Soundbites

September 29, 2017December 16, 2017 / Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

11.04am

Would the last remaining passengers travelling to Bordeaux please make your way to Gate 101.

The Duty Free at Gatwick North Terminal has grown twice in size since last year. I’m almost sure of it. It feels almost like the arcade section of an amusement park, endlessly shiny and Americanly bright. The cold, autumn sarcasm of England seems a long way off already – but maybe that’s the idea. Stepping through security into a halfway house, a no man’s land of toblerone trenches and swatch watches. There’s a stag party from South London or thereabouts on their way to Punta Cana, Arsenal shields emblazoned on their shirts and an emphatic fam thrown in after every seventh word. The Viennese kids next to me are discussing Pokémon Go in excited voices. I don’t speak German, but Pokémon is pretty international.

12.11am

Cabin crew, boarding completed.

I think there are more Brits on this flight than Spaniards. Pensioners, mostly. Grey hair, kindles and prescription glasses abound. There’s a round-faced girl with a very thick sevillana sway to her Spanish fishing for a book in the overhead locker, whilst her partner offers the usual machine gun suggestions as to where in her bag she might have put it. The woman to my left is reading a book about World War Two Italy featuring a man called Pino; her husband is browsing a Guardian article titled ‘Throw out antisemitic party members, Corbyn urged”. The tense is a little vague – either he’s taken stock of the warnings, or people are still urging him. Newspapers favour passive constructions. English is fiddly like that.

1.04pm

‘I owe you ten euros, we don’t have change. We never have change.’

Decisions, decisions. To buy a six-euro-sandwich on the plane or trek around Seville with my suitcase in search of edibles in three hours’ time? Lunchtime flights are such a pain. I guess that’s why they’re often cheap. There’s always a clicking wave up and down the plane when the seatbelt lights turn off, as though the long-awaited B is a starting gun. I can’t really concentrate on American Gods until I’ve eaten. As the trolley slowly wends it’s way down the aisle, I’m contesting myself with side-glances at the lady’s paper next to me. Apparently psychopaths prefer rap to Beethoven. Who knew?

That was a good sandwich. Worth the six euros? My stomach says yes.

3.47pm

‘Where are going after this?’

‘Oh. Somewhere.’

Alright, don’t listen to my stomach. He doesn’t know Jack shit. That sandwich was good, but not 16€ good. Turns out they really didn’t have any change at all. Serves me right for holding out for the paper brigade, I guess. We live in a plastic world now. No receipt either, so even if I were the arsey complaining type, I have no proof. I sure hope you EasyJet folks sleep easy.

I tried to start a conversation with a train of English tourists who didn’t know where the bus stop was. They were a bit suspicious of my friendliness, I suppose. What is it about the English that we suspect ulterior motives behind every act of kindness? It reminds me of a debate I had with a boy who went on to Oxford who had no faith in ‘genuine altruism’. Balls to that. You have your 16€ croque monsieur and eat it too. One thing’s for sure: there’s money to be made in tourism. If this flight is anything to go by, there’s no end to the line of retirees who’d rather be led around town by the hand for a fee than explore for themselves.

5.41pm

El autocar con destino Santiponce efectúa su salida.

Plaza de Armas hasn’t changed much, though I suspect it’s had a paint job since I’ve been away. Also, the toilets seem to be free now. That’s a major plus. The tannoy still has all the audio quality of a GCSE Spanish cassette tape, so it’s just as well I’ve done this trip a good thirty times before. Once again I’m reminded just how attractive the Spanish are as a people. The first shopping trip to Tescos after a stint in Spain always feels like a bit of a bump back down to earth, for want of a better expression. Here in the bus station, I sit amongst hawk-nosed gods. They’ve almost finished the weird Expo-style building opposite, and I still have no idea what function it’s supposed to serve. Time will tell, I guess, and Spain being Spain, that means a long time. Perhaps years. Fortunately, years is one of those things I happen to have right.

6.52pm

‘Pero, ¡hijo de la puta madre que le parió!’

We just passed a dead eagle owl at the side of the main road. Not your average roadkill. Huge and scruffy it was, with mottled feathers and ear tufts blowing in the wind. There were a few rabbits further ahead, not as common a sight here as they are back home. Almost all the creatures of this earth wear the same dusty, black-flecked coat, from the owls and rabbits to the lynx, fox, mongoose and wolf. It feels so good to be back in a land that does proper wildlife. As I write, a herd of cattle is grazing in the golden dehesa, a small party of cattle egrets following in their wake. Spain does a very good Africa substitute. Goodness, though, how the place is dry. But for the stone pines and wild olive trees, the world is wheat-yellow beneath the clouded sky. The spring greens are long since gone, along with the hat I left on this very bus…

8.17pm

‘Pasanjeros con destino Santa Marta, Albuera y Badajoz Capital, cambia aquí.’

Fucking hell, the world is upside down. Now the earth is grey and the sky is sheet gold. I’d quite forgotten how breathtaking Extremeño sunsets are. With a sky this open, you can see for miles and miles, and the sunsets seem to stretch into the infinite. The last fiery slivers of light are dipping behind the sierras to the west and the clouds have enough shades of purple and orange in them to keep my old art teacher happy for at least a couple of decades. I’d take a photo, but my camera is in the hold and the girl on the left of the bus is nonchalantly texting and chewing, oblivious to the silent fireworks going on behind her.

What a world. What. A. World. I am so very glad to be back. BB x

Entitlement

September 3, 2017September 4, 2017 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I didn’t make it to Spain.

My bags were packed. I had my lightweight hiking clothes laundered and folded and neatly placed at the top of my rucksack. My flights were booked, hold luggage inclusive, my tent rolled up and my roll-mat tucked in along the side. I’d even learned a couple of lessons from last time, and I had stocked up on plenty of mosquito repellent, sunscreen and up-to-date maps. In short, I was readier than I’ve ever been before. But I still didn’t make it to Spain.

In the end, budgeting was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Five weeks ago, when I’d bought myself a decent tent at last and was eager to put it through its paces, it seemed perfectly logical to book a return flight to Spain and see what happened. I had a tent, so this time I could camp out in the wild for free and have a cheap trip. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in fact, so much. The more digging I did, the more dangerous a notion it became. Wild camping is a legal grey area – that much is certain – but as the economic situation worsens, those countries hardest hit hit harder. Where there is money to be made, the freebooter and the vagrant are unwelcome. Whilst a local farmer may take no issue to you setting up a tent on the edge of his property, a passing local just might – for a quick buck. For a simple denuncio, one might expect to receive a small cut of the fine meted out by the police which, depending on the whims of the officer in charge, can be hefty. I’ve heard of cases of campers fined up to 600€, which is a good 590€ more than what you might pay in a campsite, if you can find one. If Spain didn’t still cling on to such legacies of the Franco era, it might not be so risky a venture. But as it stands, when a local shepherd stands to make more money by turning you in to the police than in an entire week’s work, it gives him little incentive not to do so.

My girlfriend’s mother passed onto me a keen insight on my last visit: we see a lot less danger when we’re younger. At eighteen, it didn’t occur to me that by setting up camp in the middle of the woods on the slopes of the Guadarrama I might be putting myself at the mercy, not of hungry wolves, but of hungrier shepherds. I just did it and moved on. Now that I’m older and wiser – and more wary – I find myself second-guessing a little more.

It’s just a damned shame that Spain does not have as many campsites as England does. Northumberland, for example, has over a hundred campsites. Extremadura, which is more than eight times the size of Northumberland, has twenty-two, with twelve of them concentrated in one mountain range in the north. Perhaps the Spaniards don’t enjoy camping as much as the English do, but they’re missing a trick. Spain is absolutely stunning, with scenery – in the very biased opinion of this author – second to no other country in Europe. Without campsites, or the option to wild camp, they’re missing out on the chance to reconnect with their supreme natural beauty.

When you can put a name to something you see, it means so much more to you. Your friends matter because you know them by name, just as the pupils whose names you recall stand out in your mind. Neglect to know the world around you and it will never mean as much to you as it will to the naturalist, the tracker or the mountaineer. It’s a natural connection we sorely need as tech takes over the world. Going camping offers that connection to the next generation. Or at least, so I believe.

Part of the reason I so hastily splashed out on flights to Spain which I now can’t make or change without incurring heavy surcharges (thanks a bunch, Easyjet) was a disgusting feeling of entitlement that I just couldn’t shake. Having been up to the Edinburgh Fringe for one last, loud fling with the Lights, I needed to get out. To be myself. To travel. Isn’t that what everybody else does in the summer? Instagram certainly seems to say so, as does Facebook. You can hardly move for photos of Cuba, Malaysia, New York City, the French Riviera, German markets, Polish cafés, Incan ruins and Thai elephant baths. It’s a storm of what-a-wonderful-time-I’m-havings and wish-you-were-heres that build and build until you ask yourself why you aren’t out there seeing the world. A FOMO more potent than any shot, and one that, like a bad drink, leaves a bitter aftertaste. Sooner or later, the travel bug gets to be like any other addiction, and after mowing through the next barrage of Phnom Penh sunrises and Carribean bikini lines you get itchy feet. I want to be there. I want to see that. What about me?

It’s not the Inca trail, but it’s still bloody gorgeous

Let’s not kid ourselves. Travel is not for everyone. It’s just not. It can be done on the cheap, but it’s never free. Time is money, and if you’re not spending one, you’re spending the other, which means you can afford to spend it. Now that’s a privilege few of us have.

It isn’t often that I feel bitter about the affluence of the world around me, but it’s at times like this that I realise with a nasty jolt that it’s nothing short of madness to expect the same luxuries as one’s contemporaries. Life would be an awful lot easier if we stuck to telling people face-to-face about our adventures rather than bombarding them with photos twenty-four seven, and even then, do we have to yell? The blogger in me says yes. The writer in me isn’t so sure. I’m just a student fresh out of university with a modest job already on the cards, and that’s a luxury I can’t overstate highly enough. It’ll be many, many years before I can afford annual transatlantic summer holidays, and by the time I can, I don’t suppose I’ll want to.

Fringe, I accept, was my holiday. It was expensive, more than any holiday I’ve ever had, and I was a fool to think I could afford another, summer job or no summer job. In the end I was saved by the budget and, more poignantly still, saved by the bell. A couple of friends of mine are getting married in a couple of weeks, and it’s because of them that I had to return from Extremadura before flying back out again. The folly of making two trips to the same place became apparent only once I’d decided not to go.

I still have my dreams. I still dream of South Africa. But I can wait, until such a time as I have the time, the money and the maturity to go and to really make the most of it. For the time being, I’m going to focus on the humbler side of life. I have plenty of books to read and lessons to plan. I, too, am privileged to be where I am and how I am, and I should be grateful for that. Autumn is here, and autumn is always such a beautiful time of year in England. I should be making the most of it. BB x

Bittersweet

March 27, 2017March 27, 2017 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s been nine months, three weeks and four days since I waved goodbye to Spain last summer. I was glad of the brief end to my labours, but it was the first time I genuinely did not want to go home. How I’ve left it this late to return says more about my dangerously overloaded timetable than anything else, but now, finally, I’m on the EasyJet flight to Seville with all of eleven days to play with and everything is as it should be.

Second term hit me like a truck. Since the January a cappella boot camp before the Christmas holidays were even over, it’s been the most intense ten and a half weeks of my life. Ten weeks of essays, translations and dissertations; competitions and commissions; meetings and meet-ups; catching up with old friends and catching up with work; and, of course, concerts, competitions and rehearsals. Never mind applying for jobs, that happened somewhere along the line. I forget when. It’s been fun, educational, even unforgettable, but ridiculously intense. It’s a damned good thing I dropped Arabic this year or I reckon the pressure would have torn me apart.

I feel truly honoured to have represented Durham’s own Northern Lights at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella Semifinals last night alongside seven of the UK’s best a cappella groups, including longtime running mates the Accidentals (my favourite group by a league) and this year’s winners, Aquapella. After a knockout victory in the Quarterfinals in Edinburgh back in February and the added bonus of a masterclass with our EP-producer Johnny Stewart, I genuinely thought we might be in with a shot at placing this year, even though we’ve only been in existence for four years. Sadly, we didn’t take anything home last night, but hats off to the victors – it was a well-earned victory (especially to the soloist in Aquapella’s Purple Rain… goddamn, I didn’t think there were any Tina Turner voices left in this world).

The sting of defeat smarts more than I thought it would, perhaps because this was the first time I genuinely believed we could win. But every defeat is a lesson to be learned from, and as losses go, it’s a cheap one: not only does it save us £700+ a head on the flights to New York that victory would have cost, but I also had three of the best days of my life with the wonderful Lights in London Town. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And with forty minutes until we touch down in Sevilla, I can’t do anything but smile.

Eleven days in my favourite country in the world await. Semana Santa is too late this year to linger, but I’ll be sure to take in the three sides of Spain I hold closest to my heart: Doñana for the nature, Tierra de Barros for my dear friends Tasha and Miguel, and Yuste for my novel. It’s going to be magical. I’ll keep you posted. And that’s a fact. Now that I’m back in Spain, it feels much more natural to be blogging again. Life is good. BB x

Exile: To BBC or Not to Be

September 28, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / 1 Comment

Two factors have triggered this post. One, a suggestion from my dissertation supervisor that I misread two months ago. Two, Emily Mortimer in The Sleeping Dictionary.

It’s been about six months since I decided to move to Spain for good once my university degree is over. The number was in my head without even thinking, and I had to count to make sure. Six months exactly (sometimes you just know these things). It wasn’t one of those eureka moments. It was, I suppose, a bit like a journey to find one’s faith: one day I woke up and it just seemed as though I’d known the answer all along. In that sense, there was really little I could do about it. You can’t deny that kind of enlightenment.

Over the last few months, freed at last from work and study, I’ve had a lot of time to think this one over. I’ve come up with something resembling a game plan for the next three years. I find it’s a useful thing to have when you find yourself having to reason your decision to abandon the land where you were born.

The repercussions are, understandably, quite immense. No more Christmas. No more Whole Earth peanut butter. No more Poldark or Have I Got News For You (or British TV at all, for that matter). And no more taking my mother tongue for granted: in a year’s time the only major outlets I’ll have for the English language will be my work and my book. That’s pretty extreme.

Now I’ll admit, it’s not as painful a decision as I’m making it sound. The peanut butter I can live without. British television will be a major loss though, I’ll give you that. You don’t appreciate just how good the Beeb is until you move abroad (Spanish comedy is entertaining, but it’s just not as brilliant as British humour – or maybe I’m just not fluent enough?). As for Christmas, while I’ve never been particularly excited about it since growing up, I was a little sad that December came and went and… nothing happened. Christmas is something that Spain simply doesn’t do. Even Lisbon seemed to do Christmas better in the twenty-four hours I spent there last year. On the other hand, they do have Semana Santa and that is a hundred times more impressive, so it’s a sacrifice I am willing to make.

There is at least one snag I’ve been almost too quick to ignore in this whole chasing-my-destiny thing and that is the obvious one: who and where is She? Is she Spanish, or is she English? Or something else entirely?

I’ve read a lot of articles on this subject. I feel like I had to; earlier this year it was compulsory reading, when I thought I’d found her and I needed to think things through. I hadn’t, obviously, but it did me good to read about others who had been down the same road. The general consensus seems to be that, unless you are both determined to stay together, and that there is something akin to a balance between the languages, these cross-cultural relationships are fraught with difficulties. And whilst I’ve heard a lot of people talk about how much they’d love bilingual children, from those few dual-nationality parents I’ve met, it sounds like a serious uphill slog to achieve that, as the language of their immediate environment will always take the prime position.

Never mind the bilingual children for now. I have more pressing things to worry about, namely my dissertation, which may or may not be on the subject of exile (a suitable topic for this year, I think). It is possible to look too far ahead. But as the prospect of exile looms closer, I think it likely that there may well be a few more reflective posts of this nature. It’s easy to say that you’re never coming back, but quite another to hold to that.

Perhaps it’s best to think of it not as exile, but going back to my roots. Even so, I was born in England and am, by all accounts, an Englishman. I never said it would be easy, and it won’t. But some things in life are greater. This, I believe, is one of those things. BB x

The Happiness Machine

July 30, 2016July 30, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

There’s a new kid on the block in my host family. My replacement, ready and waiting not twelve hours before I’m out of this joint. The expression ‘not even cold in the grave’ springs to mind… But he’s Spanish (an Andalusian, to be precise) and his name is José María and he’s more than happy to let me witter away in Spanish for my final hours in this country and therefore I couldn’t be happier.

My host family were quick to notice the change. Very quick. ‘Ése Ben que salió por la puerta esta mañana, ¿dónde esta?‘. He’s gone. The quiet, hesitant, reluctant Englishman who used to come home at irregular hours of the afternoon, sit in what he thought to be companionable silence and then retreat to his room is now mouthing off like a human Gatling gun, in Arabic as well as Spanish. He’s gone, and in his place is this loud, jokey and irrepressibly good-humored Spaniard. Talk about schizophrenia. I have a very bad case of Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to my two linguistic personalities. Never mind getting that dual nationality, I’m still struggling with dual identity.

The host family were quite taken aback. I don’t think they were expecting such a drastic change in personality. The father even went so far as to show me the difference between the two Bens by means of a few crude imitations. Was I really that quiet? Did I really sit at the table with my hands by my side and say as little as possible? No me lo creo ni yo. After just an hour or two speaking Spanish to this Andalusian my whole personality has changed just like that.

I’d quite forgotten just how good it felt, just to be speaking that language again. Why? What’s the reason? How can a language make me so happy? Is there a linguistic reason? Is that why Spaniards are such jolly people, by and large? Or maybe has it got something to do with the drastic increase in body language, which makes me feel like a teacher again? Or is it because it’s the language of my grandfather, speaking through me? I’d like to think that. But in truth I can’t explain it. It’s just magic. My perpetual happiness machine. In goes Spanish, out comes happiness. It’s as simple as that. I just needed reminding.

And a good thing, too. This time tomorrow I’ll be back in Guirilandia and probably pulling into the drive round about now. No more Arabic study. No more al-Kitaab. Just one whole year with the Happiness Machine. I cannot wait.

The host father came in to bid us goodnight. I apologized for not being this way over the last two months. I’m grinning like a gargoyle and laughing and switching freely between Spanish and Arabic and it’s all because I had an hour ‘in the machine’, so to speak. It’s such an amazing feeling. It’s like the whole world is bright and sunny and full of colour. I need to be living in a country where they speak this godly language. I need to be living in Spain.

In perfect honesty, this is not at all how I expected to be ending my time in Morocco. I was expecting one last chastisement over something trivial, or a panicked search for something lost, a friendlier-than-usual dinner, or something along those lines. Instead I ended it in Spanish mode. Curious, perhaps, but it bodes very well for the future, and it’s reminded me – yet again – what I need to do to be happy in this life.

I just need to talk. Y ya que sabemos cómo se utiliza esa máquina de felicidad, no hay ninguna duda sobre mis planes para el futuro. España, vengo por ti. BB x

Road Rage

July 23, 2016September 28, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When it comes to learning to drive, I’ve always thought that some countries simply have it easier. The Netherlands, for example: all those long, flat roads with nobody else about. There are parts of Spain like that. They speak Spanish there, too. It’s largely for that reason that I’ve delayed learning to drive until I’m back out there next summer. That and a sheer apathy for cars.

But if you’re stuck for choice, never, ever learn to drive in Morocco. Ever.

In twenty four hours I’ve seen probably the worst driving in my life. On our way to the beach after school on Friday afternoon we almost collided head-on with a wayward van which came careering off the road out of nowhere and straight into the trees on the other side. Two seconds later and we’d have got right into it. Thank all the powers that be that our taxi driver was alert, enough at least to stamp hard in the brakes and save us from… well, a disappointing beach trip.

The driver, you may be happy to hear, was unharmed. Dazed, confused but apparently unharmed. She just tottered out of the crumpled van and went on her way.

What shocked me most, as before, was that I wasn’t really shocked at all. Scary car accident, white van speeding towards us with screeching tyres and bits of metal flying everywhere, the sweet stench of exhaust… Nothing doing. I think that’s our curse, as children of the twenty-first century (though technically speaking I’m amongst the last of the twentieth). I remember feeling similarly ruffled at being so decidedly unruffled when I saw a girl walking home from school go right over the bonnet of a car. Shocked at the lack of shock. I blame television, specifically programmes that really pushed the boat out: Casualty, Waking the Dead, Casino Royale etc. I hope my children have a better idea of what is and isn’t shocking in the future.

The return journey was easier, all things considered. But our driver was hopping mad. We had the stereo on full blast (with that vvvvvv bass quality you might expect from a taxi) and had what must have been a drag race with a fellow taxi driver all the way back to Tetouan. Entertaining, yes, but how many counts would he go down for in an English court? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

The taxi ride to Akchour the following day wasn’t much better. We were stuck behind a lorry for some distance and there was a good deal of illegal overtaking, until the tail up simply got too much to control and some James Bond wannabe tried to schuss through the gap between two trucks. By some divine prank he made it, but the result was that all traffic ground to a halt and the drivers all got out of their respective vehicles to yell at each other for a full five minutes. Not that we were in a hurry, or anything. Morocco is still very much a country that operates on an argue-first-ask-questions-later kind of system. Maybe that’s one more thing that bled through into the Spanish culture over the years. In part, anyway. BB x

Change and Progress

July 18, 2016July 18, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about growing up. A lot of people say that you do a heck of a lot of it when you’re made to stand on your own two feet for the first time. Gap years, years spent abroad, traveling solo… You develop fastest when left to your own devices, it seems. That makes sense. I remember walking out of Heathrow Airport one cold December morning to see my family again after nearly three months in Uganda, the longest I’d ever been away from home. One of the first things my mother told me was that I looked so much older. Well – what might a mother say? But it’s stuck with me.

I wonder how much I’ve changed over the course of this year alone. As years go, it’s been a colossal upheaval. When I set out, I was still reeling from a year of juggling too many things at once, not least of all my heart, and full of ideas of my own as to what the year was going to bring. I’m not sure how much I’ve changed since, but I know that I have. I find it hard to imagine exactly who I was back then, because something tells me that the Ben that left Durham last summer (with all sixty-three kilos of his possessions on his back) and the Ben returning there in September are two very different persons. These days I’m often the Ice Breaker, the one with all the games and ready to turn my hand to just about any conversation, and yet I don’t even blink at turning down invitations the way I used to. Where once I resorted to obscure ASMR and Guided Meditations of middling quality on YouTube, these days I read (reading has taken over my life somewhat). And politics – that ghastly, age old enemy of mine – no longer scares me off. Ben could always speak, but it looks like this year he learned to talk.

A useful development for a budding linguist, don’t you think?

But these little details don’t necessarily constitute growing up. Growing up, in the strictest sense, is moving out, getting a job, having a family of your own. At least, that’s how I’ve always seen it. A better definition, perhaps, would be the stage in your life when you start thinking seriously about the future. Not just next week, or next year, but five, ten, maybe twenty years down the line. When you’re a kid you don’t have to worry too much about that. As an adult, you’re on your own. Over the course of the year I’ve seen the fog of war blown away and the next ten years of my life made clear to me. Spain is where I want to be, Spanish is what I want to be speaking and teaching is what I want to do with my life. The revelation wasn’t shocking; it’s as though the plan was always there, just waiting for me to find it. So growing up is all about thinking ahead, right?

Not exactly. As far as I’m concerned, that definition is only a half-truth. I’ve always been a thinker. I read a fair few blogs on the subject before penning my thoughts on this one, and one writer opined that being grown-up meant leaving the constant search for excitement of adolescence behind and looking instead for long-term relationships. Flawed logic: in that sense, I’ve been an adult since I was five years old. Somewhere down the line my development went a little awry and I’ve never been able to consider a relationship as anything but a long-term thing. The whole ‘bit of fun’, ‘casual’, ‘fling’ thing… It’s never made any sense to me, as distant and intangible as quantum physics or the Zodiac Killer. Oh, I know we’re supposed to go through all that in our teenage years (the casual attitude, that is, not the quantum physics). It prepares us for later life. But I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. It just doesn’t make sense. How do you even begin to describe something you physically can’t get your head around, no matter how hard you try?

This year I’ve met a lot of people who’ve changed my perspective on the world in little ways. Andreas, the old soldier with the big heart; Tasha, the fun-loving Texan; Victoria, the brave young polyglot; Alex, the forward-thinker. The Andalusian with such an honest passion for India, the Israeli in Plasencia who spoke of his love for Coelho, the New Zealander in Rabat who traded for a living. All of them made me think in one way or another; none of them will be forgotten.

Travel broadens the mind, that much is true. I might even call it steroids for the soul. I wonder how each and every one of these individuals remember me, if they remember me at all?

Growing up is more than just a birthday. It’s a series of chance encounters. It’s a sequence of experiences, good and bad, that mould you into a brand new shape. There are plenty of books about it. The genre even has its own name: Bildungsroman. One of these days I’ll look back and be able to tell you which was the younger me and which the adult, but as for the exact point of divergence, I think that will always be a little foggy. That’s completely normal. Twenty-first century Europe doesn’t exactly present us with the life-changing, coming-of-age scenarios that stories and histories regale us with. Growing up is in the everyday, tedious as it seems. What you do with that everyday, however, is another matter.

Adulthood is out there somewhere and you find it without looking for it. It’s only when you look back that you realize, I guess. Certainly, the Ben that stepped off the plane at Heathrow four years ago was no adult, just a happy, healthy individual, fresh from the happiest time of his life. The same Ben that walked out of Gatwick’s South Terminal in June, safe in the knowledge that he’d found heart and home and purpose at last and would be going back soon. Maybe all this time he was only sleeping.

As for me, I’m still very much in the works. Michelangelo’s put down his chisel and gone home for the night. I’m working on my Arabic homework with The Avener’s Fade Out Lines playing. Maybe I’m grown up or maybe I’m still just a kid. The truth is I don’t really care either way. I still spend most of time thinking, but I’m not so caught up in worries and anxieties anymore. The road ahead is clear enough and I’m on my way. Maybe it’ll turn off in directions I’d never imagined, and maybe I’ll find Her along the way, and maybe – at the end of it all – I’ll know for sure what it means to be grown up. For now, I’ll stick to this Arabic homework.

The future is a wonderful place, full of uncertainty and bright ideas, but for living, there’s no place like the present. BB x

Two Men Skilled in Climbing Mountains

July 17, 2016July 17, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

We did it. We conquered Ghorghez. It’s been staring us in the face for all of six weeks but now I can put my hand on my heart and say with all honesty that the beast has been vanquished. Call it the human desire to tame the wild in me, but I could never have left Tetouan with my head held high if I’d never managed to tackle that mountain.

Fortunately, Alex was of a similar opinion, so at nine o’clock this morning we hailed a cab and off we went.

King of Tetouan (or that obligatory tourist photo)

We didn’t have the best of starts. My host father very kindly gave me the use of his topographic map and took me up to the roof to explain the route we could take; he would have come with us, if his wife was not still hospitalized from the accident. But when he asked how many of us were going, I had to lie and say five. If I’d told him the truth – that Alex and I alone were going – he’d probably have tried to stop us. The last time he went on a fossil-hunting excursion up in the mountains, he was attacked by a group of thugs and severely injured.

In that knowledge, Alex and I arrived at Ain Bou Anane and set off on our journey.

Don’t be fooled… It wasn’t anywhere near as easy it looks

For the first ascent we had it easy, as there was a reliable, well-trodden path to begin with. Emphasis on ‘begin with’; after a hundred metres or so it vanished into the sea of thorns and scrub that covers most of Ghorghez and we were forced to resort to free-navigating the mountainside, cutting from goat track to goat track with the occasional wayward boulder as a bridge between the paths. And just as well: the tracks often vanished into thin air like fireflies in the night, leaving us stranded in the scrub.

The mountain wasn’t entirely wild. What I took at first for bird calls turned out to be the Ghorghez shepherds out on the slopes with their flocks. I’d quite forgotten how far sound travels in the mountains. More than once I thought we’d been followed, only to see the source of the noise sitting atop a boulder watching over his goats on the far side of the valley. I must admit, due to my host father’s tales, I was more wary than usual around these hill-folk. Seeing their silhoettes appearing and disappearing between the rocks set my teeth on edge. More than once I let slip that we might have to make a break for it if they ‘came back with reinforcements’.

But they didn’t, and Alex smiled and waved at them, and some of them waved back. I think we could all do with a reminder from time to time that, at the end of the day, everybody’s human. A smile and a wave could change everything.

Now that’s what I call a hike!

As for their fences… Seriously. Fuck fences. The amount of backtracking we had to do to find a way around the vast sections of the mountainside that had been cordoned off was unfair, unhelpful and unnecessary. Who even builds fences on a mountain anyway? I guess they’re for the few cows we saw munching through the scrub, but what kind of a sadistic individual drives their cattle up into the mountains and then fences them in with barbed wire and brambles? Fuck those fences.

You’ve got to hand it to Maroc Telecom. Fully functional 3G up in the mountains is impressive

Delaying our hike by one day was one of my better decisions. Not only was Alex fully recovered from his late late Friday night, but the weather couldn’t have been better. The sun shone out from behind the clouds all morning, and the wind, though strong, was cool and refreshing. Compared to the Azla trek, it was a much easier ascent. Which is jammy, for double the height.

Ghorghez’ summit in the clouds

Alex had a run-in with a rather large snake on the way down. I know because one minute I was powering ahead with my trusty bamboo cane, and the next he was racing past, raving about snakes and putting about as much distance as he could between the cliff and himself. ‘I don’t like snakes. No one likes snakes. There isn’t a culture in the works that likes snakes. There’s just some things that nobody likes. Donald Trump, snakes… Oh, it was more than a metre long, easily.’ Ladies and gentlemen, Indiana Jones. ‘We don’t even have any antidote’. True, when I was packing this morning, I didn’t really think about preparing for a snake attack. I was too busy filling up five water bottles.

Five. I’d like to emphasize that five. Ben’s clearly learned his lesson from last year’s Dana disaster (you can read about that here).

The coolest overhang in geology (or possibly the Wall from Game of Thrones)

Not sure about the snakes, but the cicadas were absolutely massive. Blood-dripping-from-their-fangs massive, as my parents would put it.

Who needs Pokémon Go? I found a Ninjask without my mobile, thank-you-very-much

Besides the creepy crawlies, the mountain was spectacular for wildlife. That’s probably my favourite thing about mountains: the wonderful creatures it brings you into contact with. Mountains are some of the last truly wild bastions on the earth. Especially for birds, and birds of prey in particular. For a city, Tetouan’s got its fair share of wildlife, namely the local kestrels and cattle egret colonies, as well as the flyover storks and kites, but if you want a really wild experience, you have to go out into the sticks. I watched a pair of booted eagles wheeling and diving and whistling overhead from the summit, as well as clocking a flyby peregrine, a couple of kestrels, a few buzzards, five or six kites, ten ravens and an Isengard-level swarm of choughs. Saruman the White couldn’t summon such a flock.

The scenery up at the top might have been taken from that very scene from The Fellowship of the Ring, strewn with jagged rocks and sparse bushes. But if Saruman was indeed watching our passage south, he must have tired of his vigil before long and gone for a coffee break because, as is the way with mountaineering, coming down was three times harder than going up.

‘Let’s not throw ourselves to our deaths just yet.’

Finding our way up the mountain had been easy enough, since the next crest was always in sight. You’d think that the same might be said for the descent, but mountains are fickle. Not only do they play with sound, they also throw your perspective off frequently. More than once we followed the latest road/path/goat-track/dry river to its end only to find ourselves staring into abyss as it plunged fifty feet down over the edge of a cliff we’d never seen coming.

The resulting backtracking led us back into bramble country, which didn’t bother me and my long sleeves too much, but it ripped Alex’s exposed limbs to shreds. By the time we made it to open country again he looked as though he’d been mauled by a particularly savage beast. We couldn’t even use the wild boar we’d seen as an excuse, as it took off into the scrub as soon as it heard us coming. Nope, that’s just the bush at work.

Ain Zarqa at the feet of the Great Pyramid and Saddle Mountain

Seven hours since setting out from Ain Bou Anane we found our way back down the mountain to the village of Wargane, completing the arc that had taken us around most of the Ghorghez ridge. I left my trusty bamboo cane at the side of the road (again) and Alex flagged down a cab to take us back to Tetouan. Three mountains in one. All in a day’s work.

Ghorghez is down. Mission accomplished. BB x

Release the River

June 28, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’ve been known to set out on the odd ridiculous adventure from time to time. Traversing Spain from north to south was one. Dana was definitely another. If the truth be told, I’m frankly surprised it’s taken me until my third week to get up to any hijinks out here in Morocco. I guess my sense of duty to a host family that would rather I spent more time with them than adventuring got in the way.

Nonetheless, the heart wants what it wants. And today what it really wanted was a decent ramble. And that’s exactly what it got.

The plan – if there ever was one – was to take a taxi as far as Martil and follow the coast to the hills to the south. Maybe we’d make for the mountains, or maybe for the coastal road. A man with a plan would have known. Fortunately, I had in my companions, for the first time in a long time, two such people for whom the total absence of a detailed itinerary was not a problem at all, if not a cause for celebration.

Tetouan isn’t exactly a village, but it does have some gorgeous views

We were in Martil for half seven in the morning. My host family had tried to dissuade me from such an early start the night before, claiming that there would be nobody up and about at such an hour on a Sunday morning. As it happens, there were plenty of taxis bound for Martil, and we had a full cab; truly, as there were eight of us crammed into that 1970s Mercedes at one point.

Martil proved to be a false start, not because of the enticements of the Mediterranean, but because of the river. After passing a minor tributary, a mere feint of the Oued Martil, we found our way blocked by the real deal. It was much too deep to ford ‘Vietnam style’, even for brazen adventurers like the three of us, and despite making eyes at a lonely fisherman and his boat on the spit of sand that was just not quite long enough to be a bridge, we eventually had to accept the fact that we had nowhere to go but backwards.

Checking a decent map beforehand wouldn’t have been such a bad idea…

Down, but definitely not out. We tracked down a grand taxi that could take us to Azla, a short distance down the coast. That the taxi had to return to Tetouan to get to Azla – the only bridge for miles being a stone’s throw from my street, of all places – was a little facepalm-inducing. But our cheery taxi driver set us down in Azla without a catch, proving that they’re not all of the bad sort Arch and I encountered in Oulad Berhil, and, choosing the dry riverbed for our guide, we set off inland.

Dry rivers are and always will be the very easiest of roads

The first half hour was nothing short of a Boy Scout adventure. The dry riverbed made for easy going until the bamboo walls that lined its fringes crept in and over and we ended up trekking through a bamboo jungle. Alex made the smart move to turn this to our advantage, taking a long and sturdy cane for a makeshift hiking pole. If we hadn’t followed suit, I suppose the going would have been significantly more difficult further on. Thank goodness for boyish tendencies.

The river took us deep into the Riffian countryside, well away from the beaten track. The river valley itself was an explosion of colour for late June: the glittering stream came to life after a couple of kilometres or so, where great bushes of flowering pink lined the water’s edge and dragonflies, damselflies and butterflies of all descriptions flitted about the water, including some of the most beautiful pennant-winged specimens of the latter that I’ve ever seen. The locals – we met with just a few on the road – were cheery enough, though more than a little bemused, I suspect, at the sight of three wayward adventurers heading deep into the hills with bamboo-cane poles. The scenery was suitably African, at least, and it was really rather hard not to whip out the camera at every turn.

‘Man is in proper Africa, fam.’

We stopped here and there where shade allowed. Man can’t tan like a boss all day, not even with a regular lathering of sun lotion. The valleys of the Rif, it should be said, are a great deal kinder on the shade front than Wadi Dana. After following the river and the road for a couple of hours we reached a turning point and – bravely or foolishly, who knows – cut across country to keep our westward bearing. Keeping west meant a very steep climb in the burning sun, but where in Dana we were long since out of water reserves by the time we began the ascent, I still had a two-liter bottle and a half to myself this time, and the going was a good deal easier for it.

Alex and Victoria – and, in the distance (that little white strip to the right), the road

The mountains, our waymarker, turned out to be a great deal closer than we’d thought once we got to the top. In another couple of hours we could have made it to the slopes. But we were already halfway through our supplies by this point and Tetouan, visible in the distance, seemed a much more sensible destination. We did nab a killer panorama from an abandoned watchtower of some description sat atop the hill we’d fought so hard to summit, which made the climb all the more worth it.

See that massive expanse of white in the haze? That’s Tetouan

From there, it was a mere two hours downhill to Tetouan and a well-deserved shower. The family still couldn’t really take it on board that I’d walked home from Azla – I like to walk, OK? – but I guess they’re getting used to it by and by. It’s been almost three weeks since my first day at Dar Loughat and I haven’t used a taxi since day one. Like I said, man likes to walk. Man will always like to walk. Man was born to walk. And if man gets the chance, man will walk his way to Cape Town one day. BB x

Life on the Road

June 22, 2016June 22, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Oh thank heaven. The air con has just come on. I’ve been sitting here on the bus for the best part of an hour now, under the mistaken belief that it was the 11:30 CTM service to Tetouan, but of course it’s the local equivalent, complete with irregular timings, sleazy touts and the train of peddlers, preachers and beggars, all of them out to make a quick buck to a captive audience. This was an unexpectedly cheaper alternative, but right now I’m wishing I’d walked that 150m more and made for the pathetically-small CTM station just down the road. Rabat may be Morocco’s capital, but it’s bus stations are about as inconveniently located as its humanely possible to be.

Rabat this weekend. The opportunity presented itself and I took it, motivated more by my desire to see the old pirate republic of Salé than anything else. Sadly, despite its dark and fascinating past, there’s nothing to tell you about the city’s pirates. No museums, no street names, not even an information board. Just a few scraps of evocative graffiti.

I might have known. Google didn’t turn up a thing. I was inclined to disbelieve that, but as is so often the case, Google was proved right. No sign of Murad Reis or his pirate republic anywhere. And there was me hoping that it was still possible to view the Web as a pack of lies. Perhaps that’s human history.

Salé itself is a pretty seaside town. I’d say it’s a welcome antidote to the bustle of Rabat, but even Rabat isn’t a very hip-and-happening place. And that’s good. Maybe it’s antidote to Marrakech or Fes, then. The capital of Morocco just seems to shunt along at its own pace, unhurried, unharrying. True, Ramadan could have something to do with that, as ever, but compared to Amman, it’s a relaxing city break. And I’ve learned a fair few things for the book just from wandering around, so that’s good. It’s what I came for.

It’s been a rather human weekend. What do I mean by that? I mean that I’ve spent most of it talking and making new friends, so much as is possible on the road. They’re always fleeting encounters; most of the travelers you find in Morocco are the spit-and-sawdust kind, the ones who bought a flight out and are musing along at their own pace; free spirits without a care in the world. One such wanderer, a New Zealand trader, had been wandering around the country for five months and more, learning Dārija, trading his belongings and doing odd jobs here and there to get by. The social skills of the Gods, truly.

People often have me down, falsely, as a die-hard globetrotter. Perhaps that’s because of my self-professed love for the world more than my aspirations for a life on the road, per se. A firm knowledge of the world and its people is a great start for any adventure. But in truth, I’m nothing like these shaggy-haired, baggy-pants free spirits I so often meet on the road. They’re the ones who are quite happy to let go; to set out from home with no desire to return. There’s a fair amount of that fire in me, I guess – at least one of my ancestors was a merchant sailor – but I know where I belong. Some people spend their lives looking for home, a place that calls out to them, a special space. A sanctuary.

For me, that’s Spain. I’ve known that for years. I think I found my home too soon.

Ignorance is bliss, but if I could look into the future, I might just risk that knowledge on a whim. Will I end up in Spain? Or will the hurricane of life carry me elsewhere, far from the lighted path? I’m my very good at putting my heart and soul into something and then watching it sail away on the waves, quite beyond my control, sometimes through no fault of my own, and sometimes so. Clubs, dreams, relationships… So many of them float away on the tide. Perhaps that’s what’s so captivating about sunsets: the end of one dream, the beginning of another.

The air con has got me musing all over the place; the air con and my frustration at the speed of this bus. Travel at one’s own leisure is a wonderful thing, but when you have a time limit it’s such a stressful endeavor. Here’s to that day when I find myself on the road again with no plans to return, at least for a month or two. Here’s to freedom. BB x