The Many Faces of Lisbon

December 6, 2015December 6, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

For a city that’s only a few hundred miles from the Spanish border, Lisbon and its environs could hardly be less Spanish. I guess I naively went in expecting Portugal to be no more different from Spain than, say, Germany is to Austria, or England to Ireland. Once again, yours truly demonstrates his supreme capacity for some Langton-style bullshitting.

This is a very last-minute holiday, even by my standards. Bus tickets bought, hostels booked and maps drawn less than twenty four hours before departure. And this time I don’t even speak the language. Either I’m getting more confident or more careless. So far, so good, so I’ll assume the former.

Lisbon is really quite something. As capital cities go, it’s a treasure. It’s not too big or crowded so as to set a country bumpkin like me off, and it’s not too small so as to be lacking in life or things to do either. On the contrary, for its size, it’s positively crammed with interesting sights to see. And with the Lisbon Card on hand – a natty little device that gives you free access to all forms of public transport for one, two or three days – getting around the place couldn’t be easier. Heck, it’s even entertaining to ride the Metro just for the sake of it, with that kind of freedom.

It’s also a tantalizingly great location for one of my favourite hobbies: people-watching. Capital cities tend to have a wider racial mix than country backwaters, so this is something that never fails to amaze me, but Lisbon’s got a damned beautiful pot-pourris of ethnicities going on. West African immigrants, in all their multicoloured splendour, rub shoulders with Berbers from the Rif and the Portuguese themselves, who are surprisingly different from their Hispanic neighbours. Beetle-black eyes, lemon-gold skin and blonde hair are a lot more common here than the dusky Moorish beauty of the Spanish south. As in Extremadura, I find myself trying to imagine these people dressed in seventeenth century clothes, wandering the streets of a pre-earthquake Lisbon or setting foot on the shores of the New World and beyond in the Age of Discoveries.

Forgive me that splurge into racial obsession. I’ve always been hooked on the beauty of the various peoples of our world. For every shade except my own, in fact. A reverse racism in the truest sense of the word. Fortunately, I’ve since learned to love my own nation for all its flaws, recognizing my angst for what it was: angst, some dim leftover from when my ego was torn to shreds in the wake of my first relationship. The healing process sure has been long enough in the completion.

Lisbon, Benjamin. You’re supposed to be talking about Lisbon.

I took a train out of town to the former royal retreat of Sintra, up in the mountains above the city. Once again you’ll find yourself in a world away from picture-book Iberia: with all the pine forest-covered granite slopes and the pink and yellow spires of the Neuschwanstein-esque follies poking out of the trees like decorated Turkish delights, you might as well be in Austria. That, and Portuguese sounds decidedly Eastern European with all those zh and sh sounds. The gigantic überfolly that is the Palacio de Pena, the last word in Romantic architectural orgasm, looked just too ridiculous to be true on arrival, so I settled instead for the Castelo dos Mouros, the old Moorish lookout sat astride the Boulder-strewn hill opposite. Sometimes it’s simply easier to stick to what you know.

Best moment of the day goes to my main reason for coming this far west: not for Lisbon per se, but the windswept cliffs of the Cabo da Roca, Europe’s most westerly point. The headland itself was crowded – it being a gloriously sunny Saturday afternoon – so I wandered off in search of one of the cliff top trails. But for a couple of abandoned motorbikes, a young couple braving the steep, winding track down to the beach and a man piloting his camera-drone over the cape, I had the coast more or less to myself. It’s funny how most people rarely stray beyond the main sights, especially when the outskirts are almost always far more rewarding. See below if you don’t believe me.

Stunning. The sunset itself, salmon-pink and ablaze, was twice as beautiful again. The trouble is, it’s one thing to look on such beauty alone and quite another to have somebody to share it with. Here at the Cabo da Roca, as in Sintra, and on the train, and the Metro, and the banks of the Tagus, and every row but mine on the bus from Spain, I find myself looking out on a world of couples from my island. A decent half-hour’s meditation on the clifftop helped to doctor my heart a little, but it’s an unavoidable fact that humans are sociable creatures. We’re not supposed to be alone. Traveling is my primary means of fighting back against a world that rejects or friend-zones me at every turn, but it’s not supposed to be that way. So there, high on the cliffs, I contented myself with writing an imaginary letter from my princess to her lover. One day, if I should be so lucky, I’ll find the One who’ll hit the road with me. One day

Lisbon, Benjamin!

Shaking off the loneliness birds, I decided to investigate the famed brilliance of Lisbon nightlife. It’s definitely worth sampling, if you’re ever in the area. I suppose it’s no different than what you might find in London or Paris, but it blew me away. And let me tell you, after two and a half months of Reggaeton, it was a dream come true to have some Justin Timberlake, Uptown Funk and Notorious B.I.G blasting through the speakers. I ended up in a dance-off with a group of Guineans and it was insane. You know you’ve made it in dance when a black guy commends you on your moves. Box ticked.

Oh! But here’s a funny story for you. This ought to lighten the mood. You see, in a town the size of the one I live and work in, everybody knows everyone else, and the general atmosphere is overall more familial than friendly. And since I’m a rookie to city-hopping, I’m guilty of several major faux-pas, like putting my shoes on the bed and ignoring traffic lights. But tonight’s really takes the biscuit. I decided to take a side-alley detour back to my hostel and, in doing so, wound up in a rather seedy part of town; the outskirts of the clubbing district, in retrospect. I found myself alone in the street and thought it odd enough until two women came about the street corner (yes, you can kind of see where this is going. I, funnily enough, couldn’t). They looked a little lost, and when one of them waved me over, I took my earphones out and asked what I could do to help. The answer I got was a husky ‘babe, you’re so beautiful’.

I don’t think I’ve ever run faster in my life.

The bus is pulling into Coimbra. Aveiro can’t be too far away now; another hour and a half, tops. I’ll close this report for now so that I have something to say in my next post. Até logo, morangos. BB x

Explosions in the Night

November 14, 2015November 14, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When Eyjafjallajökull erupted and grounded flights across Europe, I was one of the last to hear of it. Indeed, my mother and I knew nothing of it until we got to the airport, only to be told there’d be no flights for several days because of the Icelandic volcano – didn’t you see the news? It wasn’t even for want of connectivity to the outside world, though I was spending a couple of days in the marshy outpost of El Rocío at the time, but because Spanish news the night before decided to prioritize a report on whether Spaniards actually react to STOP signs, as they’re written in English, over the eruption. Of all the nights…

Last night, once again, the world was rocked by explosions of a very different, more sinister nature, and I slept through them unawares – until I saw the news this morning. And if I’m being totally truthful, I heard plenty of explosions last night here in Extremadura, but they were all of them of my own making. IS declared its actions to be an act of war this morning, and another great and terrible power made a similar declaration the night before – in my head.

I’m here in Cáceres for the Fiesta de las Tres Culturas, ostensibly to do a bit of sightseeing but primarily in search of inspiration for my novel. Cáceres is a stunningly beautiful medieval city, especially so when the town is kitted out with a giant medieval market and the townsfolk are all dressed up. There are crepe-peddlers from Lisbon, camel farmers from Valladolid and a musical troupe from Tetouan, to name just a few. And of course there’s at least one Englishman wandering about the old city with a sketchbook, snatching the occasional character out of the street with his pencils. All in the name of the novel. As I’m now set on nothing else for a career, I’ve started to take this writing malarkey very seriously.

Last night I was scripting the grand denouement of my saga, involving a terrible siege and the destruction of several beautiful buildings, as is necessary for the eventual outcome. As the bombs went off in Paris and gunfire turned the streets into a second Beirut, I had musket and cannon salvos in my head. That the idea came to me at around the same time as the attacks began is probably pure coincidence. The realization this morning of said coincidence made me feel quite sick. Everybody in the hostel cafe was silent with their eyes fixed on the TV as the ticker tape spelled out Spain’s reportage of the dreadful events of the previous night. The whole of Paris in a state of emergency? Citizens told not to leave their homes and the army deployed onto the streets? It’s like something out of a story in itself. And once again, we’re told the perpetrators were operating under the shadowy veil of IS. A war of a very different nature to the ones going on in my mind. There, in the simplified romanticism of my imagination, there are always two clear sides, figures of questionable authority in leading roles on both fronts, and a battleground on which to resolve any dispute by military force.

Not so in the real world. Twenty-first century warfare is a far more sinister affair. It’s international. A war of proxy, of shady political dealings and old worlds dragged unwillingly into democracy and the present day. Of drone strikes and mobile phones. Skirmishes fought in the East are avenged by agents operating upon the civilian population in the West. A state of total war where nobody is safe, from the soldier out on manoeuvres in Damascus to the man back home who used to deliver him the mail. At least, that’s as much as I remember of the term from my wrangling with A-Level History (before it got tedious and became the study of historians and social policy, not kings).

In short, I don’t have the foggiest as to how to react. I’m just a wannabe author voicing my feelings as they come to me. Ask a history or international relations student for their views if you want a kernel of experience: my foray with Charlie Hebdo showcased my inadequacy for dealing with such weighty matters in a succinct, un-detached manner. That’s only natural; growing up as a writer, I’ve fought hard to hold on to my imagination, and with it the childish way of seeing things as fair and unfair, good and evil, where everything can be tied back to the condition of the human heart. Mine, at the very least, is a gentle one, and it doesn’t take much to make it bleed. Hence the moniker. But it would do us all well to remember that at the heart of this long and terrible nightmare are human beings like you and me.

Personally, I ask for no swift vengeance on IS and its agents. A beast pushed into a corner is capable of unpredictable ferocity, and we’ve been pushing for long enough. The wave of violence will only spiral out of control, and many innocents will be caught up in the whirlwind before it’s over. That being said, I sincerely hope that the surviving perpetrators feel the weight of every casualty in their hearts. Some villains are unshakeable in their resolve – I turn you to fiction once again: Iago, Moriarty, the Joker and all the martyrs and psychopaths of that nature – but under the cloak of a righteous cause, there’s as human a heart, imbalanced and afraid, as everyone else.

At least, that’s my way of looking at it. I’ve probably got the wrong end of the stick as usual, but writing is my trade, and if I must write, it will be from the heart, and mine currently hurts from all I’ve seen and heard. My thoughts and prayers go not just to the people of Paris, but to the beleaguered Syrians themselves, for whom this dark threat is ever at hand, and who, fleeing said terror, have found so many European powers that bow not to the strength of their humanity but to whatever quota they deem acceptable; to a land that, for all its sympathy, continues to look to its own, until its own become the targets. To them, and to all the victims of terror around the world, in whatever form it may take, Eastern or Western.

I never did believe in Utopia, and I never will, but the sooner we can put an end to this shadowy decades-long war of terror, the better. BB x

El Guiri y La Andaluza

October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

What. A. Night. No, seriously, what a night. It really does look beautiful from the abandoned hillside of the Via Verde at five o’clock in the morning. The night sky is terrific. You could save yourself several hundred quid and skip Wadi Rum for this, if getting locked out of a hostel doesn’t bother you.

Oh, to own a camera good enough to capture all the night skies I’ve seen!

Yes, he’s done it again. Yours truly has managed to spend another night locked out and consigned to wandering in the twilight. But that’s ok. Any other night might really bother me, but my bus home isn’t until five o’clock in the afternoon, and frankly, for everything that happened tonight, I’d be locked out all over again just to live it through once more.

Hallelujah, it’s almost dawn…

The reunion of the decade was everything I wanted it to be and more (and I just saw a shooting star racing overhead as I looked up for inspiration. This was meant to be). That my former classmates hadn’t forgotten me is a given; though Olvera has a tenaciously stalwart expat scene, I was the English kid there too, the guiri, one of only three in the primary school (the other two being my younger brother and a tot in the infantil group, both desperately shy when it came to mingling). So that doesn’t surprise me all that much. That they should be so happy to see me after so many years, however, is something I can hardly believe. This is a town where friendships are cast for life. Within ten minutes I was nattering away in Spanish as I never knew I could, as though I’d never left at all. Jorge was quick to point out that I’d improved a great deal since the last time we met, which leads me to wonder when exactly that happened, as I recall acing my Spanish GCSE two years early. Perhaps it has something to do with actually knuckling under and learning the preterite. Otherwise, I’ll take it on trust.

Where to begin? How does one even embark upon nine lost years? I’d spent most of the morning narrowing down the years into the most worthy tales, and the rest of the time looking up any key words that might have escaped me, from the lesbian ex-girlfriend to the misunderstanding with the Guardia Civil and my successive failed attempts at tracking them down before. It was quite entertaining to play the Storyteller, but it was better still to hear all the things they’d been up to. Foolishly I’d expected them all to be in the same big group from primary school – a technical oversight anyone with half a brain could have known in advance – and it came as a fair surprise to see how everyone had splintered off. That’s growing up, though. I have to admit their voices alone sent my head spinning. When last I knew this lot, we were primary school kids with unbroken voices. Oddly enough I got the same start on being addressed by Jorge in his low Olvereñan bass that my entire generation got when Ron wound down the window and said ‘Hiya Harry’ at the opening of The Chamber of Secrets.

Jorge had to spark off to Málaga to another party – they’re all driving now – and we called it a night. I’d only just taken off my jumper when Alicia, another old friend of mine, gave me a buzz to let me know she’d arrived. Cue Catch-Up Round Two over tapas with Little Miss Popular before she invited me out to a night out on the town with her girls. What could I say? A night out with five Spanish girls, and andaluzas at that? That’s not the kind of invitation you turn aside.

Breaking the habit of a decade to celebrate the quest of a decade!

I hadn’t exactly planned on sampling Olvereñan nightlife, but it found me nonetheless. All I need say is that it was everything I’ve ever wanted from a club – and this in nothing more than a bar, no less: great atmosphere, a broad clientele, impeccable music (zero Taylor Swift – sorry) and a crowd quite happy to get up and dance. Alicia taught me to dance the bachata and I taught her a few moves of my own. I haven’t ever had such an obliging dance partner – mostly because in the UK, any guy really going for it in a club is almost instantly written off as gay and given a wide berth by all but the most determined non-closet cases (speaking from experience). When Alicia left to grab another Barcecola to share, I was hailed over by a group of girls sitting at a table across the floor who asked the inevitable question. But instead of surprise when I said I wasn’t gay, they gave me an encore. ‘Hombre, tienes dos cojones y bailas muy bien,’ said one, ‘podrías salir con cualquier chica que te apetece.’ That’s probably not strictly true, but it’s a damned sight better than the usual British reaction. England, you could learn a lot from this world.

Having way too much fun to bother about blur

The bar gradually began to empty and eventually it was just the guiri and the andaluza left on the floor. We clocked out just before four o’clock, closing time, and left the night there. Four hours of dancing. Think about that for a second. That’s more than brilliant. It’s bloody phenomenal. 2015’s been the best year yet, but that night trumps the lot: Saad Lamjarred, June Ball and the Music Durham inaugural concert in Durham Cathedral, they don’t even come close. And Alicia tells me that’s just a regular night; next week is a puente, and the parties will be better, busier and longer. And so I find myself on the bus back to Seville, happy in the knowledge that I’ll be back in Olvera in five days’ time. If that’s how the rest of my year abroad is set to pan out, I’m one happy guy.

It’s going to be a year spent living a double-life: one as a teacher in Villafranca under one name, the other as a party animal in Olvera under the other. English in one location, Spanish in another. So we’re juggling again. But I’ve been juggling for several years now and I’m getting the hang of it.

Seriously, though. There are only a few times in my life I’d willingly relive. I don’t look back. Last night, however, was definitely one of them. BB x

Homecoming

October 25, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

How do I begin to describe it? The feeling of being home again, some nine years after I left? It’s like your first ever Christmas morning. Like getting into a hot bath at the end of a hard working day. Like falling in love for the second time. All these things at once. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, every time I see that silhouette on the horizon, there are tears in my eyes and my heart starts racing.

I’ve lived in several places during my twenty-one years of existence, from Dover to Durham to Boroboro and beyond, but no one hometown has ever had the same effect on me as Olvera. Not even El Rocío stirs up quite the same initial rush, like a starstorm in my heart, and El Rocío is far and away my favourite place on the planet. Maybe that’s Olvera’s own magic at work. I wasn’t born here and I didn’t even live here for all that long – all of ten months and more – but if anybody asks, I always tell them that this is where I grew up. Pretentious, yes, but there’s more than vague half-blood pride behind that statement. I was twelve when I moved here, and turned thirteen just over a week after I returned to England, so I was here at a critical time for growing up. I had my first crush out here. I developed a serious passion for languages, I had my musical awakening – and consequently began to toy with the idea of abandoning my violin – and, perhaps most importantly of all, I became the avid naturalist that I am today. Oh, I’ve always been stark-raving mad about animals, but it was only here when it got to the stage where I started going out on my own and putting names to things furry and feathered (mostly feathered) without the aid of a book. My own book came into its own here – I even went on local TV to advertise it when the chance arose. Essentially, the four pillars of my life, music, writing, travel and nature, were cast here, from the same marble that mottles the rolling hills that cradle the lonely peak of Olvera.

Oh, and of course, Andalucía, like a shard from the Devil’s mirror, lodged itself in my heart and I’ve not been able to remove it since.
I’ve used the word ‘heart’ three times now. I’m aware of that. I’ll try to keep a level head. It’s not an easy thing to do right now.

But simply being here isn’t the best part. In truth I’ve made three return trips since 2007, once with my family, once with mum when we were grounded by the Eyjafjallajökll eruption and the third, the last, towards the end of my crazy pan-Iberian adventure back in 2013 when, my endurance failing me, I turned from my road towards the homely peaks of the Sierra de Grazalema. On all three occasions I tried to find my old school companions, without success. This time, armed with WhatsApp, I’ve finally managed to track them down, and a reunion of almost a decade in the making is on the cards. Excited? You bet I am. Ecstatic? That doesn’t even cover it. I’ve been planning this day in my head for the last nine years, adding new stories every year. I’m still going to walk into it and freelance it anyway, but that doesn’t kill the hype. These are people I haven’t seen since we were primary school children with brightly-coloured rucksacks and unbroken voices. I’ll bet I’m still the one who sands out a mile with the blonde hair and the blue eyes – and now, of course, the shirts – but I wonder how much will be refreshingly familiar?

I get the feeling they’re planning something behind my back as well. All I have is a time and a place, the rest is Cristina’s doing. I have twenty-four hours. That’s perfect. It means that I can spend tonight rediscovering the delights of my old Friday night haunt, the pizzeria Lirios. Better still, the red murder that’s scarred my face since Jordan is fading away thanks to a visit to the doctor yesterday, and only just in time. With a little luck, I’ll be as good as new by tomorrow.

It’s coming up to nine o’clock. I think I’ll wander on up to Lirios. I wonder if the ginger-haired porter from the Hotel Sierra y Cal who used to frequent the place is still there? If anyone in this town would recognise me, it’d be him. He was the first Olvereñan I ever met. It would be so very fateful if he were. There’s an air of fate hanging about this whole weekend. That’s what I’m feeling. BB x

The Griffon

October 17, 2015January 3, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

‘Si te intereses a las aves, hay un buitre al otro lado del río. Hay mucha gente allí esperando que los bomberos lo remuevan. Por si lo sabes…’

The last thing on the hostel TV last night, after the late night showing of Colombiana, was a brief news report documenting the beginnings of a rise in interest in ornithology in Extremadura. I have to say I’m impressed; surprised and impressed. In my experience of living and working in Spain, the most interest the majority of ‘folk here take in birds is whether or not they go well with olive oil. Spain’s not unique in this regard. As my secondary school Physics teacher once said when I explained the risk the Bristol wind farm posed to migrating waterfowl, ‘if it won’t end up on my plate, I couldn’t give a monkey’s’. And that was in England, the biggest nation of bleeding hearts. Well, here’s a little proof that Spain at least is finally taking a turn for the better.

I’ve got a fairly long wait until the bus home, so I thought I’d take a walk along the Guadiana again whilst I’m here and look across the river to Portugal. The cormorants were out on the rocks with their wings spread wide after a morning’s hunting, so I got my camera out for a few shots with Respighi’s The Pines of Rome playing in my ears. And that’s when I got a tap on the shoulder and a friendly local pointed me in the direction of a grounded vulture on the east bank of the river.

I haven’t power-walked so fast in years. A vulture? Here, in the middle of Badajoz? It sounded too ridiculous a notion to be a lie, so I packed up my gear and left the bridge and the sunning cormorants I was photographing behind in the dust. At first I thought he might have confused buitre with any other large bird – it wouldn’t be the first time – but this just must be my lucky weekend or something, because just a short distance before the second bridge…

…boom. Sulking in the shade of the roadworks with a crowd of five or six startled onlookers. It could hardly be anything else: vultures are bloody huge, even youngsters like this one.

I was worried that it might have a broken wing, as it didn’t seem particularly keen to get back into the air. What it was doing here, bang in the middle of the city, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was simply tired. At any rate, it wasn’t all too bothered by the two men who’d gone down to join it, both to have a closer look at something you normally only see high in the sky above, and to ward off any dog-walkers that might cause the bird any further distress. My heart goes out to those two.

I have to admit, I probably won’t ever get a better viewing of a wild vulture than this. Not even in Monfragüe, which is the best place to see them in all of Spain. And here, in Badajoz, of all places! Bonkers.

‘Watch out,’ said one of the onlookers as it came bouncing forward, ‘That thing’s got a beak that can bite through bone.’

To everyone’s relief, there was nothing wrong with it in the end, because after some ten minutes it puffed up its feathers, made a few bounding leaps and took off into the air on two giant wings. It wheeled about over the river and almost flew headlong into the bridge, clearing it by little over a metre or so, and flew off in the direction of Portugal.

Not something you see every day! And now I need to go in search of a USB cable or card reader of some description, because my memory card is chock-full. Well, gallinules, kingfishers, cranes and a griffon vulture, all in twenty-four hours of city-hopping! Now there’s a feathery micro-adventure for you. BB x

And the Manacles are Off

October 16, 2015January 3, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s over, at last! After almost a month of to-and-froing between school, the ayuntamiento and the Almendralejo police station, I have a Spanish bank account and the admin period is finally at an end. Alright, so there’s still some confusion over whether I really need a Spanish social security number and I’m not entirely sure how to top up my phone since it isn’t compatible with its own network app, but the most important stage (and one that, by the sounds of things, the other assistants accomplished weeks ago) is done and dusted.

So what better way to celebrate than with a little travel?

You see, I adore traveling. I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you that, but I feel like in the three weeks I’ve been here I’ve never had the chance to get out. Not for want of opportunity, of course, but I told myself right at the beginning that I wasn’t to go traveling until I’d finished all the paperwork. That was supposed to be before my (abortive) training course in Cáceres on 1st October. Well, now it’s the 16th. But that’s ok. Villafranca feels like home now, I’ve christened it with my first stupidly long walk, and I have to say I’m quite enjoying being ‘El Inglés’. But I’ve waited long enough, and now here I am in the Plaza Alta in Badajoz, enjoying a ración of some seriously high-quality croquetas as the city wakes up for the night.

A paltry three and a half euros took me all the way to Mérida, the regional capital of Extremadura. It’s also minuscule compared to Badajoz and Cáceres, for which the two provinces of Extremadura are named, which means you can get around the place in a couple of hours. I didn’t plan on staying long, since I only intended to use the city as a launch-pad for getting to Badajoz – there’s only one bus direct from Villafranca and it leaves at nine in the morning – but, as is so often the way of things, Mérida turned out to be a whole lot more than a collection of pristine Roman ruins.

At first glance it looks a lot like Córdoba, with the Roman bridge and the great big river splitting the old town from the new. But then, so does Badajoz. It’s missing the beauty of the mosque, of course, but then, Córdoba is and always will be in a league of its own. What it does have is a spectacular aqueduct on the north side of town. If you see any photos of Mérida, it’s bound to feature in more than one of them. Unlike the one in Segovia the city gave it breathing space and there’s a park around it now, but that hasn’t stopped the storks from taking advantage of all those convenient flat-topped towers.

Ah, but I can do better than that. It took me almost half an hour to cross the Roman bridge over the Guadiana this morning, not because of its length – you can span it in five minutes or less at a stride – but because I was held up by two of my favourite little riverside friends, both of them easy to spot because of all the noise they were making.

I haven’t been to Doñana National Park almost every year for the last seven years for nothing, and when I heard a distinctly disgruntled grunting cutting over the babble of an approaching horde of school kids, I was hanging over the side of the bridge and scanning the reeds in a flash; and sure enough, there he was. Old Longshanks himself.

What can I say? Gallinules. Love ’em. Loved the ridiculous things since I first saw a picture of one in a book. The name’s daft enough – Purple Swamp-Hen, in full – but the feet are something else.

I don’t know why I make such a big deal about gallinules over anything else, but they’ve always been the ultimate Doñana bird for me. Perhaps it’s because it’s basically a giant purple chicken. Mm, close enough.

Feathered friend number two should be a lot more familiar to most of you. He’s also rather colourful, but a heck of a lot smaller and shinier to boot. And once you know what they sound like, you’ll see a lot more of them. It’s a kingfisher, of course!

At least, I hope you know what a kingfisher is. Nobody here does. Not even if I give them the equally impressive Spanish name of martin pescador.

I’m still waiting on that perfect kingfisher photo. The one everyone wants: wings spread wide, water droplets falling from a dive, fish in beak etc. but until that moment, they’re always a pleasure to watch.

Everybody else was walking on by and doubtless wondering who that young loony was in the maroon hoodie-and-chinos combo with the ridiculous lens, hanging half over the bridge, but hey, I was having a good time. That’s my idea of a morning well spent, anyway.

Sheesh, long post. My travelogues usually are. Badajoz is rather beautiful, and if my right thigh weren’t still punishing me for that 45km cross-country hike last weekend, I’d probably be enjoying it more. I could do with a rest. It’s a lot bigger than Mérida and I had to double the distance when it turned out that the albergue I had in mind was a school groups affair. I was accosted outside by three young girls who asked me if I wanted a blowjob and called out ‘oyé, feo’ and ‘mochila verde’ after me when I ignored them. Then I tried taking a shortcut through the park into the Alcazaba, but shortcuts do tend to make long delays, and in this case the road came to a sudden and unexpected end. The door was there alright, but the road… wasn’t.

The adventures never end! Left the restaurant to soak up the night in the square and a wandering troupe of musicians asked me for directions to the ayuntamiento. I pointed them in the right direction, but their leader deduced that I clearly wasn’t from Badajoz. Back atcha, tío; ‘I’m from Villafranca de los Barros’. ‘Villafranca?! Hombre, somos de Ribera!’ (the next town along from VdB). It’s a small world. And I’ve just noticed that I missed a major performance from the best gypsy musicians of Badajoz at the theatre tonight. Only two doors down from the hostel, as well. Rats. I’ll be back.

I’d better call it a night there and head on back to the hostel. I might try for sunrise over the Guadiana after this evening’s gorgeous Portuguese sunset. On a final note, I had the happiest moment of the month on the road to Badajoz when I saw, in the distance, a giant V-flock of some one hundred and twenty cranes on their way south. It’s only the very moment I’ve been waiting for, the first true sign of winter in Extremadura. I was practically jumping out of my seat, I was so happy.

The photo hardly does it justice, so I’ll go hunting for them some other time when I’m not stuck on a bus. But that’s an adventure for another day. BB, which may or may not stand for Bird-Brain amongst other things, signing out x

Breathless in Paradise

August 31, 2015August 31, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Snorkeling is just about the best idea anybody ever had. The world underwater is singularly enchanting, whether you’re drifting over white sands, coal stacks or the open blue. If it weren’t for my breathing issues, and a nasty little demon called fire coral, I’d rank it right up at the top of my favourite things in life.

With school out for the end of summer – just like last year, I’ve been working all the way through it to the point where it feels like it never came at all – we’ve nothing but time on our hands until our Saturday morning flight. At Eloise’s suggestion, Andrew and I find ourselves back in Aqaba, two weeks after we popped by for a visit on our way back from Wadi Rum. By some curious stroke of luck, our hotel, the Bedouin Garden Village, happened to be the very same place we’d got our snorkeling gear from last time, so the manager, a carefree local who makes his living lounging about on the beach, smoking shisha and leading diving groups out into the reefs, already knew us and was pleased to see us again. It’s still intolerably hot – the midday sun peaks at a regular 42 degrees – but it’s cooler than it was, if you ask the locals.

The last time I wrote about snorkeling, I gave myself a paragraph. Looking back, that’s more than a little silly. It’s criminal. So this time I’ll put you inside my head, so you can see what I see:

I squeeze my feet into two giant flippers and waddle down to the water like a particularly incapable penguin, adjusting and readjusting my snorkel; there’ll be none of last time’s mistakes, or I’ll just have o March straight back to the hotel and ask – God forbid – for a demonstration. Walking forwards in the water isn’t easy in footwear more than three times the size of your feet, so I turn and start walking backwards, for all the good it will do. And what do you know? It’s a little easier. There’s a neat little life hack for you. Alternatively, you could just belly out and swim. And so I do.

For the first few metres it’s a long stretch of silver sand, dotted here and there with a buried cola bottle or lens cap. The first few fish are tiddlers, with the exception of a familiar school of silvery mullet that gawp their way along the shore. Up ahead, the reef looms. One more kick of the flippers and we’re over.

There’s only a small space between the reef and the surface, hardly enough for a man to swim over untouched, but temptation is a dangerous lady, and I can’t stop myself. Up on the reef it’s a sudden explosion of colour, and the coral has very little to do with that. It’s the fish that light up the place. There are canary yellow butterflyfish in twos and threes, flanked by dusky Arabian angelfish and solitary sergeant majors; the mottled form of a greasy grouper hugging the rocks while a triggerfish, resplendent in robes of blue and green, watches from the sand; dragonfish staring up in a stargazing torpor from the seabed whilst speckled white gobies dig their nests all about; clownfish weaving in and out of the multicoloured anemones they crave. Stranger denizens still, like the angular boxfish, the pipefish-through-photoshop cornetfish and the bizarre unicornfish, with what can only be described as a horn protruding an inch and more between its eyes, haunt the nooks of the reef, like the shady underbelly of this grand fashion show.

I’d like to say those are the thoughts going through my head right now, but it’s actually more of a constant stream of ‘ohh’, ‘wow’ and ‘ohmyGodthisissobeautiful’. Poetic to the last. And this time, my mask isn’t leaking and my snorkel is watertight, and I can enjoy this whole spectacle without hyperventilating. Further out, there’s a shipwreck that’s supposedly crawling with moray eels, and even a sunken tank. I’d love to swim out to see them for myself, but I don’t put much trust by the strength of my reserves. I may be a mean (if explosive) sprinter, but I’m not the strongest of swimmers, having been much too obstinate to ever learn to breathe properly. I’ll leave that adventure to Andrew and Mac. They already have a taste for exploring creepy wrecks from the abandoned hospital off Rainbow Street. I might try again this afternoon, but right now I’d rather continue to explore the reef.

Oh bummer, some seawater got into my snorkel. I have to surface to spit it out, but in the action a great wave pushes me under and I get an eyeful of Red Sea salt. By the time I’ve got my mask back on, it’s steamed up and I have to take it off again to clear it up. The vicious waves are making this little task impossible. I make a beeline for the buoy line that marks the edge of the reef and try holding on to that, but of course, it goes under the water, and it’s prickly to the touch from all the little reef creatures growing on it. So I make for a stack of brain coral and haul myself as gently as I can to sit on it and readjust my mask in peace. The wind’s really picking up; you can see the sand blowing across the beach back on the shore. The waves are equally relentless, but I’m holding my own here. I can see Andrew and Mac a fair way out. They’ve gone beyond the buoy that marks where the sunken tank is supposed to be, but they’ve drifted quite a way off course. If we’re not careful we’ll have a fair walk on our hands when we get back to the beach – or a harder swim, flippers or no.

Fwoosh! The giant wave comes out of nowhere and throws me back against the coral. No, not the coral, against the rock, and a stack of fire coral, which isn’t really coral at all, but a jellyfish-like creature with a nasty sting. I don’t have much time to think about that, because I’m back underwater without my mask. Pulling myself angrily back onto the brain coral and securing my mask back onto my head, I examine my arm. There’s an ugly red weal running up the length of it, scored with white. It could just as easily be leprosy. Not only that, there’s also a similarly nasty scar on my lower back and cut across my right hand from where I grabbed the reef as the wave took me under. Oh yeah, and the covered in salt water, too. Time, I think, to beat a hasty retreat.

The beach is no friend of mine today. Two seconds on my front in the sand and there’s a stinging sensation all along my right-hand side. It’s not even my reef scars; it’s the sand, whipped up by the wind to scour my skin. Talk about a full-body workout! We’re going to have to retreat further than just the shore. I’m heading back to the pool. I don’t think I’ve ever been more grateful for such a thing.

All the same, I don’t regret it for a second, even though the fire coral rash along my arm continues to pester me, some three days later. For another hour with the colorful denizens of the Red Sea, I’d do it all again. Tell me, though; is diving supposed to be such an ordeal every time, or is Butterfingers over here just as naive as ever? BB x

From Burning Desert to Sapphire Sea

August 16, 2015August 16, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

One minute I’m standing on a high rock, staring into a lunar desert whilst desperately trying to even up my tan lines; two hours later I’m staring down at a school of damselfish drifting over a coral reef. I’m still struggling to get my head around it.

Sunrise feels far longer ago than this morning. After putting the finishing touches to last night’s report, I left the others sleeping in the campground and set off alone into the desert once again, this time to see the sunrise. I made it to the other side of the valley in time to catch the first rays of sunlight bursting over the cliffs. The sand was full of tracks: the footprints of beetles, snakes, camels and four-wheel drives crisscrossed the valley floor. There was even a lone skink trail halfway across, both satisfying and amusing on a more personal level (for the record, it’s an old family joke about lesser-spotted three-toed eagle-eyed skinks that gets wheeled out whenever yours truly gets boorishly specific about animals). The others were mostly up and about by the time I returned, and in perfect time for half an hour’s meditation before breakfast. The hefty futur Ahmad and his brother Khaled prepared for us was a kingly feast: fresh bread, helwa, jam, hummus, falafel and hard-boiled eggs (there’s no escaping them!), and that’s without mentioning four glasses of that lovely sage and cinnamon-infused Bedouin tea. Dee-lish. God help my teeth over the coming year, because Spain and the Arab world most certainly won’t.

The jeep tour of Wadi Rum was a pretty standard exploration of the main sights, as you might expect: the early Nabatean rock art, Lawrence’s house and the rock arches. I needn’t elaborate much; such sights, stunning though they may be, are better detailed in guidebooks. Besides, Langelsby’s got it covered. I highly recommend you go for a tour if you’re in the area, though. On a more personal note, I found it profoundly ironic that I finally found a haven for wildlife, in what must be outwardly one of the most inhospitable landscapes on the planet. Desert larks, white-crowned wheatears, rock martins and rosefinches followed us from rock to rock whilst the ever present grackles, the tricksters of Wadi Mujib, whistled noisily overhead. No sign of the nocturnal denizens of the desert, but a welcome change from scabby cats and pigeons. The naturalist in me will never be suppressed. So says the lesser-spotted three-toed skink, at any rate.

On the knowledge that wrangling a bus from Wadi Musa to Amman might be beyond us, we arranged with Ahmad, our kohl-eyed Bedouin guide, to take us as far as Aqaba instead, where buses to Amman would be easier to achieve. Aqaba may be your run-of-the-mill beach resort these days, but it has a notch on everything I’ve seen before: the Red Sea. Sapphire would be a better name by far. I’d heard stories and seen pictures, but I’d never really believed quite how deep a blue the Red Sea was. Quite by accident, and with no small meddling from my heart, I found myself physically incapable of passing up the chance to go snorkeling.

Water sports and I don’t have an easy history, let’s say. Ask the population of Whitstable, who watched me capsize a kayak twice and have to be towed ashore (yeah, that still smarts). Swimming’s just about my favorite sport, being both an important skill and the only sport I’ve ever enjoyed, but I have breathing issues – something to do with my nose – which makes most other water sports more problematic than entertaining. Snorkeling has always been a dream of mine, though. Not as technical as scuba and easily doable for somebody with breathing issues. I say that, at least. It’s easy in retrospect.

The first forty minutes were tortuous – not because very salty water kept leaking into my mask, or because I was panicking over the oddity of breathing through a tube, but because the scenes opening up below me were nothing short of some of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever seen (ouch, that was a bad pun). Stacks of frilled and fringed coral giving way to deep, sandy gardens shimmering in the crystal sunlight. Black sea urchins stretching their tapering spines out of crevices. Angelfish, surgeonfish, triggerfish, even clownfish, frolicking just inches in front of me. It was like living a wildlife documentary in the flesh. By the time I’d finally worked out how to breathe properly – ironically, the key to it was simply calming down and having faith in the tube – we only had five minutes left in the water. But those last five minutes were magical, even more so than the stars over Wadi Rum. Who could possibly feel lonely, or even give loneliness a second’s thought, with scores of brightly colored fish teeming about so close to? Those were my brightest moments.

Christ, but I feel like a tourist right now. I’ve just tackled three of Jordan’s biggest attractions in two days flat: Petra, Wadi Rum and the Red Sea. I didn’t really give Petra much clearance, did I? Mm, I’ll leave that one to the girls over at Langlesby Travels (https://langlesbytravels.wordpress.com/).

It’s been a busy weekend and a half. It feels unreal, somehow. But I don’t regret it for a second – and for once, l don’t even feel ashamed. I am a tourist. Jordan thrives on tourism. I guess I’m finally beginning to accept that. And about time too! Travel is no more and no less than the best thing you can do with your life, and it’s such a shame to have it spoiled by something you could never change, even if you wanted to. BB x

Earthgrazer

August 15, 2015August 15, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

We caught the Perseid comet shower alright. I counted thirty-odd shooting stars in the first hour, and I can’t have seen them all. What do you think of when you see a shooting star? I figure it means something is about to happen. That’s what I think.

The night sky in Wadi Rum is really something special. Guide books say that about a lot of things, especially Petra, but I figure you get far more bang for your buck out here under the stars in Wadi Rum. Sure, I’m having to write this at half one in the morning in the stifling heat of my hooded sleeping bag after Andrew complained about the light keeping him up – through he’s still foghorning away away as I write – but I figure this is one of those nights where you have to tell it in the moment, before it’s gone. Gah, but this is unbearable. I’m taking the iPad out. I need a break of fresh air.

My apologies. I fell asleep. Let’s start this again, some four hours later, this time from a cliff a short distance from the camp. Now it’s the starlings making the racket.

By some queer streak of coincidence,some of the most decisive moments of my life to date have been marked by comet showers. I can kind of understand how people used to see them as harbingers of doom. There was a particularly memorable one the night I was chosen to go to Uganda to represent my school, and another the following year on the night before my very last and very best gig with my old Funk Band. I didn’t keep an eye out the last time the Perseid came around – if I remember correctly, I was on bedtime duty – but I remember that the last time I saw a comet shower I had my heart broken. Coincidence? Of course. But I like to believe. There’s that little bit of childish fantasy in all of us. As I reasoned in an earlier post, it’s good for the heart to let go of reason every once in a while and to trust in faith, in whichever form it may take.

After my last comet experience, I wanted a cure. Something to smile about this time. Wadi Rum provided the perfect antidote. I went wandering into the desert a couple of hours after nightfall, not exactly asking myself any deep and meaningful questions as such, but thinking overly hard as I tend to do when I’m alone. I don’t know why I didn’t remember this from visiting the desert castles in the Badia last month, but when you’re alone out in the desert, any emotion you’re feeling gets multiplied fivefold. I was feeling pretty lonely and it got almost unbearable after an hour or so under the stars, beautiful though they might be. It was a bit unnerving, too; dark shapes that became stands of grass in the darkness, and others that didn’t; the blink of a distant flashlight; the patter of feet from somewhere nearby. I think I crossed paths with a fox last night. His footprints were there in the morning, at least.

I found my way back to the sandbank at the edge of the camp to watch the peak of the shower with Daniel and the girls. At six minutes past midnight a single comet blazed brilliant white across the sky to the south, leaving a tail behind it so long and bright that it hung in the sky for a few seconds. One of those ones called earthgrazers, so I’m told, on account of their burning deep into the atmosphere. That was the one worth waiting for. The shining light in the darkness. Yadda yadda, lonely lonely. It was a star worth wishing on though, and I wished with all my heart, that’s for sure.

Standing alone to watch the stars over the desert was intense, and though it wasn’t the most memorable night sky I’ve ever seen (shock, horror, but that award goes to the stars over Bwindi with the red glow of a volcano to the southwest) it is definitely going down as one of my favorite experiences to date. Only next time I go stargazing, perhaps I’ll do myself a favor and won’t go it alone. Highly unlikely, of course, but a man can only hope. BB x

Sunstroke

July 27, 2015July 27, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

I’ve never felt so spent. More than once today I felt myself on the edge of what I could stand. Dana almost defeated us all, but it was the Sun that dealt the coup de grace.

I find myself collapsed in the shade of a fir tree halfway up the mountain on the winding path back to Dana. Andrew’s gone on ahead to get water. He’s been a real hero, egging me on up the mountainside, but I’ve slowed to such a dreadful crawl that to keep him waiting would be nothing short of torture, what with the Sun enacting merciless fury upon us all. I can only hope he doesn’t think too little of me for my lack of staying power. Working out may be a new thing for me, and true to form I’ve been none too quiet about it in my usual late-to-the-party mode, but this is something else. I can’t even see where the others have got to; MacKenzie shouldn’t be all that far behind – he was trailing us by just one bend a little while back – but there’s no sign of Kate and Andreas. I do hope they’re alright.

My heartbeat has slowed to a beat every half-second; it was pulsing like a war drum when I crumpled under the tree about ten minutes ago. Before that I’d been desperately seeking shade like some kind of wretched insect, curling up head-down behind woefully inadequate slabs of sandstone to dip my head beneath a foot or less of cool shadow. Frodo’s climb of Erebor might not have been too dissimilar; in my dehydrated insanity I even considered crawling some of the distance, when my legs felt like they might give way and my head started spinning. It’s not even the sweat that’s the problem, I’ve gone beyond that. Even here in the shade, it’s the lack of water that’s choking me. I’m drowning in hot air. Every breath feels like sandpaper in my throat. You can’t see it, but the air is full of dust, thrown up from the desert rolling out to the horizon at the foot of this canyon, some six or seven kilometers to the southeast. The mountains take their own prisoners, but desert mountains are in an especially villainous league of their own.

McKenzie just passed by. He’s still soldiering on, despite having free-climbed the cliff wall with Andreas just over an hour ago. How he has the strength for this I’ll never know. Christ, I’m out of shape. And to think that the original plan was to strike out for Petra from here. It beggars belief. I suspect we’d need a lot more than just two bottles of water to keep the five of us going. Ugh, water. It doesn’t bear thinking about. My mind can only picture two things at the moment: intense heat or gushing cold water. Both, as you can imagine, are tortuous in the extreme.

But this heat, though… It must be pushing forty. What could drive a man to seek adventure in this merciless heat? It’s dizzying enough without the climb, and there’s precious little cover, what with the Sun bearing down with unfettered ferocity on this face; just a couple of boulders and trees on the way up are tall enough to offer fleeting sanctuary. I’ve never been so exhausted, spent in every way, from my toes to my eyes. If I could put a name to it – other than a very bad idea from the outset – I’d call it sunstroke. Thick wooly walking socks and a swollen toe from this morning’s roof-jumping escapades didn’t help matters. If it weren’t for Andrew’s breathing exercises, I’d have just about given out, I reckon. Again, the man is a hero.

I hear footsteps in the distance, running. Ah – here comes MacKenzie again, bottle of water in hand. Salvation! The five thousand weren’t more grateful for all that fish and bread than I am at this sight. Enough, cruel Sun, I concede defeat; I’d quite like to return to Dana alive, if just to put an end to this despondent surrender. Over and out. BB x