Stelvio- style passes, but it is hour after hour of incredibly involved riding. Even on the flat, high, valley floors which manage to sustain excellent corn crops between rocky
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