Days by the Douro

Porto has gained prominence as the top European city for tourism for the last three years running. With this in mind, we travel north from Lisbon to Portugal’s second city.

Porto is first and foremost a city in transition. While it suffers the slings and arrows the rest of Portugal feels, tourist dollars are keeping the city afloat. Porto banks on its decay. The purple flowers creeping over the ruins by the Dom Luís I Bridge are indicative of this city’s willingness to slip into the sublime.

We walk cobbled streets like they’re travelators to another time, inspecting the fading buildings, the Gothic churches and dodging the cumbersome tour buses snaking through the antique streets.

We stand by some church and gain a vista of the city, terracotta roofing the patchwork brilliance of gracefully ageing facades. All is quiet, save the distant chiming of a bell, the swishing of a boat cutting the waters of the the Douro River. Suddenly, a big fat German crumbles under his weight and lets out a bloodcurdling cry. One person rushes to his assistance as his wife leans over him. The tourists look for a moment and then return to the vista. For twenty minutes the man struggles on the floor, letting out a plaintive squeal at intervals. He clutches his leg, sweats and stammers as we move on.

We pass through the Livraria Lello, the bookstore which features on every list of the most beautiful bookstores in the world. Emma tugs on my arm and shoots me a disappointed look. The place is fine but sardined with tourists, much smaller than it looks in the photos, she says. We’re only allowed to take photos between 9am and 10am on a Friday so we don’t snap any. It doesn’t matter really. The photo ops for this space were exhausted long ago.

Then to the Mercado do Bolhão, an old market outside the main tourist route. We walk through streets buzzing with white collar Portoans, the women clipclopping around in their high heels, the men swooshing about in their grey and black pants. We must have arrived on a bad day because the ‘noisy and exuberant’ atmosphere promised by gooporto.com is nowhere to be seen. Instead of the ‘flamboyant fishwives hawking the latest catch’ all we find is a degenerate and dirty old man trying to sell us weed. He holds the buds out in plain sight and nods his sweaty head. We shake our heads and shoo the unfortunate dealer.

Emma wants some fruit so decides on a punnet of the least fly bitten strawberries a fruit seller has. The woman tries to sell us rotting grapes and putrid figs as well but we shake our heads and pay the €1. I duck into the bathroom to relieve myself and feel eyes on my back. Once zipped I turn to see two grey men smiling at me by a cubicle. I wash my hands and skip out of there as quickly as I can. Needless to say, the old market has seen better days.

One place which has certainly received a facelift since it’s creation is the Portuguese Centre for Photography. The centre, which is set in an eighteenth century prison, houses works from mainly Portuguese and Spanish artists. The evocative exhibitions are given weight by the high ceilings, the slate floors, the bars on the windows and the ghostly echoes. It’s well worth seeing (and free).

I eat strawberries on the steps of the old prison, watching a group of guys playing football in the square. They pound the ball against the old stone walls, a form of civil disobedience no one seems to mind. The strawberries are bitter and tough, as I knew they would be. Still I held my tongue. Emma returns from the bathroom and grabs a handful. She takes a bite and gets angry at how gross the fruit is.

A line of those big red tourists buses is parked across the square, waiting for another horde to pile on and go through that whole ghastly process of experience again. Down by the Douro, tourists from all over the world are settling into seemingly provincial meals of bland tasting, overpriced seafood and French fries. The river swirls beyond, shifting water from the mountains out into that cold and unforgiving Atlantic.

In all this, I can recognise something has been lost. Maybe everyone else feels it too but is unwilling to admit it. I’m not sure when those with cameras and bum bags overran the locals but it’s sure that now the tourists outnumber the inhabitants, Porto has undergone a metamorphosis very difficult to reverse. Our perilous quest for authenticity leads us to the very destruction of that authenticity. Our very presence exists like those wandering purple flowers, come to veil a place or a time which is now bygone. The tourist city is a simulacral city, a city devoid of culture because it holds people (tourists) who are by their very nature cultureless. They are here a moment, tramping the cobblestones, superimposing romantic notions of the past on the present, and then they are gone. They come in contact with those structures of civilisation wrought by generations, wrought out of the earth, and yet their transience converts these buildings into mere cardboard cut outs, devices designed simply to take a photo of and say ‘I was there.’

The European utopia within the ruins

There’s a battle going on in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon. Though at first it might not register, this subtle collision works its way through you.

It is a sunny morning as we arrive. Thin black clouds waft over the jungle on the outskirts of Lisbon. The rest is blue. Crumbling works give way to graffitied mills and defunct factories as the curtains in my train carriage are pulled open by a middle aged Portuguese singing to himself. I rub my eyes and stand to brush my teeth. Outside, the odd eighteenth century manor loses another dusty terracotta tile from its roof, the floorboards creak. The train jitters. I try to stabilise myself on my bunkmate’s ladder. It collapses. I go with it. The toothpaste sprays across the cabin and congeals in my beard. My amigo on the bottom bunk dives under me before I can hit the floor.

At this moment Emma opens the door onto this still life. She’s hungry, grabs a roll out of my bag and heads back to her female cabin. Meanwhile we men pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off.

Once in Lisbon we walk from the main station to our lodging up – and up – in Bairro Alto, that vertiginous neighbourhood of parties, panoramas and pasteis de nata (Portuguese tarts). We pass a once decadent eighteenth century facade that is just that – a front without a filling. It is early morning and so we sweat past the tourist hub of Praça do Comércio, uninterrupted by tourists and those swarming pests.

We walk the lanes which only four hours earlier were swelling with revellers. Now only their remnants litter the street; empty bottles and plastic cups are strewn throughout, mingling with rose petals, cigarette butts and a mess of mystery fluids. Soon the stores will reopen and the proprietors will sweep the debris into the centre of the lanes, ready for the daily purge. The slate is cleaned only to be dirtied with the night and cleaned by the day – every day, like clockwork.

We drop our packs off and head back out into the day as the stores start opening. Emma is yearning for a nata and coffee. I’m happy with anything. We find a local chain down by the Monument to Luis de Camões. For €2.50 I get a ham and cheese crossaint, an espresso and freshly squeezed orange juice. For just under €3 Emma gets a slice of quiche and cafe com leite and €1.80 more gets us a nata each. It is a good breakfast from a bustling place but pretty much on par with any of the cafés you’ll stop in at (and there are literally hundreds, possibly thousands).

There’s something about cobblestoned streets which enlivens the romantic spirit in me. It’s these streets we now walk, dodging trams and taxis and bikes as we tramp through the bairros of Chiado, Baixa and Alfama (among others) with no real plan and no real purpose but to get lost.

If you’re going to get lost in any city, make it Lisbon. You can walk for hours, for days, finding splendid little cafés and bookstores, happening upon stunning vista points and stumbling into the strangest of scenes.

I’m not sure how far we are into our first day navigating this city, following its arterials and its narrow lanes before we recognise the war taking place. All about in Lisbon you’ll see the markings of decay. Graffiti abounds in broad daylight, more perhaps than in any other city I’ve visited. Exquisite houses collapse and rot while right beside them boutiques buzz with the bourgeoisie and beautifully tiled houses of the same age endure restorations. Facades grey and turn to patchwork while men in Mercedes plough upwards like madmen. Everywhere is decay. Everywhere is renaissance. It coexists.

The result, for the ignorant traveller at least, is romance, a palpable poetry. Of course the reality of all this blight mingling with beauty is much more lasting than the fading utopic vision of modern ruins.

While the worst days of the Global Financial Crisis have come and gone, the effects of the economic meltdown still linger throughout most if not all of Europe. Not least in Portugal which was the third country to request a financial bailout after Greece and Ireland. Three years after that €78 billion bailout, not much has changed. Unemployment flounders around 14 percent (more like 18 in Lisbon) at present with many simply just giving up the hunt for work. A class of ‘new poor’ exists in the dwellings you see, unable to pay utilities, thrust back into the dark ages, living without hot water and electricity, surviving on simple fare, eating little, rotting as their homes rot around them.

The implications of this turmoil have certainly been felt across Portugal, Europe and the world. What the future holds for those unfortunates and for the degraded infrastructure of this great city is unclear. For now, you can enjoy that war playing out on the streets of Lisbon and forget about all those other wars which are nowhere near as scenic.

If you can make your way to Carcavelos, a local beach, which is busy but has a nice break and cleanish sand. If you’re planning on going to Sintra, ask if there is scaffolding covering the castle. We didn’t and found a less than picturesque tourist trap barely worth the €14 admission, €6.50 train (day pass) and €5 bus. Americans looked on with incredulity at this shabby scaffolding clad castle with little to attract anyone who has seen any other castle in the world.

Un viaje al pasado, Granada

Granada was the first place I fell in love with. I was 18, fresh out of school, a man only according to the electoral role and the alcohol and tobacco companies. Granada was a place unlike any I had experienced, my only near reference coming from children’s tales and Disney films.

The good thing about Granada is that it pertains to the romance of a Moorish settlement without any of its annoyances. Its religion and its culture having been obliterated in 1492 with the Nasrid’s surrender to the Catholics and the expulsion of all its nonconforming Jews and Muslims, this place is now a happy apparition.

Still, the tourists flock, as do the bohemians, to this city of ghosts where the streets of the Albayzin are still stubbled with stones, where the weights of those shifty traders still hang above the Puerta de las Pesas, and where around every corner is a vista of that spellbinding ruin, La Alhambra.

It’s up these streets I now walk, tracing the footsteps of my former self, the sunburnt youth with buzzed hair and minimal beard. I walk to a fountain where I found out just over five years ago that this is a fluid city, that the water runs constantly, feeding dozens of fountains throughout the city. The effect of the fountains creates a subtle music, a gentle babble and a much needed coolness.

I walk through the streets lined with market stalls selling hippie paraphernalia made in India and Morocco. I see the same vendor who sold me a pair of “Aladdin pants” as I called them. He is looking older and more tired but much the same. I enjoy the tea I didn’t drink the first time and let the shisha smoke dance over me much like I did as that inexperienced child.

I remember the sleepless mornings, looking down onto the cold empty streets as the sun resumed its dominion over the receding shadows. I remember the siesta soaked in sweaty dreams. I remember howling at the moon up on some majestic rooftop, feeling for the first time the seductive pull of freedom. I remember the tapas and the sangria, that birth into a foreign world, that compact with all that history. And it feels all at once like a moment ago and yet an age away.

Now there’s jazz swimming through our window as the sun sets. The streets are reborn in the evenings. The Andalusians are returning from their siestas and the tourists are returning from their Alhambra visit, tumbling down the Cuesta de Gomérez and spilling into Plaza Nueva. We lick ice creams and talk about the future as peace is restored after an inexplicable scene caused by some drunkard in a plaza. A few parents stand like statues in amongst the stone friezes as their children make themselves dizzy with ignorance.

We drink sangria with some average tapas at Babel but it doesn’t matter. We soon return to the streets, climbing up through the Albayzin to catch another glimpse of that inexorably magic Moorish fort. We know tomorrow we’ll pass through its ancient gates, ignoring the tourists as we follow in the footsteps of Napoleon’s troops, Queen Isabela I and all the emirs of the Nasrid dynasty alike.

On the road to Algeciras

It all begins at Chefchaouen’s bus station. We pull up chairs under a shaded stall. My chair is broken; one leg bends under my weight sending me reeling to and fro like a mechanical bull rider. 3:15, our scheduled departure time, comes and goes. Emma instructs me to ask a CTM employee when the bus might be arriving. I confuse a moustachioed man for the boss, flashing my tickets. Although he might’ve appeared on Arrested Development as one of Suddam Hussein’s lookalikes, he doesn’t work for CTM and he doesn’t speak English. He shakes his head. I turn back to Emma. Emma shakes her head. I’ve got the wrong man.

We strike up conversation with some Frenchies, also bound for Tangier. The girl has been in Morocco for five weeks and is clearly enamoured of the country. ‘I’m here learning Arabic,’ she says. ‘Don’t let Fez be the thing you remember,’ she says. With French, English and Spanish under her belt and Arabic on the way, she is clearly a cunning linguist.

At 4pm a CTM bus arrives with the sign FES-TANGER posted in the front window. We race down to it and wait as a few tourists are unloaded. As we’re hurling our sacks onto the undercarriage, a guy checks our tickets and says something in French. The French girl translates: this isn’t our bus. Fifteen minutes. The driver waves his hands and the bus speeds off apparently headed south.

At 4:15 our bus arrives. We need to be in Tangier Med, a nowhere port we learned only today is 40km from Tangier’s main bus station, at 8:30. We’re running an hour late and I’m doing the maths in my head. A three hour bus and one hour taxi should get us there with fifteen minutes to spare. ‘Hey, it’s the same bus driver,’ Emma says. I’m saying, ‘How could you possibly remember someone as nondescript as a bus driver?’ Then I see him. Those of you who’ve read the previous post will be familiar with Moroccan Elvis. The CTM King dons his aviators like he’s a demigod of the road. His jet black hair shimmers in the afternoon sun. If anyone’s gonna get us to Tangier in time, it’s this man.

Off come the tourists, on go the rucksacks and we’re off. Racing through the Rif Range, passing one lame mule towns, roadside gypsies selling prickly pears and onions finding much needed shade under olive and fig trees, looking the part in their wide brimmed pompom hats. One pastoral idyll gives way to yet another: a hooded mother chasing her raggedy daughter through a dusty field, boys using an orange as a football, playing precariously close to a sheer cliff, old Arabs sitting in the shade of a minaret, a herder driving his goats up a rocky hillside. All of this with the backdrop of the dusty, stubbled Rif Mountains.

Tetouan comes steaming around a corner in a flourish of white and green, respectively the old medina plus the matching urban sprawl, and the miraculously (or stupidly decadent) grass lawns which abound on the outskirts.

We stop in Central Tetouan to unload some passengers and pick up a few more. I’m looking at the clock at the front of the bus. It reads 22:56, wrong, they’re always wrong. It’s 5:30pm.

We head out of Tetouan down a path which looks strikingly familiar. A park bounded by a quaint walkway is swimming with young Moroccans enjoying the shade provided now the sun is dipping. We round a corner out of town to find a derelict building, bombed out and graffitied. Two sketchy looking men are sitting out on a corner with deadened eyes. A vagabond with beard and matted hair stands pointing at the bus before swaggering with that old vagrant shuffle uphill. People wait for taxis. A taxi unloading passengers in the middle of the road causes a small jam as women argue and congregate trying to claim the newly relinquished cab. And the world moves on as the bus pushes towards our destination. Elvis is making record time, avoiding an accident by crossing to the other side of the narrow mountain track. I watch as two groups of men inspect the old silver Mercedes with the collapsed front and the barely scratched car it’s rear ended.

You know when you hit Tangier’s city proper on a summer evening because you hit traffic. It’s 7pm and we’re bumper to bumper. Having experienced Californian traffic jams where too many cars for the HWY meets a fiery collision they’ll show from above on the 7pm news, Moroccan traffic jams seem unconvincing and inexplicable. Where as in the West, a traffic jam is a matter of managing egos and fuel, in the East things are managed on a molecular level. The real trick of a Moroccan traffic jam is that no one ever really stops moving. Lanes meant to take one and a half cars somehow are made malleable and now host four vehicles side by side. Too many cars on the road isn’t a be all and end all problem. It’s just slow. While my teeth give my fingers a manicure, we passed an accident on a roundabout. A concrete truck has collided with a VW Golf. There isn’t a scratch on either vehicle but the drivers still stand in the middle of the road comparing automobiles as the traffic slides past them.

We move like sludge over a crest to gain our first glimpse of Tangier. The seaside city upon a hill makes me regret not patronising its expensive hostels and hotels but there’s no time for regret. We make it to the outskirts of Tangier before the King gives up. He pulls up near a CTM office and packs it in for the day. We try to find a taxi in a panicked confusion before Elvis comes back telling all the passengers to get off. Too much traffic. Last stop. The French girl helps us acquire a taxi. 200dh, whatever. One hour, maybe two. No other choice. Let’s go.

We enter a dusty sedan with no visible taxi marks. We try to tell him we need to be at the port by 8:30. He thinks we’re talking about money. We give up and rock back and forth like Quranic students in the madersa. Vaminos!

It takes him at least two minutes to make a six point turn. I count the seconds. The guy smiles, shooting a half empty grin, as I put my seatbelt on. ‘Shukran.’ ‘Yes, shukran, shukran. Let’s go.’ He drives up a backstreet past all these mansions. ‘Villas,’ he says. ‘Chefchaouen,’ he says. I nod and hope this isn’t a scenic tour. Then he parks and signals for us to get us. We’re changing vehicles. The guy runs from his boot to the new car’s trunk, lobbing our rucksacks in. We thank him as the new driver argues with a would be passenger who has his food in the front seat like a flag of declaration. The larger fare wins out and we leave the poor Arab in our dust.

The windshield is cracked on the old beige Mercedes though the car could be white and just incredibly dusty. The driver doesn’t speak English or Spanish or French. ‘Arabic,’ he says, crossing his hands. Not the best decision when driving but we’ve come to expect these outlandish gestures from the people sitting between us and a plethora of precipices. I exhaust two of the only three things I can say within seconds leaving the rest of the ride devoid of conversation. Luckily the driver has some sort of extended play songs of praise mixtape. The song is more repetitive than the call to prayer but it lends a soundtrack to the journey. Out of Tangier we pass locals returning from the beach, board short boys with their arms around each other, garbed mothers with their casual daughters, liberated by youth.

We catch our first glimpse of the Mediterranean up the hill. A few locals are sipping juice, stationed at the edge of the road, overlooking the sea. We traipse the coast with the spectral peaks of Spain so close I could touch them were I Mr Fantastic. Emma takes photos in the back. The driver notices and pulls over to be polite. The man didn’t realise the gravity of the situation. We both motion to keep going. We pass a sign saying Tanger Med 20. It’s just past 8pm. As we near the port I can feel a smile working its way across my lips. Then we stop. The driver calls to someone, another fat Arab, and he hops in the back. ‘Hola,’ he says. ‘Hola,’ we say and we carry on. For most of the trip people have been flashing their lights and honking their horns at our driver. Roadside vendors have been waving. Trying to sound clever and strangling that Romantic language called Spanish, I try to wrangle up a sentence: ‘¿Tu amigo es jeffe aqui, no?’ I say as a chorus of honks sounds around us. ‘Si, mi amigo,’ the guy in the backseat replies. ‘Mi suegro.’ ‘Claro,’ I say, pretending I know what he’s saying. The driver offers me milk he has in the pocket by his seat and I take a swig for some reason. It is lukewarm and not exactly refreshing. I feel like Ron Burgundy as we make it finally to the port after a quick driver change as our old driver took off down an empty road and his yerno took over. We race up the stairs and bound to a window, directed by some random chap. It’s 8:30 on the dot. Hot diggity. We show our booking to the woman. ‘Not yet. 15 minutes,’ she says. We look bemused. I ask if our ferry has been delayed. ‘Not delayed. Leaving at 10pm.’

The guy buzzes around me as I sit with the bags while Emma goes to the bathroom. He hands me two immigration forms with scabby hands. I fill them out ignoring him. Emma returns and he’s still buzzing. His hand is out. Whatever, I give him a few coins and he buzzes away to find another unsuspecting westerner. Good on him.

We play the waiting game with the security. ‘Come back later,’ the only English speaker says. The others seem to snigger. I spend the last of our dirhams in an overpriced border store with western products. Maltesers and Galaxy bars and a pack of Colgate marked as 35dh on the shelf. I go to the counter and the girl scans the toothpaste. ’50dh,’ she says. ‘But it says 35 on the shelf,’ I say. She goes to the shelf and removes the price tag. ‘You still want?’ she asks. ‘For 35, yes.’ ‘No, 50.’ ‘But, but.’ She shakes her head and I hand over all my withered scrunched up pieces of paper they call money. I’m short by 2dh. I shake my head and smile, trying to charm the hijab off her. No use, but I stand there long enough, learning from all my Moroccan demons, and she finally relents. ‘I give you 2dh,’ she says. ‘Shukran,’ I say and bail.

It’s time to head through the gates finally and I feel like a five year old at a McDonalds party. ‘Go, stop, go, stop,’ the Moroccans are saying at our final hurdle before our return to paradise. Through a maze of partitions emptied of people, up to the border patrol. Passports stamped. Bags through an unmanned X-ray machine. A bus as empty as a ghosts intestines takes us through the caliginous streets to the foot of the ferry. Tickets checked, passports checked, one more flirty patrolman. We walk up the thoroughfare beside the cars. And take our seats. A Spanish woman hands us a sick bag and says bueno and I feel like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. One bumpy hour later across that turbulent strait sees us in Spain with the West welcoming us back with open arms.