Snap and Scribble

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This is part three of the story of my life in Basque Country, in 1984. Part one is here…

After nearly three months living in Vitoria, in 1984, my savings were beginning to run low and i started half-heartedly looking around for work. However, there was very little work for the locals in Basque Country in those days and the chances of a foreigner finding any were pretty slim.

About this time, i decided to take a trip to southern Spain for a change of scenery for a week or two. I don’t remember anything about the journey, but i’m sure i caught the train via Madrid. My destination was a small village called Calahonda, in Andalucia, on the Mediterranean coast directly south of Granada. I’d visited that part of the coast a few years previously, during another trip to southern Spain. But i don’t think i went through Granada this time. As far as i remember, i got the train to Malaga and then caught the bus east from there.

I don’t remember much about my stay in Calahonda – except that it was a lovely little fishing village. It was entirely Spanish – unlike the tourist-infested zone around Malaga, not far along the coast. I doubt it’s still like that today, but i’ve always wanted to go back and check it out again.

I’ve only got one tiny snippet of memory from my visit there – of sitting in a bar on the beach and ordering a bottle of water. The girl who was serving me asked me if i wanted water “with gas” or “without gas” (fizzy or non-fizzy). There was something about the way she pronounced the word “gas” that lodged it in my mind for some weird reason. The dialect in the south of Spain is quite different from the way they speak in Basque country, but this girl’s accent was more extreme than most.

Anyway, after what was probably about a week, i headed back north again. But this time i intended to stop in Madrid on the way through.

I’ve got no idea how we managed to keep in touch, in those pre-mobile, pre-internet days – but i must have been in contact with some of my friends in the London squatting community, because i had an address in Madrid to go to. It was a flat in Lavapiés, in the south of central Madrid. It’s not far from Atocha station – which is where the trains from the south arrive and depart from, so i didn’t have far to go.

In those days, i was squatting in London and working at the Advisory Service for Squatters – an entirely voluntary advice organisation which had been in operation since 1977 (and is still going today). I had a lot of friends in the squatting scene all over London – including a number of Spanish people. And several of those friends were staying in this flat in Lavapiés at the time.

I think i must have been in touch with Chris and Rachel, as i met up with them again in India, several years later – so we obviously managed to keep in touch while we were travelling somehow!

We spent a few days partying on in Lavapiés, with a mixed Spanish and British bunch of travellers. Then Chris and Rachel and their friend Emma (well, i think that was her name, i can’t really remember – it’ll do, anyway!) were heading off to hitch to Faro in southern Portugal, where they were going to spend a couple of weeks living cheaply on a nearby beach. They asked me if i wanted to go with them. At first, i wasn’t keen – as it meant going back south, where i’d just come from. But, after what was probably several whole seconds, i changed my mind and decided to go. It’s never taken much thought to get me to completely change my plans and head off in the opposite direction, specially if it means going somewhere i’ve never been before!

We split up into two pairs – Chris and Rachel, and me and Emma (who i’d never met before) – to hitch out of Madrid and south to Portugal, via Córdoba and Seville.  I can’t remember exactly where we started hitching from, but i reckon it was somewhere around Los Angeles, on the Avenida de Andalucia. Wherever it was, we caught the metro there and hitched from somewhere near the station.

I don’t remember much about the first part of the journey, either, but i think it took me and Emma an hour or two to get our first lift. This may have been the one that dropped us in Bailén, which is where the road forks – going to Córdoba one way and Granada the other.  The railway line forks near there, too – just south of Linares-Baeza station.

From Bailén, most of the traffic seemed to be going south – to Granada – and not very much was going past us. We ended up waiting by the side of the road there for fourteen hours before we got a lift! That’s my all-time hitching record – and i’ve probably spent hundreds of hours on the side of roads all over the world, waiting for lifts over the years.

I think the only reason we got a lift when we did was because Emma was laying down out, resting, of sight of the road. She was a bit freaky-looking, like lots of my squatting mates – she had bleached, spiky hair and tatty black clothes, which wasn’t exactly a common sight in rural Andalucia in those days (or now, either, i’d imagine). I’m pretty sure the driver was gay, too – and he really wasn’t very happy when Emma dragged herself out of the ditch and climbed in the car as well!

Anyway, he kicked us out at Córdoba, which wasn’t much closer to our destination, but it was certainly a better place to hitch than Bailén. From Córdoba, we got a ride to Seville – where we went into town for a while, for a bit of a break from the road. I don’t remember much about Seville, except that i went for a swim in the Guadalquivir river in a park near the centre of town.  I was naked – Vitoria pantano style – and i nearly got busted by the cops!

From Seville, we got to Ayamonte – a small town on the Guadiana river, which runs along the border with Portugal. It’s all a bit hazy, but i’ve got a vague memory that, for at least some of the way from Seville to Ayamonte, we got a ride with a couple of Germans in a Volkswagen campervan. It was outside the normal tourist season and i remember the driver commenting that hitching was much easier when there were lots of tourists driving along that road.

In those days, the only route across the southern end of the border was by car ferry across the river. So we caught the ferry across the Guadiana to Portugal. Again, i don’t remember much about the journey from Villa Real, the town on the Portuguese side, to Faro – apart from being hungry and trying to eat a quince off a tree near the road. Quinces are a bit like apples – but they’re much harder and not really edible unless they’re cooked.

I had a small amount of money with me – although most of it was in the bank in Spain, and i couldn’t get at it while i was in Portugal (this, of course, was before the days of international cash machine networks!). But Emma didn’t have any – and, as the more i spent now, the less time i’d be able to stay in Vitoria when i got back, i wasn’t keen on supporting her in a big way during this trip. So we both did the whole thing on the cheap.

We’d agreed with Chris and Rachel to meet them at Faro railway station at midday – every day till we were all there. Whoever arrived first had to go to the station at midday and eventually the others would be there at that time too – that was how you had to do it before mobile phones and email! But they never turned up!

Me and Emma spent about a week living rough in Faro. As i said, i couldn’t get any money without going back to Spain, so we lived on very little – although we didn’t starve, by any means. The plan had been to meet the others and then go and spend a couple of weeks living on the beach – which wouldn’t have cost us anything, apart from a bit of food. But that never happened.

We slept wherever we could – although parks weren’t very safe as there were packs of wild dogs roaming around at night, which was a bit scary when you were trying to sleep! We spent our days wandering around the streets – Faro was a pleasant little fishing port in those days, but i imagine it’s a horrific tourist nightmare now! And in the evenings we hung out in one of the small bars and drank a few glasses of very pleasant white wine, which was ridiculously cheap, at only a few escudos a glass.

We met some interesting people in Faro – including some Africans, from the ex-Portuguese colony of Angola, as far as i remember (although it could have been Mozambique). They spoke good English and we spent a few nights chatting to them.

One night we got to sleep in the workers’ accommodation on a building site. In the same bar, we met a couple of Spanish guys who were working there and they told us there was nobody else staying on the site at that time and there were beds if we wanted to stay. I think it was only one night, although it could have been a couple. The beds were in one of the half-finished buildings – it was a hotel, i think – and it was pure bliss to be able to sleep in a bed again after what had been quite a long time. Probably since Calahonda, for me, as i’d been sleeping on the floor in the Lavapiés flat.

Anyway, after about a week, we decided Chris and Rachel weren’t ever going to turn up and we decided to head back to Madrid ourselves.

By this point, i’d had enough of roughing it and, as we were heading back to Spain where i could get hold of some more money, i splashed out and bought us a couple of train tickets back to the border – i was over hitching!

I think i’d still been planning on hitching from Ayamonte back to Madrid – but when we got to Ayamonte i gave up on that plan and decided we could catch the train back there too – even if it did cost me a week of my stay in Vitoria. It meant spending the night in Ayamonte, though, as by the time we got there it was too late to go to the bank. That night, we slept out the back of the railway station, which was right on the edge of town. There was a fair bit of dog howling going on in that area too, which was a bit of a worry, but it was an uneventful night in the end.

It was a great feeling climbing aboard the train the next day, for a nice comfortable trip back north!

Back at Madrid, me and Emma went separate ways. She went off to try and jump trains back to London and i went to the north of Madrid and hitched back to Vitoria. I got a lift all the way with a couple of Portuguese guys who were on their way to France. They’d already picked up a Spanish man – he was doing military service and was on leave, i believe. The Spanish guy couldn’t communicate with the Portuguese people at all – they just couldn’t understand each other – but i managed to have a sort of chat with them, in a mixture of broken Portuguese and dodgy Spanish. I think the Spanish guy got out at Burgos.

When they dropped me off at Vitoria, it felt like coming home.

It had taken me and Emma two whole days to get from Madrid to Faro – which we thought was a very long time. But when i got back to London, several weeks later, and met up with Chris and Rachel again, i discovered they’d spent forty eight hours on the side of the road, trying to hitch out of Madrid, without any luck at all. And had given up at that point and headed back to London.

This is part three of this story – part four will be along soon…

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