As mentioned, provisions were generally scarce, maybe we were too late in the season or someting, I don't know. Anyway French towns and villages always have a boulangerie open in the mornings, so on the way out of St-Étienne-de-Baïgorry we found one, and feeling hungry we decided on four pain chocolat each. The exchange went something like this:
'Bon matin madame."
'Bon matin monsieur."
'Je voudrais huit pain chocolat, s'il vous plait.'
'Deux?', looking at the two of us.
'Non, huit!', said I.
'Deux?', again, persuasively.
'Non, huit. Er...', and then it hit me - as a Briton abroad, even if I didn't talk LOUD AND SLOW, I should at least gesticulate wildly and the magical 8 finger gesture was enough to reassure her we meant buisness. 8 pain chocolat were duly handed-over and we walked triumphantly out of town stuffing our faces.
There followed an overcast day of wandering around in the mist, being scared that the large group of men with shotguns we met were Basque separatists and eventually descent into St-Jean-Pied-de-Port. St-Jean-Pied-de-Port is a beautiful walled town, on the pilgrim route to the Santiago de Compostela in Spain. We bumped into Neil and Tita again, near their campsite and having seen posters advertising it, we all went to some demonstration Pelota matches in the evening. Just outside of town is a HUGE new pelota stadium, where we saw the reigning World and Olympic Champions (was a demonstration sport in Barcelona) play.
Before that, however, we wanted some more Camping Gaz. Curiously I had the new style cartridges which, for a French product were all but impossible to obtain in France. We tried a couple of shops, until one assistant was determined to help us. Our French, woefully inadequate for explaining the complexities of the new fangled valve system did not allow us to give the reasoning why their products were unsuitable. As a last resort, seeing we weren't getting anywhere, I suggested (in French) that they were unsuitable because they were yellow and we left it at that. The confidence resulting from the morning's exchange robbed by Camping Gaz's distribution system.