Travels

At the End of the World

/ Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

Cape Finisterre, 20.11.

Galicia provides. Happiness writes white but the white light is brilliant, like the sands that run along the length of the bay beneath my window. Like the feathers of the gannets and terns that dance above the face of the water. Like the sparkling reflection of the sun as it sinks below the horizon along the 42nd parallel north, disappearing beyond the Atlantic, beyond Chicago, beyond the end of the world.

Madrid feels a world away. I caught the early AVLO train from Chamartín and joined a modest number of passengers on the three hour journey to Spain’s north-westernmost region. The railway line tunnels under the snowy peaks of the Guadarrama before racing across the featureless plains of Zamora and then, slowly, climbing into the wooded hills and craggy moors west of Astorga before rolling through the deep valleys of Galicia proper. Spain is one of those countries that alters radically as you travel through it, and the Madrid-A Coruña train is a very good way to prove that point.

I arrived in Santiago de Compostela with a couple of hours to kill before the bus to Fisterra, so I wandered into town and sat in the main square in front of the cathedral for a while. A few school groups posed noisily in front of the cathedral, while exhausted pilgrims sat at the feet of the pillars, soaking up the sunlight to recharge their batteries. There aren’t as many now as there were during the summer. I guess that’s to be expected. The year I made the trek, 2023, was also a delayed holy year, the first since the COVID-19 pandemic shut the Camino down, so the numbers were especially high.

I wonder how far these bold pilgrims had come this year. What friends did they make on their journey? What memories will they take away with them forever? Did somebody watching from the sidelines wonder that about me, years ago?

The bus from Santiago to Fisterra is almost as long as the train from Madrid, but it does travel along one of the most scenic routes in the whole country. To reach the famous cape, it first has to pass through all the towns and villages along the coast, fording the great rías that weave through the cliffs on their way to the sea. The sun came out from behind the clouds just as the cape came into sight, and the whole coast seemed to come to life: the yellow flowers of the gorse shone like gold, the sand beneath the shallows glittered like jade. My heart did a similar leap once when I saw the silhouette of Olvera, my old hometown, for the first time in seven years. It made me smile to think that this place had joined that pantheon.

I arrived early, so I went down to the beach to soak up the sea air for a while. Fisterra is so special to me because it combines the two sides of my heart: the sounds and smells of the sea from my childhood in England, and the language, cliffs and mountains of my adult love for Spain. Mountains take my breath away (especially the craggy limestone kind) and marshes hold a special kind of rapture for me, but I think I will always come back to the sea when I need to feel whole again.

As I watched, a sandwich tern flapped into the little bay and started diving for fish. It was a beautiful sight to see, for the waters are so clear here that I could see the bird’s brilliant white form beneath the water after it had dived, moving like a living arrow. After five attempts it speared a shining silver fish and took off to the south with its catch in its beak. I realised the path on Google Maps didn’t actually exist and beat a quick retreat to the hotel for check-in.

The last time I was here, I only saw the town’s fishery out of hours. I got lucky this afternoon: on my way to the cape I dropped in and caught the daily auction (or lonxa) in full flight. Crates of hake, mackerel, red gurnard and more than a dozen other species I learned to identify as a kid went to the highest bidder in one of the mildest mannered auctions I’ve ever seen (though, to be fair, I haven’t seen that many auctions). Some of the larger fish had QR codes slapped on the sides linking them to the fishermen who caught them, I suppose – my camera didn’t reach far enough to tell.

On one side of the room, crates of sea urchins were stacked fifteen high. I didn’t see any percebes (the region’s famous goose barnacles), but then, the manner by which they are collected is very different indeed, so that’s hardly surprising.

I left before the giant anglerfish went under the hammer. I’d have been curious to know how much that went for.

I called home from the cape and said I’d be back before sunset. It’s now fifteen minutes to sunset and I’m still here, but I’m glad I stayed. The weather here is so changeable and this might be my only chance to watch the sunset from the cape, as it was rained off the last time I was here. A small cohort of like-minded pilgrims and locals have come out here with the same idea. A couple of noisy Spaniards made a pig’s ear of taking a highly choreographed selfie nearby, much to everyone’s frustration, but they’ve gone now, and it’s been nothing but the sound of the waves for the last twenty minutes.

I’m going to stop writing now. The sun will be sinking below the horizon soon and I want to appreciate every second as it does. See you on the other side. BB x

Lost Souls

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Calle de San Millán, Madrid. 21.03.

The gates of Hell are open night and day / smooth the descent, and easy the way.

Virgil, The Aeneid

At the foot of the mighty bridge that spans the gorge over the Río Tajo in Ronda, the yellowing ruin of an old pumphouse steadily crumbles into oblivion. Trees grow out of its windows and human and animal detritus clusters against its walls, as though they shrink from the searching light of the world beyond. Abandoned spots like this would be covered in graffiti in England; profane scribbles and indecipherable tags whose meanings will fade from the world long before their makers. A single graffito marks the eastern wall. Of all things, it is a quote from Virgil.

The memory came into my head as I stood before Goya’s Pinturas negras in the depths of the Prado, bewitched – and not for the first time – by the unfettered darkness on the canvas.

In the opinion of this jaded wanderer, there are few artists who can hold a candle to Goya, an artist whose style was shaped – or, perhaps, perfected – by the ravages of one of the darkest periods in Spain’s history.

The Prado does a fantastic job at telling his story. On the top floor, illuminated by the brilliant natural glow of several skylights, his early works shine with an innocent halo. Paintings such as El quitasol and La vendimia tell of a happier time, when Goya was young and using his gifts to make a name for himself in the circles of the rich and powerful, as many an artist had done before him for generations.

Descend to the ground floor, and some of his younger naïveté is stripped away like a layer of paint to reveal a cunning eye for detail and social commentary. Unlike the illustrious royal portraits by Titian and Velázquez which grace the walls further down, Goya’s subjects are painted as they are, without any false veneers of lustre or glory. Maja vestida has a cute smile, but she is a pale imitation of Maja vestida, whose knowing expression betrays a far greater honesty.

And then you descend to the basement. The lights dim. War comes to Spain, Goya’s former patrons flee for their lives, and the country descends into chaos. Goya sees it all and sketches furiously. The illness that robbed him of his hearing pushes him into a deeper, darker school of thought, and his subjects trade their rosy cheeks and playful smiles for pallid masks and devilish grins. At the same time, the faces become much more recognisably Iberian, replacing the stateless Western mannequins who previously adorned his tapestries. Still a master of light, Goya now perfects its dexter side, drawing on the darkness of the maddening world around him, culminating in the macabre frescos of the Quinta del sordo. The sunken, bulging eyes of Saturn and his gaping maw stare out of the canvas with a malice that is at once pitiful and horrifying.

An American girl is toured swiftly around the room by her imperious mother, the latter commenting loudly on the broader collection ‘back home in Washington’. A Latin-looking schoolboy fills out a couple of questions on a worksheet on one of the paintings and moves on. Two young parents push their infant child by in a pushchair. They cast Saturn a brief glance and move on, a little faster. A gallery official in black and red watches from a corner, but nobody needs reminding that photos are not allowed in here. Goya’s demons still have the power to strike terror, two hundred years later.

Out in the daylight, Madrid goes about its business. My footsteps take me back into the heart of the city. There are a lot of indios about: current estimates hold that they make up one in seven of the capital’s population. In the city centre, I’d wager the ratio is even higher. Pizarro’s pigeons have come home to roost.

In a side-street, two officers of the municipal police search a couple of North African men, who have their hands on their heads – “Qué hacéis por aquí?”. A carton of box wine lies discarded in the road, ignored by a street sweeper who is watching the scene unfold over his shoulder, sweeping the same dust in circles.

In Plaza Santa Ana, a small group of Africans have laid out their wares on white blankets and try to flog what they can to passers by in reluctant, almost disinterested tones. Clutched in their hands at all times are the ropes fastened to each corner of the blanket, ready to be drawn up in a moment’s notice. These unfortunate hawkers are known in Spain as top manta, and are usually more in evidence in the larger cities along the coast: Barcelona, Valencia, Málaga… wherever careless tourist money can be found.

It crosses my mind, as it has before, to strike up a conversation with one of them. To get their side of things. To hear their story. Something checks me: a sense that unfriendly eyes are watching. I scan the square.

Sure enough, standing in the shade of a plane tree at the edge of the square is their overseer: a surly man in a Cameroonian football shirt. He appears motionless, but his eyes are fixed on the street vendors, who occasionally return his gaze, like nervous shorebirds before a sleeping crocodile.

My speculation becomes flesh when one of the hawkers approaches him with what seems to be a question. The conversation is obviously not an amicable one, and the overseer is on his feet and shouting, followed swiftly by his companion, a big chap with dark shades and a military-style beret. The overseer barks at the hawker and sends him packing. “No eres más que un puto negro.” It’s a loaded insult, but since it’s contained, hurled from one immigrant at another, nobody seems to notice. Madrid’s shoppers continue about their business. Tourists sink half pints of Mahou and Amstel mere yards away. A lost soul staggers to keep his balance, either too drunk or too drugged up to pay the scene any heed. The two Latino vagrants sleeping rough in the shade of a nearby bush hardly bat an eyelid. One stirs slightly, the other draws on his cigarette, casting a gentle orange glow in the shadows.

As I turn down a street toward the city centre, I see a police car slowly crawling toward the square. I turn around, but the top manta touts have already got wind of the impending threat: their bags are slung across their shoulders and they are retreating into the shadows. They will be gone long before the police arrive.

Goya’s Madrid is a dichotomy: a place full of light and consequently of shadows also, of rosy-cheeked beauty and ugly avarice. This is no less true now than it was two hundred years ago: it just wears Adidas trainers now.

Tomorrow I leave the capital behind and make for the windswept coast of Galicia. I have never been much enamoured of cities, being inclined to agree with the author M.M. Kaye, who described them as “the breeding places of the very worst aspects of humanity”. My destination is the Costa da Morte – the Coast of Death – the wrecking place of many a luckless merchant sailor. But its name is deceptive: for me, it is a place of unfiltered light and hope.

The gates of hell are open night and day / Smooth the descent, and easy is the way / But to return, and view the cheerful skies / In this the task and mighty labor lies.

Virgil, The Aeneid

The mighty labour has begun. There are still fragments of my heart in need of healing after last year’s American adventure. Hard work and endless endeavour have been a good palliative, but they are not the solution. Finisterre healed my heart before. It will do so again. I am sure of it. BB x

The Hall of the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 13.45

A shadow lies upon his tomb, in Moria, in Khazad-dûm. The Company stood silent beside the tombs of the kings of old. There were many recesses cut in the rock of the walls, and in them were large iron-bound sarcophagi of black marble. Frodo and the Company stood in awe, but Pippin felt a compulsive urge to reach for his iPhone so that he might share the spectacle on Instagram. He held it aloft, and for a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists, and then it issued forth a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow.

“No photos!” barked the security guard, gesturing wildly in Pippin’s directions, before muttering a loaded “turistas” under her breath.

In the year 1563, Felipe II ordered the construction of an enormous palace in the foothills of Monte Abantos, partly to commemorate his victory over the French at the Battle of San Quintín, partly as a country retreat where he could hunt big game, but perhaps most importantly as a necropolis for the Hapsburg line. Here, entombed within the bowels of the largest Renaissance building on Earth, lie the remains of almost every king and queen of Spain of the Hapsburg and Bourbon lines.

To get here from Madrid, you have to catch a bus from Moncloa. Spain is steadily catching up to the rest of the world as a cashless country, but most of the local bus companies are still coin-operated. I was delayed by an hour because my first attempt to board was a flop: the driver thought I said “puedo cobrar” instead of “comprar” and wagged a finger at me, saying “yo cobro, tú pagas”. Granted, I had a cold, but I’m pretty sure I made myself clear. I was honestly so ruffled by his wagging humour that I forgot I did actually have a ten euro note on me, so I got off the bus and went in search of breakfast and a cash machine – and a few plasters for my wounded ego.

The next bus driver wasn’t a wisecrack, so I had a very enjoyable ride across the dehesa. To the north of the road to El Escorial, the snowbound peaks of the Guadarrama rise up out of the plain, its mantle pure and unspoilt by the ski-lifts and stations that criss-cross similar ranges in Central Europe. At one point, the road crosses the Valdemayor reservoir, and on a cloudless day such as this, the mountains rise again into the mirrored surface of the blue waters.

The centrepiece of El Escorial – as is so often the way with Spain’s grandest architectural treasures – is an enormous basilica, featuring a collection of saintly portraits, painted ceilings and a gilded reredos of jasper and red granite that stands an eye-watering 92 ft tall. As if that weren’t enough, the high altar is watched by the sentinel eyes of life-size bronze sculptures of Felipe II and his father, Carlos V, and their respective families, eternally offering their prayers to God above the crypt where their bodies are interred. It’s no great leap of the imagination to compare El Escorial to the Valley of the Kings: should it fade into memory someday, the discovery of the altarpiece alone would be an archaeologist’s field day.

The comparisons don’t end there. Much like the triumphal engravings of Ramses’ victory at Kadesh in Abu Simbel and Trajan’s Column in Rome, El Escorial’s “Sala de Batallas” (Hall of Battles) testifies to the martial prowess of the Habsburg line, depicting the greatest victories over the French, Moors and other enemies of the dynasty across over a hundred metres of fresco. That’s ten times the length of my mega drawing and eight times the height. I clearly missed my calling by four and a half centuries.

As well as a hoarding place for countless royal artefacts (including one of the largest collections of holy relics in the world, numbering around 7,500), El Escorial is most widely known as the final resting place of Spain’s monarchy from the early modern period on. These most haunting treasures of the royal palace can be found in the innermost depths of the palace complex, entombed within vaulted marble sarcophagi that contain the remains of princes, consorts, bastard sons and daughters and other high-ranking members of the Hapsburg line, right the way up to the present. The blank headstones above the sarcophagi in the last rooms sit waiting for Juan Carlos’ relatives and their progeny.

If that weren’t chilling enough, one of the rooms features an enormous marble monument to those of royal blood who perished before puberty, marked with A or B to differentiate between the Austria and Bourbon clans. With their famous predilection for morganatic marriages, it’s perhaps no surprise that so many infantes never made it to adulthood.

In the deepest reaches of all, far below the palace itself, is a golden chamber called the Panteón de los Reyes. This is the Habsburg Holy of Holies, where the bodies of the kings and queens were laid to rest: from Carlos V, who oversaw the conquest of the America’s and the birth of the Spanish Empire, all the way up to Alfonso XIII, exiled in 1931 by the short-lived Spanish Second Republic. In a single 360° turn you can see them all. There can be few places in the world quite like this, where you are quite literally encircled by the tombs of the kings of the past.

In such a sacred space, photos are, quite naturally, forbidden – but that didn’t stop a couple of Korean and American tourists from trying. I just carried out a quick sketch in my journal and was done with it. Nobody ever seems to mind the sketching. I wonder why that is?

Outside, the air is a lot less oppressive. A number of articles describe the location as “austere”, and I can imagine that in the grip of winter it may well be, but under the warm spring sunshine it is anything but. A cool wind blows down from the snowy mountains, but it is accompanied by a warmth in the air, sweeter with the scent of cherry blossom. Crag martins and wagtails twitter merrily over the pool, and in the dehesa beyond, I saw (and heard) a family of one of Spain’s most beautiful birds of all, the Iberian magpie, a relic of the Ice Age whose nearest living relatives can be found in eastern China. As I watched them hopping around in the branches of the nearest tree, a little owl flew into sight, calling to its partner in the valley below.

Finally, the greatest sight of all. As I made my way back to the bus station, a lonely black shadow came down from the mountains, casting an unmistakeable silhouette against the intense blue of the Spanish sky: a griffon vulture, the true king of these mountains. They were here long before the Hapsburgs and will be haunting these hills long after they have been forgotten.

I have been fascinated with vultures since the first time I saw one. That boyish glee I get when I see that shape in the ether hasn’t gone away after twenty years. I don’t think it ever will.

Austere? The building, perhaps, in true counter-reformation style, but the location? Hardly. I don’t think Felipe needed much convincing. If I had all that Habsburg money floating around, I’d have wanted to end my days here, too. BB x

Wishes and Migas

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Calle de San Millán, Madrid. 20.09.

The sun is just starting to set beyond the skyline. Down in the street below, Madrid’s colourful denizens are out for an evening paseo, dressed to the nines to the last man (and woman). The rumble of motorbikes is a constant accompaniment to the general hubbub and the occasional police siren soars above it all every now and then. The lodgings I’ve managed to snag come with a balcony that looks out over the crossroads below, so I’m treating myself to the noise of Madrid for a few days before retreating to the quieter shores of Finisterre, at the end of the world.

The capital is much as I remember it from my last visit, several years ago, though it makes a change to see the place under the warm spring sunshine rather than wrapped up in the chestnut smoke of winter. It’s inching toward 20°C outside, but the madrileños are still going about in puffer jackets and (fashionable) greatcoats as though it were 5°C. I haven’t brought any heavy-duty winter wear as I have to carry everything with me from Madrid to Galicia to the Canary Islands and beyond on this latest adventure, but I might pick up a few Spanish clothing supplies while I’m here in the city. I haven’t overpacked, for once.

During the course of my wanderings I stumbled (quite by accident) upon the Tienda de Deseos again. I found this strange corner of Madrid last Christmas, its walls covered with the scribbled desires of a hundred passers-by fluttering in the winter wind. Last year there were quite a few lonely hearts on here. This year there seem to be a lot more general “wishing for all the best in life” requests. I made a wish last year to find her – “wherever she may be”. This year I was a bit more specific. Beautiful though it was, I don’t think I’m quite ready for another trans-Atlantic situationship.

Even in the heart of the capital, there are clear signs that spring is here. The cherry trees lining the Calle del Arenal are dressed all in white. The swifts are here early, too – they must have come hurtling in on the wings of the rainclouds, because I’ve never seen the Río Manzanares so full.

There were a few posters on some of the bollards advertising an anti-hate march in defense of the Trans community, which I really ought to have stuck around to watch, as it’s one of the A Level topics for Spanish at the moment. A smaller group of protesters were picketing the Corte Inglés just off Sol, sporting the usual V for Vendetta masks and carrying telescreens displaying the slaughter of fish off the Spanish coast. Nobody seemed to be paying them much attention.

I treated myself at dinner with a rather upmarket restaurant modelled on Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s Capitán Alatriste books – dishes, decor and all. It didn’t disappoint one bit. I had my first migas in seven years and tried cochinillo for the first time. It was incredible, even though my taste buds hadn’t quite recovered from the usual end of term knockout cold.

On my first grand adventure across Spain many years ago, food was a luxury I rather recklessly decided to do without. Now that I have the means, I intend to make good on that dreadful error by exploring the best dishes the country has to offer as I go. I haven’t found any callos yet, but they’re on my list!

Please excuse the rather humdrum post today. I haven’t had any grand escapades yet! The real adventures start tomorrow… BB x

Amber and Ashes

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Warsaw is a strange town. For a European, at least. It’s like looking at a replica – which is not so far from the truth at all, as the city was razed to the ground with unparalleled savagery on Hitler’s orders. It seems absurd that I stayed in buildings in the US this summer that were older. But, there we are. It’s a testament to the Poles’ love for their capital city that they rebuilt the place brick by brick, presumably at no small expense.

I’ve come to the centre of the Old Town in search of amber for my mother, to replace a pair of cherished earrings lost long ago. I wanted to visit the Polish Jewish Museum and the Warsaw Uprising Museum, but as luck would have it, those two museums – and only those two – are closed on Tuesdays. So I do one of my usual make-it-up-as-you-go walking tours instead.

The usual global parasites that infest the heart of Europe’s ancient cities have been mercifully kept outside the old town walls: the lurid glare of the Hard Rock Café, Costa coffee and the Golden Arches can be seen from its outermost streets, but no further. Along with the usual array of anachronistic American college jackets with Warsaw splashed across them, quite a few souvenir shops appear to be selling tee-shirts with the city’s name in Star Wars font. One even has a chibi Darth Vader next to the slogan “I love Warsaw”. It seems a little tasteless to have a man infamous for his hatred, wanton destruction, ruthless repression and stormtroopers (and who isn’t even the obvious real life counterpart) associated with a city like Warsaw, but perhaps the irony was lost on the designers.

Not far from the city centre stands a miniature statue atop a plinth, just outside the city walls. It depicts a child soldier, an anonymous victim of the Warsaw Uprising. It is a stark reminder of just how young the rebels were: the average age of the insurgents was only seventeen. One has to hand it to the incredible courage of the Poles for standing up to the might of the Third Reich, when they were all but trapped under the heel of the Führer’s jackboot.

Nothing remains of the Jewish ghetto, which was considerable. Similar ghettos in Spanish cities are minute by comparison, despite Spain once housing a not insignificant percentage of the world’s Jews. There are nods to what once was: a metal plaque cuts across the road in places, marking where the perimeter walls once stood.

In a park nearby, a woman in a fur coat walks her dog. I arrive one minute too late to catch the start of the changing of the guard, but I do see the new sentries move into position beside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A fire burns steadily in an iron grate between them. The chosen shelter for the tomb is the last remaining piece of a former palace complex, of which only three arches survived the destruction of war. A short wall on either side of the square bars access to what looks like an excavation site. Beyond that, the yellow squares of ceiling lights gleam from behind the glass of the office buildings. I have always been curious as to what it might be like to work in one of those places, though it’s the same kind of curiosity I harbour for how it might feel to tumble over a cliff or to sink to the bottom of the ocean. Perhaps I’m happier not knowing.

Night falls. Warsaw puts her Christmas clothes on. I consider going without supper, but one of the restaurants in the old town does flaki and I can never say no to offal. This time I can savour it in peace, without the tutting and sermonising of the vegetarian globetrotter who was so judgemental of my taste before. The pierogi are probably a bit much and I can’t finish them all, but I do an honest job of it. I suspect that flaki appeals to me because tripe stew isn’t too far from the Spanish dish of callos or any number of dishes I have eaten in Uganda and Morocco.

Back at the hotel, I have a lot of time to think. I pack my bags. I watch Polanski’s The Pianist and try to picture those things happening right beneath my hotel window, some eighty years ago. I tell myself I mustn’t sell myself so cheaply anymore, apologise to a few matches on Hinge and unmatch. I take a shower and read back through the blog to happier times, to the Camino, and wonder whether that ought to be my next grand adventure. After all, the end of the Camino isn’t the end of the road. It’s just the start of the next one. BB x

A Parting Gift

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A loud knocking at my door woke me this morning. It was only Łukasz checking I was up and about, but it caught me off guard all the same. I must have passed out the night before. I guess I was more worn out than I thought. My phone was on about 18% battery and the bathroom light was on. I sheepishly turned it off, threw on some clothes and all but inhaled a cup of green tea so as not to hold the others up any longer. Talk about a bad start.

I needn’t have been so flustered. It was absolutely miserable outside, the earth damp from a night of rain and melted snow and the sky dark with the threat of more. The temperature had risen by about six degrees, which was something, but it was hardly what you’d call perfect wildlife watching conditions.

Nature, however, is and always has been fickle, and we were in for more than one surprise before we bade farewell to Białowieża.

We agreed to try for the bison once again, after our lucky encounter with the wolves the day before. We found the herd even faster than on the first morning, grazing in a field just outside Narewka. They seemed unapproachable at first, but Łukasz had a better idea.

A hidden track ran through the forest on the other side, allowing us to get a lot closer than we’d managed on the previous occasion. Of course, the conditions were awful for photography. The focus assist light on my camera kept blinking in its struggle to focus on the dark shapes which Łukasz admonished me for, fearing it might spook the herd. I gave up pretty quickly and contented myself with watching the bison through my binoculars. I did manage a grab shot through them with my phone again, though.

A squall came in and we backed down. Łukasz concluded it was not the herd we’d seen before, which had numbered some thirty-nine individuals and hadn’t featured the bull with the twisted horn. Hoping to show us more in the time we had left, he took us back to the last place we’d seen the larger herd. He offered to go out and run to the spot where we’d left them. I volunteered to go with him. We had barely gone more than a few yards when he suddenly stopped in his tracks, held up his hand and said ‘Wolf!’.

I dropped to my knees and followed his line of sight. And there it was, standing on a rise at the edge of the forest: a white wolf, its winter coat lightly flecked with grey and brown. Like an echo from yesterday, it soon got wind of our attention and slinked back into the trees and out of sight. Łukasz tried calling after it, but there was no response.

After waiting for several minutes, we counted our stars for a second encounter with wolves in as many days and started heading back to the car. I must have been on high alert since being all but shaken out of bed this morning, because I saw it first: a second wolf, barely fifty metres away, watching us from the field adjacent to the track. This time it was me that gave the signal. I’d made the choice to leave my camera behind on this quick sortie, but I didn’t care. With only my binoculars to rely on, I was spared the frustration of staring through a viewfinder and getting poor results, and instead had the joy of watching the beautiful creature bounding away across the field as though it were only feet away.

I can’t show you what I saw. So let me describe it to you.

A tall and powerfully built creature, with the faintest of black lines down its legs. A warm buff colour lines its flanks, the colour of undercooked gingerbread, but its eyes – a lot more visible at such close range – are an amber so intense that not even the best of Warsaw’s jewellers could hope to replicate it. It runs as gracefully as though it were sailing across the field, and its body moves like a wave, arching and falling with every step. When it stops to look back – and it does this only once, and for just a moment – the black lips on its white muzzle are drawn into a grin. And then it turns away with a swish of its tail and lopes off into the forest.

This is Białowieża’s farewell: a final encounter with one of its most handsome creatures of all.

It is magnificent. I am lost for words.

The car is now flying through the vast flats of Eastern Poland. Scenery I remember seeing only in picture books of the East plays beyond the window like a zoetrope: stands of towering, limbless spruce trees, bending under the weight of the wind; lonely cabins and hunting hides in the fields; water towers and the bulbous spires of Orthodox churches rising out of the low-lying villages we pass.

It’s unlike any place I’ve ever been before – but then, I guess I haven’t ever traveled this far east. Go any further than Białowieża and you’ll run headlong into the Belarus border wall – a reminder that Iron Curtain of the previous century was, true to its name, only drawn back, and not ripped down for good.

One day, if the fates allow, I would love to see Siberia. I suspect that kind of adventure is absolutely off the cards for now, but until then, I can only hope things do not spiral out of control the way they did before.

There is too much that is beautiful in this part of the world, too much that has been done to save these treasures from the brink of oblivion. Too much to sacrifice on the altar of ambition. Well – that’s my ten cents on the matter, anyway. BB x

Forest of the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m kneeling in the snow, staring down an arrow-straight road carved through the forest by the Russians more than a century ago. Our guide makes a signal and tells us to wait. We could be here for up to an hour. The fever that has followed me since stepping out of the plane in Warsaw has not broken yet: I’m still nursing a headache and a bad cough, my back hurts, and I’m starting to freeze from the feet up. But I’d suffer it all again to see what I just saw: a genuine forest spirit, a shadow of the ancient world, loping out of the trees and onto the road. A wild wolf.

When I woke up this morning, it was to a frozen world. The snow hadn’t started falling when I turned in around midnight, but there must have been quite a lot of it during the night, because there wasn’t a single track to be seen in the village. That may have more to do with the fact that we were up and gone by six thirty, a full hour before sunrise, and on a Sunday morning to boot.

After a short drive through the frozen forest, Łukasz brought the car to a sudden stop and jumped out to show us what he had seen: a single set of footprints in the snow, larger than those of any dog I’d ever seen. Following a tip-off from a friend of his, we set off into the forest to try our luck with one of the wolf packs that inhabit Białowieża Forest.

We didn’t have to go for before we found another set of prints. And another. And another. In all, we counted around eleven sets of prints in the snow. They had to be recent: the snow had only started in the early hours of the morning, and it was still very early. We pushed on to the crossroads, hoping to catch a glimpse of our quarry crossing the road in one of four possible directions.

We waited. A couple of red deer broke the cover of the trees, but they didn’t look particularly perturbed – not a good sign when you’re tracking a creature that puts the fear of God into nearly everything that moves in the forest. Łukasz tried calling out to them – and a bloody convincing mimic he is, too – but the forest was silent. Wherever the wolves were, they were doing what they done since we first crossed paths as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago: giving us a very wide berth.

We moved on, taking a chance on the left road. A couple of minutes into the walk, we came to a sudden halt at the sign of a dark shadow in the road at the top of the rise. On closer inspection through the binoculars, it was another tracker and his party staring right back at us through a pair of binoculars of his own.

We met halfway. Łukasz and the other guide swapped information. They’d come from the other side of the quadrant and had found tracks on the road leading into the woods, but nothing on the forest trail, meaning the pack of eleven had to be in there still. They might well have been watching us all the while, invisible between the thousand arms of the trees within.

Well, some of them, anyway. One of the women from the other party suddenly pointed back down the road and said something. My head turned so quick it might have snapped – and then I saw it. A lone wolf standing in the road, staring straight at us. Łukasz gave a signal and we all dropped to the ground, some on their bellies, since wolves are more likely to be spooked by a standing human silhouette than a prone one.

It didn’t hang around. Before my companions could get their cameras ready, it had loped off into the cover of the trees on the other side and was gone.

We waited there for quite some time. Where there was one, the other ten were sure to be nearby. Just as we were getting restless, three red deer came hurtling through the trees to our right, from the part of the forest where the wolves were hiding. Had they been spooked by the pack? The others were momentarily distracted and in that moment I had my eyes on the road, and that’s when I saw it: a second wolf, emerging right where the first had come and gone. Unlike the first, this one didn’t cross the road in one go, but instead came trotting towards us. I motioned to the others and tried a few photos, but my poor camera was struggling in the low light, so I contented myself with the binoculars instead.

Nothing quite prepares you for the size of the wolf. You expect a dog, or something like it, but it is so much more. Bigger. Stronger. A restless hunger in its yellow eyes. An untamed purpose in its gait. Even its footprints tell you you’re in the presence of something magnificent: there’s no graceless wrinkles or adapted opposable thumbs in its pug, just a perfect symmetry of power.

We never did see the other nine members of the pack. It’s possible they made a kill during the night and decided to remain close to their prey, sending the two we saw ahead as scouts. Who knows? Eventually, we elected to abandon the vigil and leave them be, since by now the pack must have worked out where we were and how to avoid us. We left the forest by the same road we came, but not before a lone bull bison emerged from the trees just a hundred metres or so down the road. Poland, you sure know how to pull out all the stops!

We ventured into the strictly protected area of Białowieża Forest after breakfast, hoping to try our luck with some of the park’s rare bird species, but a combination of high wind and sleet cast a spell on the woods. A single mistle thrush cackling at the gates was the only sound we ever heard: neither the croak of a raven, the wittering tattoo of a nuthatch, nor the hoot of an owl, the mew of a buzzard or the drumbeat of one of the nine species of woodpecker that call the forest home. Nothing. Even the wind died away as we wandered deeper into the woods, where some of the trees are hundreds of years old, and others older still.

Białowieża Forest is famous for being one of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests, but what is even more fascinating – if a little disturbing – is that an astonishing 30% of its trees are dead (some figures indicate it may even be nearly 50%). It is, in a way, a forest of the dead, albeit one so full of life in the spring and summer that you could be forgiven for missing that small detail.

Not so in the bleak midwinter, however. The towering spruce trees look more like the charred pillars of a gutted cathedral, while those that have crashed to the ground seem like the carcasses of enormous serpents, their curving branches like shattered ribs on the forest floor. Everywhere is the sweet smell of decay and black fungus grows on the stumps of the fallen giants. The presence of several stones and crosses marking the mass execution site of hundreds of Polish Jews by the Nazis only adds to the creeping dread.

We spent around three hours in the woods, learning about the ancient trees and the various species of fungi that call the forest home, but the eerie silence of the birds was sorely noted.

We did not leave disappointed, however. Something far more beautiful and far more chilling took its place.

Just a hundred metres or so from the main gate, an unmistakeable howl broke the silence, echoed a few seconds later by another. It’s amazing how a sound that you must have imagined and read about in books for years can still make the blood run cold on instinct.

I would have settled for hearing a wolf over seeing one on this trip, and I got both. I may not have been the luckiest in love this year, but I’ve taken all the chips home with the wolves on this trip. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m doing something right at last – reconnecting with the younger version of me who was far more interested in the natural world than anything else.

If I have any budding resolutions for the New Year, it’s to do something like this again. I am, and always will be, a naturalist first and foremost, and everything else I claim to be second. I should reclaim that part of me. It is, it must be said, a genuinely happy and fulfilled part of me, and the greatest gift I could give to any children I should be lucky enough to have someday. BB x

Thathanka

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Local Time: 21.00

Bojarski Gościniec, Narewka

The temperature has risen a little since yesterday, though not by much. I’m still nursing a bad case of end-of-term-itis – it always hits me bad in the first few days of the holidays – so marching through the frosty Polish deepwoods with weak lungs and a headache was a bit of a challenge. But if I was properly breath-taken, it was on account of the incredible wildlife encounters I had this morning.

We must have set off shortly after 7am, about half an hour before sunrise. We had a couple of false starts – it turns out hay bales make very convincing bison half an hour before sunrise – but it didn’t take us long to track down a sizeable herd grazing in the fields.

The European Bison, or wisent, is one of conservation’s greatest success stories. What was once a ubiquitous symbol of Pleistocene Europe had been driven to extinction in all three of its holdouts by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. Though strictly protected on the hunting preserves of the Russian Tsars, their numbers were already dwindling during the Early Modern Period and the last wild bison was shot here in Białowoeza in 1921, shortly after marauding German soldiers during WW1 whittled the herds down to just a few surviving beasts. With so many bison in zoos and private menageries spread across Europe, however, an effort was conceived to bring the wisent back from extinction. From an initial breeding stock of twelve, the population gradually recovered over the second half of the last century. The wild population now stands at around 4,000 individuals, headquartered along the Poland-Belarus border, with reintroduction projects from Blean Woods in Kent to Castelo Branco in Portugal – a truly remarkable rescue operation.

Our guide, Łukasz, took us to a number of places where the bison often leave the forest to graze. It’s been a good year for acorns, so they aren’t venturing out into the open as much as usual, browsing instead on the bumper crop in the dark heart of the ancient forest. Perhaps that’s why we had no luck after leaving the first herd to try our luck elsewhere.

We did find a solitary elk sitting beside the road, half covered in frost, which was an amazing stroke of luck.

Łukasz made the call to return to the herd we’d seen at sunrise, so we parked at the last spot we’d seen them and ventured out across the frosty meadow in search of our quarry.

It wasn’t hard. The heaviest land animal in Europe isn’t exactly inconspicuous.

My camera didn’t really do the beasts justice – I don’t possess a supertelephoto lens like many amateur wildlife photographers – so I resorted to a little optical trickery by “digiscoping” – that is, holding my iPhone camera up to the viewfinder of Łukasz’ scope. It took some manoeuvring and I only got one usable shot, but the result was pretty good… for a phone.

Tomorrow, we set out in search of the reason I booked this holiday in the first place: wild wolves. I’m well aware the odds are stacked against us, and to be honest I’d settle for hearing them, or even just following their tracks, but it is set to snow tonight, so who knows – we may get lucky. Watch this space! BB x

The Borders Have Moved

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Local time: 21.52

Bojarski Gościniec, Narewka

They weren’t kidding about the cold here in Poland. It’s hasn’t snowed properly yet this year, but the full moon is just a few days away and it’s set to bring the first snow in its wake. An icy vanguard has already won the field. The grass in the car park was already crunchy underfoot after lunch, and when I could take my eyes off the stars on my way back to my room tonight, the wood panelling outside glittered like stardust.

I’ve come out here on an organised tour run by Wild Poland, a firm that I must have recalled from ads in the wildlife magazines I read as a kid. Łukasz, our guide, met me outside a Costa coffee shop in the arrivals lounge of Warsaw-Chopin Airport, together with the other three members of our group. It’s definitely what you’d call a private tour – but that’s not how it’s always been. “We barely survived COVID”, Łukasz explained. “Back then, we had a team of maybe thirty people. Now it’s just me and Tomasz. Brexit didn’t help. Before Brexit, maybe fifty perfect of our clients were British. Then they stopped coming. Not altogether, but not as many as before. Maybe they were worried about getting stuck over here.”

We stopped for lunch at a hotel-restaurant outside Wyszkow. The couple of British retirees provided some entertainment in their desperate search for a vegetarian option on the menu, while the third member of the expedition, a French wildlife photographer from Zürich, wasted no time in wolfing down a bowl of flaczki (beef tripe soup) followed by a rare steak topped with two fat king prawns.

Tour-hoppers are an interesting sort. I haven’t met people like these since I went gorilla trekking back in 2012. The Frenchman seems to travel the world for work, taking every opportunity he can to spend an extended weekend “shooting animals” – with one of his two cameras, of course, though before the ambiguity was cleared it was very amusing to see the momentary alarm in the faces of the retired couple when he said he was going to spend his Christmas in the south of France shooting flamingoes.

The retirees themselves seem to have spent their entire lives traveling. Iraq, Libya, India, Lake Baikal, Switzerland, Costa Rica, South Africa… it doesn’t sound like there’s a place they haven’t been. They seem to have done bloody well for themselves for a couple who left school at sixteen without mentioning work once during the day’s conversation, but perhaps belonging to the generation that inherited houses bought on the cheap in London has something to do with it. Their speech smacked of the Grand Tour. I couldn’t quite square the lady’s worldly, highly tolerant attitude with her strict vegetarianism, but I guess it takes all sorts.

It’s very quiet here in Narewka. The forest crowds in on all sides, dark and unforgiving. The lurid green Christmas decorations hanging from the lamp-posts, wrought in the shape of half-trees look rather ridiculous – a pathetic artificial import of the real thing, which stands mere feet away, as the myriad stars of the winter night sky glitter and gleam between the branches of the ancient forest. Art imitates nature and, as usual, fails to match its majesty.

Over dinner, Łukasz takes out his map and shows us the plan for the next few days. On a table behind, five men in heavy blue policja overalls play cards, sometimes coming and going, sometimes replaced by a new face, but always totalling five.

“They’re here to patrol the border,” our guide explains. “They will work through the night.” The Belarusian border is only ten kilometres away as the crow flies, slicing right through the heart of the forest. It’s been a natural crossing point for immigrants over the last few years, so the police presence here is fairly notable. I’ve seen more officers than locals.

It feels odd to be so close to the border and to hear it talked about as though it were the Iron Curtain resurgent. It feels only all the more odd with these two retired Brits talking about their carefree travels in the 1970s, before the wall came down, and all the other borders went up – before the world was gentrified.

Not for the first time, I wonder if I was cheated out of an adventure on the Greyhound buses by every American I ever met, purely because of an inherited terror incubated over decades of a world beyond the safety of their own property. Now that you can travel without fear of risk, why would you travel any other way? Adventure – from the Latin advenire – implies something unexpected, something about to happen. Something alien to a generation of tourists who only want the social clout of a shiny new Instagram photo or another country on their roster. And with more and more influencers joining their ranks every day, it’s only set to get worse.

The age of adventure didn’t stop when the last corner of the world was discovered. It ended when we sent a marketing team there.

I’ve avoided organised tours for so long because I have a deep mistrust of others managing my travels for me. I appreciate my freedom, and I prefer it to be absolute – to allow me to meet the real people and get to know the place properly. In this case, my Polish isn’t up to scratch, and I want to see a proper wildlife tracker at work.

I also really, really want to see a wild wolf. So fingers crossed for a lucky weekend! BB x

Tiny Wings

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

3rd October, 10.40pm. The Flat

The October half term holiday came to a rather unorthodox end this evening with a last minute trip into town to catch a talk by celebrated English nature-writer, John Lewis-Stempel, on his latest release: England: A Natural History. It isn’t every day you get to meet people who you have grown up reading, and as this is a year for saying yes to things, why not? I came away with a signed copy and a really interesting chat with the author about the importance of names – not just the scientific names of the animals and plants around us, mind, but the old English names that are disappearing even faster than some of the creatures themselves: you might have heard of a peewit or yaffle, or possibly even a dumbledore, but would you know a bumbarrel or cuddy bear* if they were sitting in a tree in your garden? (Answers at the end!)

I’m feeling much recharged after ten days’ leave. These boarding school terms really do knock the stuffing out of you, though as I like to say, I’m happiest when I’m up to my eyeballs – it leaves less time for dwelling on things. I left it a little late for any far-flung adventures this year, but I did make it to Dartmoor a few nights back, taking advantage of the last few days of the public bus service that crosses the moors before they shut down over the winter.

Why Dartmoor? Possibly because it’s arguably easier to get to by public transport than Exmoor, which is a lot closer, but mainly because I had an insatiable itch to see the legendary Wistman’s Wood, a tiny sliver of temperate rainforest nestled deep in the heart of the national park. It popped up in a number of ghost stories I read a while back and again in Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain. The desire to see that last fragment of the Great Wood that once covered this island ended up pressing against the inside of my skull like Wistman’s own stunted trees.

I was holding out for mist and fog, but I had neither. The weather was actually remarkably pleasant for fickle Dartmoor, so instead of mirk and mystery I was treated to soft clouds and sunlight through the ancient branches; the kind of warm glow that Tolkien bestowed for a moment upon Fangorn Forest, an ancient wood of his own design. Did he pass through here, I wonder? His faithful illustrator Alan Lee certainly must have done at some point.

Just as it sits in a valley in the innermost chamber of Dartmoor’s heart, so too is Wistman’s Wood at the heart of much of Dartmoor’s folklore. It is said to be haunted by the spirit of a terrier who can still be heard scampering through the boulders, while by night it is prowled by the far more sinister wisht hounds, a local variant of the hell-hound myth that can be found across the British Isles, from the gytrash and Barghest to the Beast of Bodmin. The wisht hounds were believed to be kennelled in Wistman’s Wood by Old Crockern himself, the ancient pagan spirit of the moor whose foreboding tor rides the crest of the hills a short distance to the west of the woods.

There were no malevolent spirits during my brief stay, of course – at least, none that I could see from my perch atop a boulder on the fringes of the forest (visitors are no longer allowed to enter the wood proper, so as to protect the longevity of this sacred and truly unique ecosystem). But that is not to say the place was lifeless: quite the contrary, in fact. There was no wind, but the trees were alive with rustling leaves that turned out to be the beating of tiny wings. In the space of a single minute I clocked three species of tit (blue, great and coal), blackbirds, redwings, wrens, robins, tiny treecreepers and the truly pint-sized goldcrest, our smallest native bird. I haven’t seen a forest so alive in a long time. Even the air itself felt different, a fact that would have been obvious to all but the senseless by the thick, mossy lichen growing on every surface, a perfect natural yardstick for a healthy forest.

I spent the next five hours or so wandering in a wide arc around the surrounding moorland, following a rather makeshift path swiped from the internet the night before. I haven’t hiked around Dartmoor since I was at primary school, so I’d forgotten that, up on the moors, river crossings are often not bridges but rows of stepping stones. Which are a delightful challenge in balmy summer weather, no doubt, but something of a roadblock after the first heavy rains of autumn. I made the tactical decision to not tempt fate and so I took off boots, rolled my trousers up to my knees and waded across.

I hardly need to point out that Dartmoor’s rivers are devilishly chilly – and surprisingly deep. I was just shy of the other bank when the water came almost up to my waist. Thank goodness I’d brought a spare pair of trousers, or I’d have had a very wet hike back to the inn!

Luckily, as I crested the hills due south of Two Bridges, the sun came out to guide me home. It seemed to turn the grass to gold, in a wave that washed down the hillside until I was stranded in an ocean of golden blades. I straggled up to the Crock of Gold, a small stone-strewn vantage point where, as if on cue, a shining rainbow daubed itself across the grey sky to the north. No leprechauns on this occasion, but I got my gold one way or another.

Well, I’d better put down my proverbial pen and get some sleep. Back to work tomorrow, and another busy term awaits! BB x

*Bravo for holding out for the answers! A peewit is of course a lapwing, a yaffle is a green woodpecker and a dumbledore is a bumblebee, while cuddy bear and bumbarrel are old English names for the wren and long-tailed tit respectively! Go figure!