Andorra! Yes, it’s a country. Just trust me on this. It’s- I just went th- Look, can we argue about this later? I have a blog to write.

Andorra is a little nugget of land way up in the Pyrenees mountains, nestled between France and Spain. It doesn’t have an airport, nor a train station. The only way to get there is to drive, or ride a bus like the one I boogied on down upon from Toulouse in France, which led to a lot of “your bus is too loose” jokes that were hilarious only in my own mind.

Andorra is 181 square miles in size, which makes it kind of big for a microstate. But that only means you don’t have to worry about getting drunk and falling out of the country. It’s the biggest microstate in Europe, though still only about 2/3rds the size of itty Bahrain. And it only has 84,000 people, to Bahrain’s 1.6 million. Why does it exist? Ugh, I was afraid you were going to ask that.

I read up on the history of Andorra to be able to answer this question and my brain exploded about six minutes in, at which point I had to give up and go to the swap meet for a replacement. The folk history is that Charlemaigne named the area after the biblical valley of Endor, where the Ewoks are from. At different times it was ruled by the Visigoths, the Diocese of Urgell (who were constantly taking things over and then adorably saying “Did I do that?”), and then The Kingdom of Toledo, which was, yes, a bunch of guys from Ohio who thought this whole kingdom thing sounded pretty easy to pull off.

Basically to prevent you from getting confused and bored reading about this like I did, the Snapple cap version is that due to intermarriage, the princes in Spain and France were both co-princes of Andorra, so neither of them could really take it over without causing some super-awkward Christmas dinners. Over the years, due to the convoluted quirks of inheritance and the French Revolution, this co-princeship passed down to a Spanish bishop and the president of France.

It has essentially remained independent because nobody could figure out who it should belong to and they all got confused reading about it. I like the idea of Andorra having a 4th of July-style celebration every year where everybody shrugs en masse and then they shoot off some fireworks.

See? Even the Snapple cap version took like twelve caps to explain. It’s a mess.

I was staying in the capital city of Andorra la Vella, which means… Andorra la Vella? You’re fired, Google. Wait, I found it, it means “Andorra: The Town.” I’m not kidding. That’s hilarious. ALV is the highest capital city in Europe at 3,356 feet, though they don’t know that because feet are America’s little secret.

The entire city of Andorra la Vella basically looks like a giant REI. It’s got that “outdoorsy mountain chalet with stones on the outside and really overpriced fleeces on the inside” theme that you see in every touristy mountain town worldwide, only blown up to the scale of a country’s entire capital city.

I was adding a little grit to this by staying in a room above a bar. I got the Rock ‘n Roll room, which I think the girl gave me because she figured I was either British or American. It had framed KISS albums on the walls and a magazine about PJ Harvey. It was cool.

I almost ripped the bathroom door of the hinges trying to use an exercise band to stay in shape while I was there, but don’t tell them that. I enjoyed that the way out was a little back stairwell that dumped out into an alley behind the bar.

Andorra la Vella has a big melting clock Salvador Dali sculpture in the main square.

And one of those “here are some staggered letters that spell out our town’s name” signs. I couldn’t find the angle where this worked at all but that’s all right, I hear Anorrad and Anodra are both really nice this time of year.

My bar home was situated right in the middle of the historic old town, which was nice for walking around and seeing the few historic things that Andorra did have.

I walked a lot along ALV’s steep streets, eventually finding Central Park, with their funky footbridge that looked like you were walking into a dead whale’s ribcage…

And eventually stumbled across the big weird glass pyramid I’d seen from the bus on my way in. It turns out this is a thermal spa called Caldea. I didn’t have that kind of money, but I did enjoy the public sports area surrounding the pyramid grounds.

Andorra la Vella had a bunch of fun quirks, like the… art? Look there was weird shit everywhere and I guess it was art. There were a bunch of naked guys up on poles that lit up at night.

And this portal to the Andorran Upside Down.

I don’t know why I’m fascinated by the different crosswalk symbol guys in different countries, but the dude in Andorra seemed super-friendly.

And the sidewalks had these cool green and red light bars that let you know if it was safe to cross the street or not.

Truth be told though, what people actually come to Andorra la Vella for is shopping. I don’t know if they have low taxes or what but I got the distinct impression that almost all of their tourists came from Spain or France to shop in the endless rows of high-end shops on the main streets.

I wasn’t there to shop, rather to hike and see weird shit, but thankfully they had plenty of that too.

If you decide to visit Andorra, bring a car. That’s the complete extent of my advice as someone who did not bring a car. Just bring a car. Everything I’d read about this country bragged about its wonderful bus system, which was complete and total bullshit. Yes, there are buses, but… good luck with that.

Everything I did in Andorra that involved leaving the capital city of Andorra la Vella at all was a complete and total shitshow. Things that were a 15 minute drive away generally took about three hours to get to on the bus, between buses not showing up, running at weird times, not going where they appeared to be going, or just flat out not existing. I spent a lot of time at Andorra la Vella’s cute little bus station, trying to figure out what was vegan in the vending machine as I waited for a bus that definitely wasn’t coming.

How could everything I’d read online be so wrong? It was like someone hadn't done their homework and just bullshitted the assignment at the last minute, or a small child had just imagined what Andorra might be like and they went with that. They didn’t expect anyone to actually go there and until I came along they were right.

Eventually I realized that the Andorra bus system was not completely insane. Only mostly. The insanity of the system was amplified considerably by the Moovit app that the Andorran tourism website was endorsing. The app was wrong about absolutely everything: routes, times, where bus stops were, you name it, it found a way to be wrong.

OK fine, Google Maps, it’s you and me buddy. Annnnnnnd… Google Maps was no help at all. Because when you hit the Public Transport button in the app, it just threw up its hands and said “Wait, you don't have a car? Why don't you have a car? That's messed up dude.”

It didn’t list any bus routes at all.

Eventually, eveeeeeeeeentuaaaaaaally I found my way to Arinsal, a little village where the good mountain hiking kicked off. I hopped off the bus, thanking the driver in terrible Catalan, and wandered around looking for where the hiking train began. Oh I heard it was behind this ski lift...

I somehow ended up in a playground behind a hotel. Whoops, nope.

Eventually I exhausted all the options for where it couldn’t be, and found where it was. I hiked up a steep street and then turned off onto a dirt path leading up the mountain.

This was truly some steep shit.

I love mountain hiking and had done a ton in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, so I was in really good shape, but was also realizing I had some collective fatigue building up as I huffed and puffed my way up the trail, grabbing rocks to boost myself up the steepest parts. The only person I saw was a Spanish girl gingerly coming down the trail, who looked like she’d either just seen a werewolf or had done a lot more difficult hiking than she was used to.

Up, up, up for an hour. During one of the many bus transfers on my voyage to Arinal I’d popped into a little grocery store and bought things to eat on the trail for lunch, and now my stomach was letting me know it wanted to eat all of them right now. Just a minute. Let’s get to a nice overlook for a rest and lunch.

Before too long, I found that overlook, but it was occupied by four young Spanish guys and girls who were loud as hell. Not exactly the vibe I was looking for. I “buenas”-ed them and carried on up the trail. After making a wrong turn through a cow pasture, I passed a girl wearing a huge hiking backpack who looked like she was hoping to die soon. It was a steep hike.

Now this looks like a nice spot, I think I’ll stop h-

I looked up the trail and saw straight into some kind of stone hut where a girl was changing her clothes or taking a shit or something. I don’t know what she was doing in there but she was half undressed and she looked at me like “How DARE you look straight up the trail you’re walking on and into the open door of my weird stone hut”? I looked away awkwardly. OK! Not stopping here. My stomach protested loudly as I passed by the perfectly situated picnic tables set up behind the hut, overlooking a breathtaking view of the mountains.

Twenty minutes later I found a nice boulder overlooking another beautiful view from the mountainside. Finally!

I sat down on the boulder and took my lunch out of my pack. Finally! I’m starving. I went to open the container of red bean hummus I’d picked up at the grocery store in town, ready to tear into it with the baguette of delicious-looking bread I’d bought to go with it, when I suddenly realized the plastic sealing the hummus container was the same stuff they used to protect the space shuttle on reentry. This stuff was standing aside for no man, and no hummus was going to get eaten on its watch. I couldn’t believe how impenetrable this stuff was. Peel it off? Nope! Puncture it with a finger? Good luck! I didn’t have any silverware or a chainsaw with me on the hike. Oh my God, am I not going to get any lunch after all?? My stomach grumbled like thunder rolling across the valley.

All right, desperate times call for desperate measures. I searched through everything I had on me and realized the only thing I had that would be capable of breaching this fascist plastic seal was the key from the bus station locker where I was storing the rest of my stuff. Oh man. This is so gross. I laughed out loud at what I was about to do. The only less sanitary thing I could have possibly opened the hummus with would have been the urinal cake from that same bus station’s men’s room. I slathered the key in Purell and plunged it into the plastic, which recoiled at the sheer mind-bending grossness of what I was doing, and then finally gave way, deciding it no longer wanted to live in a world where people did shit like this.

The red bean hummus and baguette were the best of both of those things I’ve ever eaten. I washed it down with a kombucha that I’d had to set on a rock for ten minutes to get it to stop explosively foaming, after my climb up the mountain had apparently continually shook it like one of those machines at the paint store. It was still foaming over when I drank it, but less violently and damn, man, I didn’t have all day.

After lunch I continued up the mountain, and was rewarded with utterly beautiful views.

I ‘supped some wild horses as I trekked by. I’d heard there were brown bears in these mountains, but I hadn’t seen any.

The trail took me along the upper ridges of the mountains...

...and then looped around a high green valley.

The day went on like this, wonderfully, as I followed the trail back down the mountains from the other side, and down into a different village from the one I had left. Getting back to Arinsal involved walking through a long dark car tunnel with minimal sidewalk, which was honestly a little scary...

...and then along the narrow shoulder of a mountain road for a mile or two, occasionally hopping up onto some kind of concrete storm drain to avoid oncoming cars...

...before I found myself back where I had begun.

Wow. Thanks Andorra. You’re okay with me.

Andorra may not have a lot of the things you associate with being a country, like 2/3rds of the planes/trains/automobiles trifecta, but it does have an amusement park. A very uniquely Andorran amusement park. Naturlandia.

The bus had dropped me off as close to Naturlandia as the buses go, which is to say not that close at all. There was supposed to be a van or a dude or something who would drive me the rest of the way. How do I find- Oh hey, there’s a tourism office! Awesome.

Inside, the Andorran tourism office lady doesn’t speak a word of English. I'm no advocate of everybody speaking English, but if your whole job is to help visitors find things, perhaps you should not solely speak a language that's unique to your small region. If someone speaks Catalan, they probably don't need your help SINCE THEY LIVE HERE. She was also terrible at charades, but we eventually worked out that a van or something might meet me up the hill if I waited there and ate some fruit. I walked away with a Denny’s kids’ placemat-style map of Andorra and hiked up the hill.

And, true to her word, or whatever she actually said, a van or something did pick me up and took me to Naturlandia.

The main reason I wanted to go to Naturlandia was to ride Tobotronic, the longest mountain coaster in the world, with 5.3 kilometers (17,400 feet) of track. A mountain coaster is where they set up some rails through the woods on a steep mountain, slap you into a little bobsled with wheels on the bottom, and send you screaming down the mountain. I’d done a really fun one in Jamaica earlier this year, but this was the big leagues compared to some little mountain in Jamaica.

As I climbed onto the minimalist toboggan and the operator asked me something in Catalan that was either “Do you speak Catalan?” or “You know you’re about to die, right?” I nodded and he gave me a thumbs-up and started the chain lift, which proceeded to drag me up the mountain. We were starting out at around 7,000 feet, and the chain lift pulled my little toboggan up, up, up for a solid fifteen minutes. Some parts of the lift were quite steep and the view behind me was continually amazing as I rose higher and higher up the mountain.

At the top, another guy asked me an important question in Catalan that I nodded to. Pictographical signs warned me repeatedly that you needed to use the brakes on the turns or you were going to die. Additional signs warned you not to ram into people ahead of you, killing them. Yep.

I mashed the brake release lever into the floor and was off down the mountain. Whoooo! The speed and the jankiness of the ride were a perfect combination. The wind whipped around my face as the endless green trees streamed by in a blur.

I had the brake release mashed all the way down when I hit the first sharp turn. The track squealed loudly and my toboggan pitched violently to one side, my momentum trying desperately to eject me straight out of the toboggan and into the trees, only my seatbelt keeping me on the rails. Waaah! Okay, maybe they were right about the brakes. I began tapping the brakes before hitting the sharp turns.

Woosh! Zoom zoom zoom through endless exhilarating turns and slaloms. This is amaz-AAAAH I suddenly realized I was nearing the end and some lady and her child were going VERY slow at the end of the run. I yanked back on the brakes and skrrrraaaaaaaaaakkkked to a halt before I ran them off the mountain. I noticed there was a large chunk of rubber missing from their rear bumper. Huh. I think somebody else wasn’t as quick on the brakes.

God, that was great. I wandered around to see what else Naturlandia had to offer.

Ah, so this is sort of a place to introduce kids to extreme outdoor sports. There’s a big harness-assisted jungle gym, a zipline, some buggies, a lil archery range. Kind of weird they don’t have a climbing wall.

This would have been a great place to go as a kid, but there was nothing really intended for adults. That’s cool. Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time blared on the sound system as I munched on a bag of Mister Corn.

Okay, yeah. So I’m gonna do that tobotronic thing again.

Repeat the loop with the Catalan guy at the bottom, towed up the mountain, nod at the guy at the top. I held back as long as the track would let me at the top, to give the guy and his daughter who left ahead of me time to get well down the track before I started, because I wanted to see what happened if you didn’t use the brakes at all. Almost getting dumped the first time had been scary, but also convinced me that this thing was probably built to withstand such a thing. I stomped on the brake lever, pinning it under my foot, and flew down the opening stretch.

First turn. SKRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAK! Still in the toboggan, and going faster now. SKRAAAAAAAK whoooooooosh! SKKRRRIIIIIIIIIIIEE-whooooosh! I was figuring out how to pitch my whole body to the inside on the turns, to combat the force wanting to throw me out the other way, and to pick up even more speed. SKRAAAAAAAA- ooh, that was a good turn. The track dipped up and down, creating little airtime moments where the wheels left the track. Skip skip skip the toboggan rocketed along.

It was way more fun to ride it this way.

Of course the downside of absolutely hauling ass is that the ride is over faster. As I jetted into the brake run, I suddenly realized I hadn’t killed that guy and his daughter who were ahead of me, they were just now stopping up ahead. Nice, guys! You must really have been moving. Kudos to the dad, that guy must not care about his daughter at all. Just kidding, kids need to experience terror.

Pretty much every amusement park nowadays tries to make money by selling you a photo of yourself riding whatever ride you were just on, and Naturlandia was no different. I blitzed right by these photo booths hundreds of times on this trip between all the parks that I visited, but Naturlandia is one of only two times where, in retrospect, I wish I’d bought the photo. I looked like an absolute badass screaming down the mountain in that toboggan, one foot casually stomping the brake lever down to disengage it completely and my hair flying around my mysterious covid-masked face. That would have been my profile picture for everything.

Researching how to spell Tobotronic to write this, I stumbled across some forums and news articles talking about how many people have been injured on that thing. Mostly from toboggans crashing into each other. Broken toes, somebody broke their spine. Yikes! The most exciting was the woman who didn’t wear her seatbelt and was promptly jettisoned from the toboggan, rolling down the mountain until she hit a security fence and then had to be evacuated by helicopter. Probably better I hadn’t read that before I went!

I caught the last van down the mountain and attempted to navigate the maze of covid-cancelled buses in trying to get back to Andorra la Vella. As I walked along the dusty street to the bus stop, I found myself singing Hotel California:

“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air…”

The bus pulled up and I climbed on. I looked up at the route map on the wall to see what stop I needed to get off at…

Colita.

Huh. That’s weird.

Andorra is not exactly a country overflowing with things to do, but thankfully the few things they have are all pretty memorable. I’d decided to stay in Andorra for a fourth day so I could visit the village of Ordino and their famous Museu de la Miniatura, the Museum of Miniatures.

I mean, a tiny country has a miniatures museum? You can’t miss that.

When I finally got there on the bus, the museum wasn’t back open from lunch break yet, so I wandered around a bit. Huh. So this is Ordino.

A hotel called Coma? That sounds amazing!

Once the museum opened, it was just me and the museum’s owner. I assume she was the owner, maybe she was just a lady who wandered in off the street but she wanted to talk miniatures, and I was down for that. She started by showing me an absolute load of matryoshka Russian nesting dolls, which aren’t that miniature but apparently they got this whole miniatures thing started when people didn’t know when to stop when it came to making the innermost dolls smaller and smaller. I was surprised to find nesting dolls that didn’t fit the standard “here are some progressively smaller Russian ladies” pattern, some depicting religious figures or politicians.

Some had just gone off the rails and got smaller and smaller out to infinity, the smallest one existing only in your imagination.

From there we looked at fancy Russian boxes, which again: not that small, but they were related somehow and they were pretty.

I was starting to think we were just seeing whatever the owner liked to collect and I was fine with that.

Also, eggs:

Then, all that out of the way, we proceeded to the inner sanctum, the realm of the truly and insanely miniature.

Apparently there are two superstars in the world of making absurdly miniature art. One is a Japanese artist whose name I swear I didn’t forget, I just wrote it really small so that it looks like the period at the end of this sentence. He painted things on tiny bottles from the inside. I don’t know if he did a bunch of scenes of Andorra so he could get in this museum or what the deal was there.

I realize you can’t really tell how small those thumb-sized bottles are from the photos, but trust me, they’re small bottles. If you bought a bottle of anything and it came in that size you’d be disappointed that you didn’t get more.

The other superstar, and arguably the father of miniature art, and maybe that’s because nobody else is crazy enough to do this, is Nikolai Syadristy from Ukraine. His work is what makes this museum worth going to.

We begin wading into the depths of this insanity with a portrait of Nikita Khrushchev. I think it’s Nikita Khrushchev, like, before he lost all his hair? I’m sure someone will correct me in the comments if I’m remembering this wrong, an obscure drawing in an obscure museum in an obscure country is too many obscures for Google to bail me out on this. The thing that’s unique about this portrait is that it’s created out of all of the words from Khruschev’s speeches, written really, really, really small.

Syadristy has one of these of Lenin in his museum in Kiev that’s made up of the full text of all of Lenin’s published works. There’s a quote from Syadristy saying he didn’t realize what an asshole Lenin was until he hand-copied all of his books. Seems fair.

This is the only one of Syadristy’s works in the museum that you can see with your eyeballs. The rest require a microscope, and these photos are my best attempt at taking cell phone photos through a microscope. I’ll let you decide for yourself which is more impressive, him making this tiny shit or me getting okay photos of it.

An entire place setting on top of a sugar crystal.

A woman and a wolf in a wintery landscape, all on a grain of salt.

"Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

The pope, carved out of an apple seed.

A life-sized flea!

A flower painted on half a pear seed.

The fable of the fox and the grapes, grape-seed-sized.

Chariot and archer in the eye of a needle.

The royal wife telling the pharaoh to talk to the hand.

And... yeah I have no idea what this one is. It's a dude on the wheel of time or some shit. It's art, stop asking questions.

After staring through a microscope at these unbelievably tiny things for an hour, everything else started to seem way, way too big. It was a neat trick.

Dammit Andorra, you need to scale down. Your immensity is boggling my mind.