Dali and the Pyrenees

I finished my Pyrenean Odyssy at a place called Banyuls-sur-Mer on the Mediteranean Coast. I wandered onto the beach front with its smattering of bars and took off the red rucksac for the last time. I ordered a beer. I wondered how I felt after the 800km of walking over the central spine of the Pyrenees from the Atlantic coast.

I realised that I didn't feel anything in particular. Or, perhaps more precisely, I felt that I'd done something slightly too hard for me, but that that something had been akin to knocking my head against a wall.

Anyone with the right amount of determination could have done it.

I ordered another beer. I'm to meet my friends Rob and Barbara here. We plan to spend the night, and then to motor back to their house in Rasquera, Tarragona, stopping, en route, at Salvador Dali's house in Port Llligat, Cadaques.

For a hit of Surrealism. 

Surrealism, with it's neatly unrelated combinations of images and events appeals to me after the seemingly relentless predictability of these monster mountains, with nothing but the expected as you pass from one high col to another.

I realise how I'd longed for the unexpected as I'd ached and inched up one improbable pass after another, to be confronted only with more rocks, or sun, or sky.

I remember walking up to one high col with an erstwhile companion, Nick, a serial long distance trekker from California. He was ahead of me, and as he reached the top I shouted up to him, asking him what he could see.

Rock, snow, clouds', he replies, 'what were you expecting, Las Vegas?'

And I realised then that I was expecting something else from this walk in the hills. Something undefinable, something that I didn't know that I wanted.

Later I was to realise that I had had just this, but it took me a while to work through what it was.

Here's some images from the house that Salvador and Gala Dali built in the fishing village of Port Lligat, down the road from Cadaques.

Andre Breton laid down the law about surrealism in the early 1920's, explaining it neatly as the pictorial or other expression of the real workings of the mind. Others have explained it, perhaps more succinctly, as an attempt to portray irrational thought.

The pictures here show Dali's expressiveness at work at his home. There's a gentleness about his take here, a softness that allows irrational thought a place amidst domesticity.

Once you're past the taxidermy in the hall a lot of the space seems, well, homely. The bathroom's a sedate tiled affair and there's one room dedicated to photographs of Dali himself with assorted glitterati. The effect of all this is to make you feel quite at ease, almost at home. We all like tiles in the bathroom and photos of ourselves with other people.

The house is, in fact, a neat compliment and contrast to the Dali museum at Figueres, with its inside out Chevrolet that rains on the occupants (on the insertion of a couple of Euros),

and its outsize eggs and loaves as battlements.

The totality of my Dali experience, post Pyrenees, kept me thinking about my wanting the unexpected, or my wanting the real workings of the mind explained, via my experience in the Pyrenees.


After a while, safely back in the UK, and able to process the experience, I realised what I had gained amidst the predictable snow, rock and sky.

On the High Route in the Pyrenees I would wake up with a clear sense of purpose.

To get to the next stage on the trail. 

This would be an understandable challenge, possibly navigationally demanding and would maybe also include a frisson of physical danger. 

And there'd be a reward too, in the shape of a safe pitch for the tent or a mountain refuge for the night. There were two sorts of refuges in the Pyrenees, staffed and unstaffed. The staffed variety provides food, wine and blankets, and the unstaffed; simple shelter from the storm.

It's hard to make it out here but if you look closely you can make out the shadow of the Refuge de Baborte, an unstaffed refuge on the so-called wilderness section of the trail.

The reward of shelter after the physicality of the day, and the knowledge that some Easterly progress had been made toward the Mediterranean begins to form a pattern in the mind. Nomad like, my life had made a different and straightforward sort of sense.

Long distance trekking is a very accessible package, far removed from the complex and sometimes labyrinthine challenges that we face in our workaday lives. It's one that, at least with hindsight, I value highly, and although the Pyrenees didn't offer me anything at the time that surprised me or offered to explain irrational thought, looking back, there were a couple of hints or nods to the proximity of Dali and the unexpected amidst the snow, rock and sky.

I discovered these upscale loaves, rock hard, almost fossilised in a sack in a refuge in Andorra, and earlier these wild strawberries looked very dreamy if a little bit lost on the Aneto-Posets map.

The loveliest irrational image I found though, was this: Walled Garden.

I love the way the Firethorn is growing only in the shelter of the rough wall, and stands as a splash of colour in an otherwise monochrome landscape.

The gift though, that I took from the Pyrenees, regarding the real workings of the mind, was the realisation that there are simple ways that you can live life. And even if, for me, it was only for a little while, it was a realisation enough.