A brand new country! Sort of. Andorra not actually being a country, but a co-principality. The official language is Catalan, but French, Spanish and, to a lesser extent, English are also spoken. Not quite sure what to use for 'hello', 'goodbye', 'please' and 'thankyou'. Mumbling something under your breath seems to work as well as anything.
Andorra is right up into the Pyrenees, so we were a bit concerned about how Skippy would handle the climb. Or if he would make it at all. The road up is a series of steep hairpin turns and very few places to pull over. If Skippy decided to chuck another spark plug while halfway up a mountain...
Anyway, he did fine. Just very slowly. Thankfully for other drivers, there were passing lanes every so often so the bank of traffic behind us never became too long. However, constant revving of the engine in second gear for 30 or more kms was causing an interesting hot oil smell so we had a bit of break at Pas de la Casa. Also, I needed a bit of rest after wrestling Skippy around all those hairpins. No power steering.
Pas de la Casa, like most of Andorra, is set up for two things: skiing and shopping. The ski season was over (although we were still above the current snow line, and big piles of shovelled snow was still just lying about the streets) but shopping seemed to be in full swing. Andorra has very low (or no?) sales duties so is a popular place to buy booze, cigarettes and electronic equipment. One reasonabley sized store that we passed stocked, as far as I could tell, nothing but cartons of cigarettes, stacked from floor to ceiling.
Canillo is a much lower altitude than Pas de la Casa. Cue several kilometres of hairpins downhill on a 9% gradient, mostly in second or third gear, trying not to burn out the breaks. Cue also more traffic banked up behind us.
We are staying a Camping PLA which is a bit rundown, but pretty cheap and has free wi-fi. In the (unisex) bathrooms there is constantly playing one of Andorra's two radio stations (I don't know which) whose playlist consists of American pop in about equal proportion to Catalan pop. If no-one has yet every coined the phrase, 'that crazy Catalan pop music' then I would like to do so now. It's crying out for that description.
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