World Andorra Andorra la Vella

Brendan's Tour of Europe

Andorra la Vella, Andorra Apr 29, 2006

As we headed into Europes second smallest country (or principality to be exact) we weren't sure what to expect, lots of shopping and lots of mountains and not much else was what we had read... and the books didn't lie.

This tiny little place has no sales taxes so it is a mecca for true duty free shopping, electronics and perfume like you would see in any duty free store but especially cigarettes and alcohol which are usually not truly duty free. I saw two cartons of cigarettes for €10 on the first day and bottles of whiskey for €5, it is little wonder this place attracts 11 million vistors a year. Breaking that down its an average of 30 000 per day, compared to a population of just over 80 000.

Our first night consisted of finding a hotel, we had tried to book one in Barcelona but the two places Kylie spoke to didn't speak English and when we tried in Spanish we couldn't understand what they said back to us. I tried the last one in the book and she spoke a little English, with her English and my Spanish I think we got across OK but she could have well being saying 'not Saturday' as 'Saturday is fine'. We got to the hotel where we thought we might have a booking and after climbing up 3 flights of stairs we realised... we did have a booking (big sigh of relief). The rest of the night we found a decent place for dinner and jumped on the internet to try and work out where to stay in France.

The next day was our nature day so we took a bus to the nearby village of Ordina to climb some mountains. There were two trails, one of which was covered in two metres of snow and the other one we couldn't find, so I ended up dragging Kylie stright up the nearest hill I could find with an eye on getting to the snow covered tops of the mountains behind.

After scaling one Mt Beerwah sized mountain I asked Kylie how ken she was to reach the snow, the answer not very. So I left her to have some lunch and I decided to tackle it on my own, I told her to give me an hour and a half before she left in disgust. I started running up the mountain but as soon as I was out of sight I slowed to a crawl, this was going to be harder than I thought.

The path I was following suddenly became 'Privado Propert' so I decided to head straight up the valley the logic being the shortest distance between two points is in a straight line. It was pretty tough going so I started pacing myself with 1:30m bursts of speed followed by 30s of rest, this was soon reduced to 1m of steady going with 30s of rest and soon it became "I'll make it to the next log then I'll stop for 30 seconds".

After an hour had passed I had made it quite a distance but the peaks were still a ways off and I was running out of breath, water, time and memory in my camera so I finished the memory card and headed back down. What had taken me an hour to do uphill took me all of 15 minutes to finish down hill and I was soon eating my lunch too.

Having decided that our mountain efforts deserved a treat tonight we are off to the largest spa complex in Europe, which is fed entriely by thermal springs (apparently you can go for a week without showering after a dip in their pools so I might have to test that theory).

Well we didn't get to test the spa theory as the fine print says you need to book ahead 2 weeks in advance. Instead we got an early night as we had to get up at 4:45 to catch an early morning bus into France.