Climbing Holidays in Spanien - Siurana - Lleida - Arboli - Barcelona [English]

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Since I'm back from Spain I try to find the right words for all those fantastic moments and experience I had made the last week, and try to put them into a Blogpost. But I don't know how do describe all the emotions, the lifestyle we experienced and all the awesome people from around the world we met on our trip.
So I decided, I will tell you only some important facts, a little bit background information and show you a whole bunch of pictures.

Sunday 29.04 with an hour delay we started or flight with Lufthansa to Munich (the board computer was broken), we had planed 1h30min to transfer to our connecting flight, but after the delay we were running through the Munich Airport, to catch our plane. We just hoped that our luggage would be as fast as we. We were so relieved after we saw our climbing gear on the baggage carousel. We picked up hour rental car, a very nice and new Volvo Kombi with only 1700km :) Within a 2 hour drive via Tarragona - Reus - Cornudella de Montsant - through Siurana to the campground http://www.campingsiurana.com/. We slept in a cabin (Categorie C) and paid 35€ a day.
Monday 30.04 It rained heavily through the whole night, so our mood was quite depressed, we thought we were running away from Austria and the bad cold weather and now this.
After a quite cheap breakfast, I think I paid 2€ for Espresso+Croissant on the campground Bar/Restaurant, and as a little surprise our table neighbor was Sasha Digiulian the most famous and best female climber in the world (who just redpointed her second 9a Era Bella at Margalef a day ago), we went down to Cornudella de Montsant, to buy some water and plan our day.

We just reached the parking spot, and were very surprised when we heard a car honk. It was our climbing guide, who would show us around for the next 2 days. He is a former Grazer(Styria-Austria) citizen who now lives in Barcelona, and he is also a good friend of one of our female climbing partners. We arranged to meet in the next coffee shop, and suddenly we were 9 people around the table and we had our second breakfast. We were a mixed up group, we spoke Spanish, English, German (and also some dialect from styria and carinthia), it was maybe the most awesome experience I ever had. The bad mood we were in flew away, and we decided to go climbing, or at least try to go climbing because it was still raining a little bit. We went to Siurana, Sector Grau dels Masets (Oest) and tried some easy routes, to get used to the area and the rock.
Afterwards our college showed as another easy Sector at Arboli, I guess we would have never ever found it by our own. We went back to Cornudella de Montsant, into a small restaurant for dinner. The food in Spain is just delicious, and so was the vino tinto (red wine). From this day on we had the best weather, sunny but never to hot for climbing, only at night it still got very cold and we had to switch the radiator on, to full power.
Tuesday 01.05 On the next day we drove over 2 hours to Lleida(I think this is the home area where Chris Sharma lives with his girlfriend Daila Ojeda I just love to be on famous places where the hole climbing world is coming together ^^ ), at the train station we picked up a girl from america, she also joined us that day, so we were 8. In the Streetview picture you can see where we bought our lunch, it seems quite standard around here to get an Bocadillo(Baguette) with ham and cheese, fuet, chorizo or anything else u could imagine, all locals at the crag had one too. On our way home we had dinner there too, the climbing crag is only a few 100 meters along the street.

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Because there was a holiday in Spain, there where a lot of people at the crag. The Spanish families go there with their child's and dogs, it looked like we where on the beach or something similar, everyone was happy and enjoyed a good time. We stayed there the whole day, tried some nice routes, the other group(4 people) went to a crag nearby and they did a multipitch route. In the evening we met again in the restaurant I described above. We were so hungry so we started before the others arrived, that was a really bad idea, our Spanish is quite bad so we decided to eat some pizza, while our colleges ate the most delicious lamb chops and rabbit ragù (very famous and a traditional dish in Spain).
Our climbing colleges had to leave for Barcelona, because the all had to work on Wednesday.

Wednesday 02.05 this time we went to Arboli, here are a few easy routes, and the whole crag is in the shadow until midday. We had the wall for our self's the complete day, after we couldn't manage to get up a crazy 6a we decided to build a Toprope so we could try a wounder full 7a and a very nice 6b. The location was superb and we had an awesome day. At the left Streetview picture you can see the crag, if you turn the camera you can see Siurana and back to Cornudella, at the right picture is our parking spot and on the left side is the way up to the easy sector where we have been, on the right there are some harder climbs.

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Thursday 03.05 Actually we planed an off day, we wanted to go back to Tarragon visit the beach and the town. But because we had driven over 500km the last few days we were very tired but still very motivated. Because of the good weather, we decided to go climbing and visit the sector Siurana Grau dels Masets (Oest) again. We warmed up on some easy routes, but I was looking for a challenge for today. After the last days went very well, and I felt very comfortable toproping 6b, 6c+ and even 7b+, I decided to try a nice line which attracted my attention on Monday. I haven't looked at the Topo, so my mind could stay clear and focused.
It looked like the perfect Route for the last day of climbing. The first move was already very hard, I managed to get the first part of my fingers into a small crack, I was able to get my feet up higher and match the flack with the second hand. But the hold was not very trustworthy, but it was the only way to get up there and I had to but my full bodyweight on to it for reaching the next hold. So I decided to stop my Onsight try, and went from quickdraw to quickdraw. Everything went well, it was totally my style of climbing, but at the fourth qickdraw, there was nothing left no hold no foothold nothing, I tried everything for over 15 minutes I guess, but I couldn't find a solution.
Back at the ground, a nice guy from the Netherlands who just stepped by moments ago said: "Nice 7a, you are trying here". I just thought "WTF" whalt did I get my self into this time, the Route didn't look or feel so hard, my first guess would have been 6b and the movement didn't feel harder at all, but that explained why I couldn't get further.
I was always afraid of hurting myself, by taking a lead fall but in the end I hurt myself because I took a big toprope swing. I had a really hard impact, hurt my ankle badly, and had scars over both legs and one arm. The rest of the day I tried "to lick my wounds", patch up my scares, cool my ankle and pack everything for Barcelona. After 4 days of climbing without a break, we decided to get straight to Barcelona on the next day and enjoy this beautiful city.

Friday 04.05 We started early in the morning and headed back to Barcelona, return the rental car, and search for our hotel. The cultural shock was immense:)

By foot we explored Barcelona, we strolled the length of La Rambla don't mix it up with La Rambla at which one we were still looking this morning. We visited the big market, ate some ice cream and enjoyed life. In the evening we met up again with our climbing partners from Monday and Tuesday, they showed as the typical Spanish night life, it was just amazing.


On Saturday 05.05 we managed to see a part of great culture by Gaudi Casa Milà, Sagrada Família, Casa Batlló. Afterwards the girls went to the beach, we enjoyed one last Spanish meal, and went to the Airport where we all met again for our trip back home.
As easy as it sounds, but now it got adventurous. First the flight from Barcelona to Frankfurt had a delay, so we had to run through the whole Airport again to catch our plane back home. We manged to get on the plane in time, but still the adventure wasn't over.
I don't know what happened but I guess Lufthansa flies only with (broken) "paper Planes", this time the engine from the elevator (aircraft: controls the aircraft's orientation by changing the pitch of the aircraft, and so also the angle of attack of the wing /via http://en.wikipedia.org/) was broken. Because there is a night flying restriction on the Frankfurter Airport, we had to leave the plane and get a hotel room (Lufthansa organized and paid for everything, nice Job, quite good crisis management).
We refused the rebooking for the earliest flight, because they weren't sure if they could manage to organize a bigger plane and we were tired and just wanted to sleep and relax through the next morning. We booked our flight for 12 o'clock, enjoyed a luxury night and an awesome breakfast in the Frankfurter Sheraton Hotel.
On the next day everything went well an we landed safely at 1pm in Graz.

I spent around 500 € over all.