Gorbeia, the highest peak in the Basque Country (bus from Bilbao)

There are many ways to get to and go up the beautiful mountain called Gorbeia, which is at the border between the two provinces Bizkaia and Álava. In this post I will briefly describe how to get there from Bilbao by bus without a car.

All important information are put into the map below.

From Abando bus station (Hurtado de Amezaga) you can take the bus A3917 (timetable below) or A3925, but about A3925 and the path from there I have currently no idea. At the very last station of A3917 (Altazusta near Zeanuri) you have to walk a few kilometers along a lake and turn right at then to get to the park entrance. If you are lucky someone will give you a lift, because that part is just on the road.

When the way goes steeply uphill you are in the park and just have to follow the road. At one point the road splits off, but just stay on the main road turning right and finally you will get to a crossroads with a map and a sign saying "Aldamin" pointing to the left. Follow this road, pass by a small parking area and a few houses. When you see a wooden sign saying Gorbeia pointing uphill perpendicular to the road, leave the road and follow the small path as indicated in the map.
There is no need to write more, you will find the way to the peak and up there you will have a great feeling. YOU MADE IT!

Bizkaibus A3917 from Bilbao to Zeanuri/Altzusta:
Mo - Sa from 6:15 AM to 10:15 PM every 60 minutes.
On Sunday from 7:15 AM to 10:15 PM every 60 minutes.

Return bus A3917 from Altzusta/Zeanuri to Bilbao:
Mo - So from 7:45 to 9:45 PM every 60 minutes

So keep in mind that the very last bus leaves at 9:45 PM. Therefore it is a good idea to leave Bilbao the latest at 11:15 AM. In any case ask the bus driver to confirm this time for your day of the trip.

We did this trip in August 2014 and luckily a friendly girl and her father gave us a lift from Altzusta to the park entrance. We reached the peak at about 5 PM and at 4:30 PM nebula started to form. When we started descending the nebula was very dense and the view was limited to about 15 meters. We strictly stayed on the path and found the way to the road without any problems. However, one should take care and maybe stay in contact with others hiking up as everyday there some crazy athlets RUNNING up the mountain in 1 hour 7 days per week!
Later we missed the bus as 8:45 PM and so had a drink in a bar in Zeanuri.
Our trip after all took roughly 9 hours, but you can do it faster as we were with a 9-years old kid that asked for many breaks and motivation. ;)

On the map you will find the most important points for your orientation. The trip is definitely worth it!

Windows 7 & GNU/Linux (Ubuntu 14.04) Dual Boot (hp touchsmart)

I had some difficulties with installing Linux on my HP Touchsmart tm2.
At first I tried to install UEFI for HP laptops, but finally that failed. So I put Ubuntu 14.04 on an USB disk and tried to install, but the partitions were shown completely wrong.
The origin of this is the hard disk format, i.e. that Windows has invented a special format which is not compatible with Linux.
The program "EaseUS Partition" did the job for me within a few seconds and converted the primary partition to a logical volume.

After this conversion the installation of Ubuntu worked without any problems and I was offered several boot options - but Windows 7 did not boot giving me the following error:

0xc000000e [...] winload.exe

This happened because I installed grub into the little 200MB partition which contains the MBR (Master Boot Record). To fix this I created a Windows 7 installation USB drive (WinUSB tool helped me) and booted from that USB drive. I had to start the repair mode three times (including reboot) until the program showed me the Windows 7 partition. Then I chose to repair this Windows 7 installation by means of the console and the following commands repaired everything: (take care whether your installation really is on drive C:\)

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force
attrib -h -s C:\boot\BCD
del C:\boot\BCD
bootrec.exe /rebuildbcd
bootrec.exe /fixboot

Actually I don't understand a lot about these commands. One tutorial did not show me the bootrec.exe /fixboot command, so I don't know whether it is important to execute it after /fixmbr. Maybe /fixmbr and /fixboot is sufficient.

Well, after that I booted from the Ubuntu live CD (from a USB disk) and from the terminal I executed the following commands to repair and reinstall grub:

sudo mount /dev/sda4
sudo grub-install /dev/sda -root -directory=/mnt
update grub

Since then everything worked fine.


I want to rewrite this article with the following structure:
1. Problems that occured
2. Mistakes I did leading to the problems
3. tools I needed
4. important steps leading to the solution
5. smile
x. add links and images