Šīs dienas statistika:
Iztērēti 4€ par piecām siera bulciņām
Ar 1 auto mēroti 2km
Ar 5 vilcieniem mēroti 670km
Stopēšanas kausa izcīņa:
Arvils 11+1:8+1 Elvijs.
No one wakes us up on the train, so we reach the terminal station, which is three stops away from the one we needed. We return back shortly. And miss our stop again as we fall asleep.
Okay - Cannes will be suitable as well, so we'll step off there. AND AGAIN! Okay, we have to stop at Nice, otherwise we'll be back at Monaco.
But the Nice station doesn't suit us. We have to get to Cannes if we want to move towards Marseilles.
We spend an hour and a half in Cannes. Afterwards we'll get to Avignon, from which we'll go to Portbou, the closest city in Spain. In Avignon, a ticket seller directs us to the second station.
When we're there, we go to the ticket office and ask how to get to Spain. A woman says that we can go right towards Barcelona but we have to go back to the previous station.
After an hour we're on the train. We'll have to go for a long time as there are a few hundred kilometers to Spain. After a while a woman wakes us up asking to move our bags as the train is full. Only two people were on the train when we embarked.
The next time I wake up is when the ticket inspector wakes me, saying that the train won't go to Portbou. He asks us for our ticket and says that we can get a free bus or taxi to the city, but doesn't say anything upon discovering we don't have any. We'll have to cross the border on foot.
When we step off it's 9.30 p.m. and it's completely dark outside. As we step off the train, we're addressed by three travelers that also got here without a ticket. All of them are Australian but live in Berlin, which is where they started their trip. I come up with a term of how to call them - "Metal bums" - they're wearing leather jackets, have disheveled hair, sandals, dirty hands, faces and bags.
They also give off a pungent odor. They have a dog with them, whose name is Viggi. As I have offline maps, they ask if they can come with us so that they don't get lost. We continue going, six in all, and as we go into the tunnel there's no GPS and there's nothing to warn us that we've been going in the wrong direction for some time already.
We go through narrow streets, pass abandoned houses and long-disused footpaths. I realize finally that we have to go back and we go to the start of the tunnel. One of the Australians is lagging behind all the time as he's spraying "No Borders" on the walls of the tunnel.
We don't understand where are we. The navigation says we have to go straight ahead but there's no way we can do that. However there is a path which we decide to walk after some deliberation. The feeling is like in the movies when someone from Mexico is trying to illegally enter the United States.
After a two-minute walk we cross the border between France and Spain. At the foot of the mountain we see our hoped destination for today - the Portbou town. We have to go out of our way to get to a gas station, which we hope to be our savior.
However it's closed. At that same moment we see two cars crossing the border. We try hitchhiking. The first car passes by but the secodn one stops.
We squeeze ourselves into the car that has three French people who try understanding where we're from - they seem to be clueless even after we tell them "Latvija, Latvia, Lettonie, Lettland".
We're at the train station the bar, which is open but has closed the register so can't sell us water. It's just 11 p.m. but everything is so silent here it seems like late night.
At the station we meet an Italian guy who says he's coming from Barcelona. Like us, they have to wait the whole night for the next train. After a little while his girlfriend arrives and they produce cakes that they offer us. We accept as we haven't eaten anything like that for a long while. After some eating and chatting we go to sleep, but the hard bench only holds a promise for a painful night.
