Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Once I read a book about a woman who travels around the US on the train with her camera, which, as a budding photographer, I found highly irresistible. She wrote about having “train face.” Years later, after an overnight train through Spain into Barcelona, I finally understood what she meant.


Looking in the mirror of the women’s bathrooms at Barcelona-Saints Station, I decided I definitely had “train face.” It’s what a night of poor sleep in a cramped, cold compartment with the conductor’s flashlight illuminating the semi-darkness every hour looks like. I needed some breakfast (ie. Coffee!) and I needed it fast.


I emerged to find James sitting on a bench, encumbered with our two huge backpacks, equally afflicted by “train face.” We found coffee and pastries at a food stall and welcomed the sugary food. We sat amid the morning commute, I with my vice-like grip on my backpack, remembering the story of theft and lies from my Lonely Planet “Rite of Passage” book that took place in the very station we were seated in. We consulted my copy of “Europe on a Shoestring” and decided to try out the Tres Estrellas campsite. The catch was that it wasn’t actually within Barcelona. It was a bus ride to the town of Castelldefels, south of the city.

Barcelona

We set off from Saints Station to find the Plaça Espanya and our bus. Along the way we met two backpackers from New Zealand who were looking for a place to stay in Barcelona. We swapped stories, and after everything we said, they would reply “Aw, true?” After we split up, James talked about dunnys until we found our bus.


Eight and a half miles later, we found ourselves on a stretch of highway near an airport. On the left side of the highway were campsites, including our destination. Unfortunately, we were on the right side of the highway with no overpass in sight. We got off the bus with a French couple who were also looking for accommodation. The four of us stood by the side of the highway, looking wistfully at the other side. A team of road workers took pity on us, and told us they would watch the traffic for us and tell us when it was safe to cross. Collectively taking a deep breath, the four of us took off running toward the center divider, our backpacks bouncing uncontrollably and hitting us in the heads with each step. We somehow managed to roll ourselves over the concrete divider, and then dashed across the rest of the highway to sanctuary. (We later discovered that if we stayed on the bus for just one more stop, we would be right next to a pedestrian overpass.)

On the way to Castelldefells

After pitching the tent and freshening up, James and I caught the bus back into Barcelona for the afternoon. We stopped at the Plaça del Catalunya, right at the mouth of Las Rambles, a pedestrian boulevard selling everything imaginable. From street performers to caged birds, Las Rambles had it all, including access to one of the best markets I’ve ever seen. The Mercat de la Boqueria seemed to go on forever, yielding endless stalls of fresh produce, eggs, seafood, meats and cheeses. The sheer abundance of foods took us both by surprise, and we spent ages just looking at everything.

Mercat de la Boqueria

Mercat de la Boqueria

Tearing ourselves away from the fresh goodies in the market, James and I continued down Las Rambles toward the seafront and the statue of Christopher Columbus. We wandered back through the Barri Gòtic and La Ribera, getting lost among the tiny, twisted medieval streets. We could almost feel the ghosts of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro in the oldest section of the city. We saw the cathedral tucked among the high grey stone walls and discovered squares exploding out from the narrow streets.

La Merce Basillica

Barcelona

Barcelona’s older section was a visual feast and a virtual Where’s Waldo of architectural details. A stone courtyard yielded fountains, mosaics and elaborate wall plaques. Easily the largest city James and I had been to thus far on our trip, Barcelona overwhelmed me. The streets bustled with electric anticipation one moment, yet quiet repose seemed attainable just around the corner.

Candle Seller

We couldn’t resist heading back to the Mercat de la Boqueria to pick up our dinner. €2 later, we had some of the freshest vegetables we could find to make a vegetable stew back at the campsite. We made our way back to the Plaça del Catalunya to wait for our bus.

Monday, August 15, 2005

A little over a week into our trip, I was nearly used to sleeping on the ground with only a thin roll mat and sleeping bag, my balled up sweatshirt for a pillow. Terrified of having my passport and money stolen, I wore a money belt safety pinned to the inside of my jeans or skirts during the day, and slept with it pinned to the inside of my sleeping bag at night. Although this was slightly uncomfortable and made for some tricky maneuvers to pay for anything, the alternative was not something I wanted to think about. I’d already had that experience the first year I spent in England, and didn’t need a repeat in another European country. Paranoid? Yes. But did I return to England with passport and money intact? Yes.

Hondarribia, Spain

We woke early on our final day in Hondarribia. One thing about sleeping in a tent – once the sun is up and shining on it, it’s way too hot to sleep. So James and I were getting in a lot of early mornings. Relaxation called to us that day. We packed up our gigundo backpacks, rolled up the sleeping mats, and took down the tent. After checking out of the campsite we made our way into town to spend our day on the seafront.

Basking in the Sunshine

James fished from the rocks jutting out into the water. He had a small cork paddle with fishing line wrapped around it that he’d taken on a trip with his best friend years ago. I sat on the rocks reading and wandered on the sand collecting green sea glass. Although “sea glass” sounds romantic, it’s really nothing more than old, broken beer bottles that have been tumbled around in the ocean with the sand. No more than someone’s old garbage.

Sea Glass

We went to the shop on the corner for our lunch of fruit, bread and chorizo. We even found a small bottle of wine to enjoy while basking in the Spanish sunshine. As we ate our food along the seafront, we watched the feral cats. They lounged on the grass, in trees, on the rocks, under the rocks. There was a black and white cat with two kittens hiding under the rocks. We felt sorry for her and cut up small pieces of our chorizo for the little family.

Family of Feral Cats

Later that day, James and I gathered up our things and caught the bus to Irun. We were taking the overnight train to Barcelona via Pamplona and Zaragoza. Our seats were two of six in a car, and they pulled down and out to extend into small, relatively comfortable sleepers. It was absolutely freezing. I had pulled on my numerous layers to little effect. I sat shivering next to James, wishing I’d brought a blanket. Noticing my discomfort, one of our companions leaned over and said that Spanish trains were always freezing. He told us he was an actor at a theme park in Zaragoza and was returning for his fourth season. He left in the night while we slept.

Friday, August 12, 2005

James and I rose early that morning. As we’d moved farther south, I no longer had to don layers and layers of clothing throughout the night to keep warm, which made packing up our backpacks that much faster. By now, we felt we were really getting the hang of these early morning starts. We would be making our way to La Rochelle’s train station to begin our journey further south still, into Spain.

On our way to the station, we met a Polish man from Warsaw who was on his way to Poitiers. Curious about our travel plans, he loudly and wholeheartedly congratulated us when he discovered we would be leaving France that day. “The French are f***ing bastards,” he exclaimed. “You’d go crazy within the year if you ever lived here.”

Our first train journey of the day took us to Rochefort. No cheese for us, just breakfast at a small yellow roadside café with lace curtains and an hour or so wandering a tiny park in the middle of a busy road. Just before beginning the next leg of our journey, I made a mad dash to the bathrooms, only to find them closing for cleaning. I slipped into one of the stalls before the maintenance people could close up. When I emerged, I discovered that in my haste, I hadn’t bothered to read the sign on the door. I was in the men’s. C'est la vie.

Back on the train a few hours later, this time to Bordeaux, James and I found ourselves squeezed into a bank of four seats with our enormous backpacks and somewhat enormous fellow passengers. The train was crowded, hot and sticky, and smoke from the smoking compartment was slowly leaking into the air around us.

James on the train, somewhere in France, heading south

Tempting as it was to stay in Bordeaux and taste the wine and explore the countryside chateaux, we decided to push on to Spain. Our next journey was to Dax. I was surprised to see pine trees racing past the window of our carriage.


From Dax, we caught a train to Hendaye. We were almost, almost to Spain. It was late afternoon, and we were both exhausted. We were so close to the border we could almost taste the tapas. We approached the ticket window and said we’d like to go to Irun, the first stop into Spain. “Irun?” the woman behind the counter asked. “Irun? Why would you want to go to Irun?” She didn’t add “You stupid idiots” to her question, but you could that’s what she was thinking from the way she stared at us. (A few years later, back in California, I met a woman from Hendaye. She asked if I’d ever been since I seemed to know where it was. I told her I’d only passed through on my way to Irun. “Irun?” she replied. “Irun? Why would you want to go to Irun??”)


Finally, we arrived in Spain.

Hondarribia, Spain

James had been to Irun before, and he remembered a bus to the next town over, Hondarribia. He knew there was a campsite there, so that’s where we decided to go. The campsite was right where he remembered it, and they even had his information in file, albeit incorrectly – their records showed that James was Irish, when he is, in fact, English. No matter. They were booked solid and were turning people away, but our luck held (or maybe we had perfected our pathetic look), and we were told we could pitch our tent on the campsite’s playground after it closed that evening. We stowed our backpacks in the office and made our way to the campsite bar to kill some time. It was a dark room, with strands and strands of colored glass beads covering the windows. I ordered a red wine (vino tinto) and was surprised to find that it was served cold, straight from the cooler. I was even more surprised at how refreshing it was in the heat of the afternoon. Later, when it got dark and we pitched our tent on the playground, James and I made our way into town for a late dinner of burgers and sangria. Too tired to explore, we drifted off to sleep on a playground in the north of Spain, ready to start our Spanish adventures.

Monday, August 8, 2005

After a sobering morning at Omaha Beach, one of the D-Day invasion sites, James and I caught the bus back to a small town we’d passed through earlier, Port en Bessin. We may not have been saying much, still digesting what we’d seen and experienced at the American Cemetery, but our stomachs were certainly doing some talking and were ready to do some digesting of their own!

Port en Bessin is a tiny place, set a little ways up a hill overlooking the harbor. There’s a tower-like structure further up the hill to the east, and a drawbridge that allows boats to sail in and out of the marina. We visited a small grocery store on the western side of the bridge and bought the fixings for a feast: baguettes, salami, cheese and nectarines, along with zucchini, mushrooms, tomatoes and pasta to save for dinner.

Port en Bessin, France

James and I waited to cross the waterway with the residents of Port en Bessin, waving at the passing boats. A young girl greeted us with “Bonjour!” There really isn’t anything quite as charming as children greeting you with accents and language foreign to you. During my first few days in England, when I was asking myself what exactly I had done by moving to a country I’d never even visited before, my doubts and questions melted a bit the first time I heard a child’s voice calling “Mummy!” When in self-doubt in a foreign land, listen to the voices of children.

James and I ate our salami and cheese baguettes on the hill overlooking the harbor, saving our nectarines for dessert. It was the most relaxing thing to sit in the sun feeling the warm sea breeze, watching the boats. Sitting on the hillside watching the residents of a tiny seaside town bustle about their daily lives, it began to really sink in that I was traveling.

Port en Bessin, France

We wandered around the streets for a little while, looking at the houses and shops and surrounding hills. The town was very picturesque, and looked exactly the way I’d imagined a French town would look. (Part of me wonders if this has anything to do with watching Snoopy cartoons when I was younger, particularly the ones where Snoopy is the Red Baron and they’re all staying in a chateaux. Those shows certainly influenced me more than they probably should have in other aspects - when I was in high school, I chose to take French instead of Spanish, even though Spanish would have been infinitely more useful to me in southern California.) Finding that a place looks just the way you’d imagined it has been quite a rare experience for me. The more time I spend imagining a place and all of its grandeur, the less it lives up to my expectations. The reality ends up rather, well, ordinary.

St. Andre, Port en Bessin, France

Before we caught the bus verts back to Bayeux and our campsite, we found a church to check out. One of my favorite things about Europe is the amount of churches that can be found, and how accessible they are. In a blur of candles, incense and marble, St. Andre’s stands out in my memories because it was filled with nautical items. Where you’d expect to find saints lining the walls, there were model boats. Holy water was contained in a huge clam shell. Being so close to the sea, it’s only natural that it should obviously have such significance in people’s lives.

Back at Camping Municipal de Bayeux, James and I set up the tiny camping stove we brought and began cooking dinner. (Well, James cooked, the gas canister stove terrified me. I had visions of accidentally starting a fire/explosion if I tried to use it.) Our pasta and vegetables eaten, we decided to explore a little during the last remaining hours of daylight and made our way to the Cathédrale Notre Dame. I took entirely too many pictures of its exterior.

Cathedrale Notre Dame, Bayeux, France

We returned once again to the campsite, ready to settle in for another cold night. This time I was prepared. I laid out extra tank tops, long-sleeved shirts, socks, scarf, sweatshirt and towel in the order I’d be layering them on throughout the night.

We would leave early the next morning, having never seen the famous Bayeux Tapestry.

Sunday, August 7, 2005

France from the Window of the Ferry

We arrived in Le Havre on Sunday morning. James and I, having spent a fairly sleepless night in and in the vicinity of our “reclining seats,” tried perking ourselves up with a breakfast and strong coffee. Here we were, at the very outset of our European adventure, tired to the bone already.

The very first glimpse of France in the dawn light did more for our spirits than any coffee could. France, and the whole of Europe, seemed to blossom before us out of nothingness. We had a rough itinerary together, and we were eager to disembark the ferry, catch a train, and disappear into the countryside.

France From the Window of the Ferry

Unfortunately, being a Sunday, train service was rather limited, which neither James nor I had taken into account. Also, as Le Havre is at the tip of a finger of land, there didn’t seem to be a direct train to the west. Our best bet would be to catch a train inland to Paris and change to another train back out to the northwest coast. The earliest train to Paris was in a little under 3 hours.

And so, we waited.

James, our backpacks, and I all sat on the marble floor of the Le Havre train station and waited, our butts growing cold and numb. Aside from the local pigeons, we didn’t see anyone else. I pulled out Europe on a Shoestring and began looking for what our next destination would be. We both decided that Bayeux looked like a good bet, especially since its campground looked cheap.

We caught our train to Paris, arriving at Saint Lazare station to grab a quick lunch of salami in a crusty baguette (a meal I would soon get really tired of), and hopped a train to Caen. We had a few hours to kill before catching another train to our final destination of Bayeux, so we decided to kill a few glasses of wine (“Je voudrais un vin blanc, s’il vous plait.”) while we waited at the tiny bar we could see from the station. I felt oh-so-European, sitting on the sidewalk at a tiny round table, sipping my wine and watching the world pass me by. Of course, I probably looked oh-so-touristy, with my giant backpack’s straps wrapped around my legs, my google-eyed stare darting left to right without ceasing, the unmistakable whiff of overnight ferry and fried breakfast caught in my hair. Ah well, c’est la vie.

Bayeux Station

When we finally pulled into Bayeux and realized we had no idea how to get to the municipal campsite, our fatigue got the best of us. We took a cab from the station, vowing that this was to be the first and only time we’d splurge on a taxi while we were traveling.

Our five minute taxi ride took us straight through town to the campsite, where we eagerly pitched our tent. That first night was one of the coldest, and brought back strong memories of my beach-camping experience. As the night wore on and the sea air got colder and colder, just about every item of clothing I’d brought found its way onto my body: jeans, socks, tank tops, more socks, long-sleeved shirts, sweatshirt, even more socks, scarf, finally even my towel. Unable to sleep for the second night in a row, I started to dread the coming month.

Saturday, August 6, 2005

It was time to go. Somehow my enormous backpack and I managed to get from my flat at Old Street to James’ house in Stoke Newington without taking anybody out. After a few final preparations (Passports? Cameras? Underwear? Check, check and check.) and a final home-cooked meal of chicken kievs and potatoes, we were ready to begin our journey. His parents drove us to London Waterloo station, wished us well and waved goodbye. We boarded our evening train to Portsmouth, and then we were off, my stomach in my throat.

A bookworm by nature, I had limited myself to bringing only 3 books to last me a month: Rite of Passage: Tales of Backpacking ‘Round Europe from Lonely Planet, Deep France: A Writer’s Year in the Bearn by Celia Brayfield, and the Lonely Planet’s Europe on a Shoestring: Big Trips on Small Budgets. (Can we see a trend here?) I pulled out Rite of Passage and began to scare myself silly. With stories of hostels that smelled like vomit and being mugged not once but twice in Saint’s Station, Barcelona, this was probably not the best choice of books to bring with me while experiencing my first backpacking adventure. With some distance and time, I can chuckle and empathize with these writers and fellow travelers, but at the time it just terrified me.

In no time, James and I were in Portsmouth, where we would leave behind Britain and all of its familiarity. As dusk fell around us, we made our way on foot to the harbor, where we had two seats on the overnight ferry to Le Havre waiting for us. Still a beginner at this backpacking thing, I felt like I was walking through neck-high water: exerting all the effort and not getting very far very fast. What a relief it was to find the ferry terminal.

As we pushed off, James and I stood on deck at the railing, watching England slowly slip away from us and be swallowed by the night. “I’m in the middle of the English Channel!” I thought to myself, mentally conjuring up a map of the world with a big X over southern California and an even bigger X in the space between Britain and France (You Are HERE). Just living in London alone had been a huge mind-bender at times (I live HERE?), so embarking on a European adventure was almost beyond belief.

The ferry to France takes longer overnight than it does in the daytime, so we had a long night ahead of us. The reclining seats we’d booked were disappointingly uncomfortable, with cold plastic covers and unmovable arm rests, and in actuality only reclined maybe 12 inches. Apparently our fellow travelers were just as disappointed, because before long, virtually all available floor space was taken over by sleeping bags and bodies. I bedded down in the aisle between the seats, only to be stepped on repeatedly throughout the night. The room we were in felt like a movie theater without a screen, or a conference room with no podium or stage. Just lots of bodies, anticipation brewing like a strong pot of coffee, making sleep impossible.

Late July, 2005

I didn’t think I’d be able to stand up, much less walk. My borrowed purple backpack was a monstrosity, almost as tall as me, and stuffed with tank tops, underwear, a camping stove, and whatever else I thought I’d need for the next month. It was all part of the crazy idea James and I had come up with to backpack around Europe after we graduated from art school. Crazy to me, anyway; I’d never dreamed of doing anything like this, and up until a few months earlier, had always said I hated camping and had no desire to do it. (This claim was based on one night in a tiny tent on the beach with my church youth group when I was 12. My sleeping bag wasn’t warm enough, my socks were damp, and the youth pastor’s kids threw rocks at my tent all night.)

Nevertheless, James and I came up with a plan: after we finished art school at our respective universities, we’d take a month to travel around Europe by train, carrying everything we needed in our backpacks, and find cheap campgrounds to pitch our tent in along the way. By the time we returned to London, my 3 year student visa would have expired, and I’d have to pack up and move home to southern California.

That July was an eventful month. After a rigorous campaign, London won the bid to host the Olympics in 2012. The Red Arrows flew over the city toward Buckingham Palace in celebration. The following morning, London’s underground and bus systems were attacked by suicide bombers. Thankfully, none of our crowd was lost or injured.

My family flew in for our graduations. Degree shows came to a close. James and I had a weekend trip to Wales, where I experienced the joys of peeing outdoors, along with many other firsts. (Lentils being one of them. Also sleeping in a sauna and seeing the Milky Way.)

And then it was time.

I looked at my backpack, innocently sitting on the floor of my room. I somehow contorted backwards, stuck my arms through the straps, and tried to straighten up. And immediately fell backwards onto my bed.