Introduction
This post was written long before I started this MrJohn blog thing, back when I was thinking about writing an autobiographical book about stuff I’d learnt at work. That project didn’t really work, it was too self-indulgent, but there were a few decent bits I liked, and as this one relates to travel, I thought I’d include it here.
The fact that is was written a while ago means there are no photos and there’s a slightly different writing style, and it’s long, and if you lack the will to read this much on a screen, there is a podcast version (recorded and released Sep 2025) with special guest Rebecca Smith, and there’s an e-book containing the first dozen posts on this blog. If you’d like a copy of that, please contact me.
Itchy feet
Family lore says that I don’t do travel.
This comes from the fact that when I was barely a year old, my desperate family had to drive me home from a caravan holiday in Filey where I had spent two days screaming my little lungs out.
My Father, at the end of his tether – a tether not known for its lengthiness at the best of times – dropped me off with my Grandparents and zoomed back up the A64 to rejoin my Mother and elder Sister.
Since that day, I have adored all travel and holidays, but the first story is the one that sticks, and my family still marvel that one so uncomfortable in a Filey caravan as a baby can be so full of wanderlust as an adult.
I am, like so many people, a contradiction. A nomadic homebird, a loner who likes to feel connected to others, a free spirit who enjoys his routines and habits … how do you square all those incompatible circles?
I am also, post-cancer especially, not easy to feed. I have some food phobias that my analytical brain cannot work out – there is no logic to my irrational fear of eating certain foods, and although I’ve managed to push through some of the sillier outer edges of my fears (food touching other foods etc.), and even started to eat some things I would never have considered edible before, the main core of my phobia remains, and this complicates off-beat travel and wears the patience of anyone I am with. The cancer bit is more about what happens after I eat, with my digestive process not what it was since a surgeon cut out a large chunk of my guts – arguably too large a chunk, but better to be safe than sorry when dealing with stage three tumours.
Anyway, I don’t know if I was born with itchy feet and Filey was the exception, or if that condition developed during my childhood. I do know that by the time I was stumbling wearily through the last few months of my boring University degree, I was so desperate to spread my wings it was unbearable. This post is about the first time my lost and restless little soul embraced that wanderlust feeling. I’d travelled before of course, but this was different, this wasn’t a holiday – a short interlude to normal life – this was the real thing, a lifestyle choice. I was setting out on a proper adventure that had no end date.
Next steps
I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life; at least not a realistic clue, I had been raised to think sensibly, and ideas like being a comedy writer (my ideal job) or a rock star (never going to happen) didn’t seriously cross my mind.
Such things were only available to a mysterious class of Other People.
I had finished University and knew I didn’t want a proper job, the idea of settling down and getting a mortgage left me feeling bored and claustrophobic. I wasn’t immune to the tug of responsibility and expectations, I wanted people to proud of me and to be seen as succeeding in life, and so I was not thinking of entirely going rogue and avoiding the career ladder forever. I just wanted a couple more years of youthful adventure before I tried to live up to what everyone expected me to do.
I was intrigued by the idea of working my way around the world.
This has been my dream a few years earlier when my friend Adam and I were doing our A Levels and we decided to buy a van and travel around Australia, working our way across the country for a year or so before deciding if we’d come back home and go to University.
I had deferred conditional offers from both Salford and Keele Universities to study Economics and Politics. I was excited about either, although I preferred the former, feeling I needed to experience a gritty urban environment after my comfortable upbringing in the leafy suburbs. I knew I had a narrow view of the world, a view devoid of street cred, and I was restless and desperate to put that right.
I thought a year of intrepid travel then an inner-city University would tick the necessary boxes and make me an interesting person that people might like and want to spend time with.
I failed.
It wasn’t for lack of imagination though, in fact it was probably the opposite, because having too much imagination and spending all day dreaming and planning left me with insufficient time to study, and hence my A Level results were woeful.
I had lots of ideas, from sailing around the world, to touring Africa or India, to living on a kibbutz in Israel. I was fascinated by the history and enormity of Russia, but also starstruck by the bright lights of the USA … it was so full of energy and glamour, it had brighter colours than the rest of the world, and seemed to vibrate with possibility. I used to wonder if the ground there felt different to walk on, like it had some sort of magical buzz about it, and maybe all of those idealistic notions made it feel too far out of reach for little old me, impossibly glamorous for a lad from Leeds … and so when Adam suggested Australia, I shrugged my shoulders and thought why not …
It is true that our analysis didn’t extend much beyond listening to INXS and watching Neighbours, and perhaps the chance of bumping into Kylie Minogue entered into our thinking, but for me, the more we talked about it and made plans, the more Australia looked like the right answer. It would be somewhere I could find my true self, be accepted, and maybe even flourish.
We decided to spend a full year travelling, finding work to pay our way wherever we could. We pored over maps looking for places we really wanted to see, and talked about whether we’d feel more at home in Perth, or Sydney, or Brisbane … already picking favourites, despite having no idea what any of the places were really like.
We were going to buy a cheap old van and do it up ourselves, turning it into a caravan so we could sleep in it during our adventure. Adam had the brilliant idea of using hammocks for beds so we’d save space, so we weren’t short of creative solutions.
To fund the plan, Adam had seen an advert for bus drivers, and we figured we could do that for a year, working every possible shift, driving the worst routes, and saving as much money as we could. After a year we guessed we’d have enough for our flight tickets with sufficient change to buy a van and keep us going until we found work.
We were excited about it, and decided to get an old van immediately and crack on with restoring it. Once we’d got it all ready, we could simply ship it to Australia, saving us the trouble of buying one at the other end. This would surely be cheaper than a human ticket, we reasoned, because there was no need to provide meals!
Looking back at it now, I see that there was no part of this plan that made any sense at all, especially the hammocks.
I was serious enough about it to check out the air and sea freight rates, and this was fortunate because we quickly realised that buying the van here and shipping it halfway around the world wasn’t a very good idea. We perhaps should have also realised that neither of us had any relevant experience or skills when it came to the restoration of vehicles, and a lifetime of reading adventure stories and listening to rock music hadn’t prepared me for hardcore mechanics.
I wasn’t deterred. I applied for the bus driver job, and got an interview. This was my first proper job interview, and I was nervous. My entire future depended on this plan, and I had one short interview to convince them that I was their man.
I failed.
His first question was “Why does a lad with eight O levels want to become a bus driver?”
I hadn’t prepared for this question, or indeed any other questions.
I answered: “I eventually want to go into transport management, but I’d like to work my way up. I don’t think any bus driver would have much respect for an 18-year-old in management, so I’d like to do the job first for a few years, then look at my options.”
I was quite pleased with that!
He didn’t look impressed, and said: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I realised I needed to sound realistic, so I said, “Well, I think that’s about around the time when I’d be looking at getting into management.”
He put down my CV and looked at me with weary eyes.
“The thing is,” he said, “We’re looking for bus drivers.”
I was disappointed, and so was Adam, although he didn’t even apply, so probably wasn’t taking our plan quite as seriously as I was.
I didn’t give up.
My next interview was for a job I really wanted, and had I got it I would have given up the Australia adventure and even my plans to go to University.
I’d been an avid photographer as a child, earning my Photography badge with the Cub Scouts, and spending a lot of my holidays trying to snap decent photos, which wasn’t easy with an old Agfamatic 901 camera that shot wobbly photos on 110 film.
That I shot any good photos at all with this inflexible horror is a testament to my ability to take a decent photograph.
So when I saw a photographer job advertised in the Yorkshire Evening Post, I applied with excitement. This felt right, like it was made for me, and I was sure they’d see I was the perfect fit!
The thing is, interviews don’t work that way. No one sees what’s inside you, they see only what’s on the outside: the way you look and the things you say and do.
It’s not preordained by destiny, it’s not “meant to be”, it’s decided by a flawed and biased human being, probably bored and distracted, asking questions to try to figure out who’ll be the best person for the job.
This job would have been life-changing, it would have defined me for ever. I have would been able to grow into becoming the artistic persona who drove a VW Beetle that I desperately wanted to be … but I had no case to make, no prior experience, no portfolio of success, I just needed the interviewer to peer inside me and spot the spark of potential and take a chance.
That I even got an interview was incredible.
I assume this was an open-minded hiring manager taking a chance on a kid straight out of school, and if so, I am grateful to him. I was hopelessly out of my depth, but he indulged me. He listened to my stories about the Cub Scouts photography badge and my holiday snaps, and then asked someone to show me around, saying “This is John, not much experience, but obviously really keen, can you show him around please.”
As I began the tour, I saw the next interviewee waiting to go in. He was a proper man – maybe 30 years old – with a bulging portfolio under his arm. I’m guessing he didn’t have to lean on his Cub Scout photography badge during his interview.
The photography studio was wonderful. It was exactly the kind of work environment I would have adored. It was arty but practical and unpretentious, creative but realistic, with interesting stylish people who were dedicated and hard-working. I am probably over-romanticising it, they were taking photographs for retail catalogues, not changing the world, but to my young idealistic eyes I was completely wowed by it all and really really wanted to get the job!
I failed.
On one level I knew I was never going to get it, but on another … you never know, might that kind and patient manager think it’d be worth taking a punt on that inexperienced child sitting in front of him? Well, no, he didn’t, because why would he take such an unnecessary risk … so I decided to refocus on getting cash for the Australia trip, and tried an Estate Agency.
This interview went better, up to the point where he told me how little I would earn. Taking into account my commute and other expenses, I would have made a net loss each week. I wouldn’t have minded if it were a field I really wanted to get into (I’d have jumped at such a deal from the photography place) but my plan was to accumulate cash, not give it away, and so when I got the call saying I’d made the final three, I withdrew my name.
The Australia plan fizzled out, the final bucket of cold water being those A level results that slammed the higher education door shut. If I wanted to open those doors again, I needed to spend a year doing resits.
Australia, university, photography and bus driving were now all off the table, but following a year working in various dead-end jobs and studying to put my academic record back in some sort of order, I sneaked into Leeds Polytechnic.
Three years later, as that degree was drawing to a close, I had to think about what to do next.
Could I really work my way around the world?
I knew I didn’t want a proper job, and I knew I wanted to continue the student lifestyle, to travel, to experience living in a different country, and to learn a language.
I first applied for Camp America, thinking it’d be great to spend a few months in the US working with kids on a summer camp. I didn’t fancy working in the kitchens or cleaning the toilets, and so applied to be a Camp Counsellor, working directly with the kids and (hopefully) earning some tidy tips when their parents came to visit.
I failed.
I attended the introductory event, completed the forms, got some good references together, and did an excellent interview – leaning heavily on my experience working with youth groups in theatre – and never heard from them again.
One curveball alternative plan I was investigating for after Camp America was to join the army. This might seem like an odd choice for an irreverent lazybones like me, but the Adjutant General’s Corps had piqued my interest at a job fair and I thought they might jolt me out of the rut I’d got myself stuck in. They were advertising for teachers to help soldiers prepare for the academic side of officer training at Sandhurst, to teach Gurkhas to learn English, and to create educational materials. The job sounded fantastic, it would force me to get fit and would be a fascinating experience, plus having a few years in the army would be the kind of CV bling that would open up a vast number of sensible opportunities in the future.
The Familiarisation Visit (“Fam Visit”) was my first encounter with British Rail pricing policies that meant going via London was about twice as expensive as going via Birmingham then Banbury, moving on to increasingly small lines as I edged nearer to Wilton Park. I was quite excited by this, these were new routes and new stations to me, and such was my life at the time that a trip to see Birmingham’s New Street Station was keeping me awake with excitement.
The Fam Visit was a mixed bag. The job sounded wonderful, the explanatory sessions were interesting, the food was good, the evening was fun (I attended my first Scottish ceilidh) and had it not been for the five-mile run broken up with press-ups and shouting, I might have gone for it.
The run was not unreasonable and not unexpected (they had told us there was an assault course), but I was unfit and didn’t even own a pair of trainers (I was made to do it in my Doc Martens) and so as the group set out, all gung-ho and outdoorsy and macho, I felt completely out of my depth.
After a couple of miles, I had to stop, I couldn’t go on … I flopped down on a tree stump, the Major shouted at me: “Get up!” and then to emphasise the point, she made everyone do press-ups for a bit.
I failed.
As we all jogged back, with the end in sight, I managed to get into a rhythm. I’d broken through whatever barrier had floored me a few miles ago, and was now mindlessly plodding home, eyes fixed on the warm changing rooms in the distance.
The Major ran alongside me and started with the clunky psychology: “I think you were trying to wimp out back there,” she said, “don’t you think so?”
“No,” I said, “I’m unfit, I know that, that’s all,” but the culture was making itself clear to me, and from that moment on, the Major was out to show me how much of a misfit I was. Later she stared in astonishment and asked “have you shaved?” and I said no, because I hadn’t shaved, because I barely needed to shave once a week never mind once a day, and after the late night ceilidh, I just hadn’t bothered in the morning.
She demanded I immediately go off to shave and so I went to the bathroom, unpacked my shaving kit and shaved. Later she looked at me and rolled her eyes – yet more evidence that this one wasn’t a good fit: “Is that the same shirt as yesterday?” she asked, incredulous, and I nodded (I didn’t have any shirts, this was my sole surviving school shirt).
“It’s black!” she roared as she spotted the tiny barely-visible dot on the otherwise pristine white shirt.
The offending dot was blood from having just fucking shaved my fucking face in the toilets!
I was starting to get the message that the army didn’t want irreverent boys who didn’t shave properly and couldn’t run very far. They were looking for tough rugger players who clicked with the macho culture and were already proper adults, not awkward lazy students who still hadn’t worked out how to be a grown-up. They wanted soldiers who fit their mould, I was a misfit wanting to be a traveller and a teacher. They didn’t say no to me exactly, so I can’t say I failed because I never tried. They had made it clear that there was a huge chasm between me and what they wanted, and challenged me to do something about it. I went home determined to get fit and ran every morning for three days, but this petered out and I allowed all the warnings about how tough Sandhurst was to get under my skin and I let the idea drift away. I still wonder what might have happened if I’d gone for it. In truth the chasm wasn’t that I couldn’t run five miles, that was easy to fix, it was cultural, and I knew I didn’t fit in.
I finished my final exams, completed my rubbish dissertation, and got my mediocre degree. I still insist that academia failed me at least as much as I failed it, but either way, I was a restless 22-year-old graduate with itchy feet who needed to make some decisions about life.
I was working two jobs, data-entry by day, pizza delivery by night, so I had some money coming in and needing to break away, to do something different and see something of the world, I decided to go to Spain to teach English.
I didn’t know much about Spain, but I had backpacked there the previous summer with some friends, working our way across the north coast. We imagined it would be fairly quiet as the weather wasn’t as good as down south on the Mediterranean, but that’s exactly why it was extremely busy and very expensive. A lot of Spanish people go north in the summer to escape the heat, a concept unimaginable for a Brit. After being conned in San Sebastian, stuck on an industrial estate in Santurce, and sleeping in a field in Comillas, we eventually hired a car in Santander just so we had somewhere to sleep. We drove south to Reinosa, and along the Ebro valley, ending up in Briviesca – a tiny village in the middle of their summer fiestas. We had a fantastic time, Spain was a wonderful combination of lively and laid back, with great food and wine, gorgeous beaches, and pretty girls. Even the language didn’t seem as impenetrable as French or German and so I decided Spain would be my destination.
I enrolled to do a week-long introductory TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course.
The TEFL school was on the second-floor of a scruffy building on Vicar Lane in central Leeds, run by a man called Nigel. Despite this, it was excellent. I started the week with the vague notion of teaching in Spain after completing a longer TEFL qualification in the new year and doing a year’s worth of Spanish classes, but ended it – just five days later – full of confidence and excitement and raring to go immediately.
This was timely. I needed direction, my self-confidence was rock bottom and I was increasingly lost and lonely.
I hadn’t much enjoyed my studies, and my social life had initially revolved around my girlfriend (who dumped me, another story) and then my housemates who were slightly older than I was, and they had drifted off into more sensible lives, our shared house returning to its owner. I was again living with my parents, uncertain about everything … even uncertain about who I was and how to navigate my awkward personality. I had tried to be outrageous and funny during the TEFL course, which worked sometimes, but mostly it was disruptive and silly. I was unwilling to settle into being the introverted nonentity I felt I was at heart, but instead of trying to get good at being me, I tried to try to be someone else, an annoying extroverted wisecrackin’ loose cannon, and as always when we try to be someone we’re not, we’re not very good at it.
I worked on one assignment with a nomadic guy called Kim. His life was travelling around in a van getting work wherever he could find it, and he thought having a TEFL qualification in his quiver would be another way to earn money as he wandered the world. I was transfixed by this lifestyle, and quizzed him on it endlessly, but never imagined I could do it, not least because it involved completely opting out of normal life, eschewing the usual measures of success. I wasn’t ready to do that, it seemed like someone else’s gig, and too much of a hustle for my taste, not really a life of romantic freedom but a life on the poverty line, scratching around for work, always looking for the next meal.
Another student on the course (Helen) was heading straight off to León in Spain to start a job at a school that September. I decided to follow her, I had nowhere better to go and at least I’d know one person, maybe she could even help me get a job. I arranged to meet Kim there too, so we could have Christmas together, it would be fun to have some company and as he was driving down to Spain anyway, he promised to meet up. I badgered him about it, giving him my parent’s number so he could call them to find out where I was. He laughed saying “you don’t seem to believe that I’m going to show up! I will be there, I promise!”
I never saw him again.
And so I sold my bass guitar and amplifier (I had failed to become a rock star, or even an able musician) and worked every shift I could, losing two-nights’ pay when I accidentally reversed the pizza delivery car into someone who sneaked into my parking space as I was reversing in. On reflection, it wasn’t entirely my fault, but I think it’s probably too late to unpick the details of the incident now; I have come to terms with the loss of that £30.
Despite this, I amassed £1000, converted it to traveller’s cheques in Spanish pesetas, and phoned Helen’s parents for her address in León, discovering she had moved further north to Oviedo. I packed my old rucksack and got my cheap airline ticket and with no job, no accommodation and virtually no Spanish, I set off on the biggest adventure of my life.
Route 66
We left our house in Horsforth, heading south on the Leeds Ring Road before switching into Bradford and onto the M606, a little spur of a motorway that connects the city to the M62, Britain’s highest motorway.
Such banal and familiar roads felt odd being the start of my life-changing adventure, but there’s no other way to escape your home than along familiar roads.
We merged onto the M62 heading west, and as we climbed up into the Pennines, we passed the famous farm in the middle, the westbound lanes passing to the south, the eastbound to the north. We both looked over toward it but neither of us said anything. Between me and my Father – and the rest of our family – we had told each other the story of the stubborn owners who had refused to sell about a million times. I had always admired their determination and irreverence, and was sad to learn many years later that this wasn’t true, and that the road went around the farm because the rock underneath is unstable and cannot support a busy motorway.
Dropping down into Lancashire we passed the M66, which given I was clutching a copy of Jack Kerouac’s adventures on Route 66 (the rather tiresome “On The Road”) in one hand and my flight ticket that had cost a bargain £66 in the other, it would have been fun to have taken the M66 to complete the theme – alas we were going to the airport, not to Ramsbottom, and so I said nothing and we continued on the M62 then on to the M60.
My Father and I didn’t talk much. We got on reasonably well if we kept it superficial, but he wasn’t a natural parent and I’m not a natural child, and so it had been a struggle over the years.
Our interests didn’t align much either. He was a different generation (obviously), but not just because of the 25-year age difference, but because the world had changed so much from the his youth. He had been just seventeen when The Beatles first hit the world, but he had been looking the other way; the sixties passed him by. He was rooted in the fifties, a gentle Enid Blyton decade where pop music and comedy were safely owned by the establishment. He had grown up to become a middle-class Freemason and golf club conservative, a gentle open-minded and funny man, but an unsociable and short-tempered one too. He was happy with his habits and routines, and although he’d do his duty, he was often reluctant, even frustrated, when asked to step outside of that. In contrast, I was defined by the eighties, a love of aggressive anti-establishment comedy like The Young Ones, and music that seemed designed to annoy previous generations. As much as he was settled and content, I was curious and restless, and it felt like we were from different species, not just different generations.
I tried to explain how innovative Jaco Pastorius’s bass playing was on our car journey, but he wasn’t interested. He didn’t say so exactly, he communicated it by silently nodding in that way parents do when children talk to them about boring stuff. Now I have children of my own, I better understand how uninteresting children can be, but back then I thought it was typical of his lack of effort.
You might lay a similar charge at my door and ask what I had done to engage with him on his turf, and I’d tell you to check your facts before shooting your mouth off because I had shown a reasonable level of interest in golf and computers, even if some of it was fake to try to spend some time with him and maybe even gain his approval. I had happily caddied my way around Horsforth golf course many times, and spent an entire day in The Warren on Rabbit’s Captain’s Day when my Father proudly held that position, but I just didn’t have the patience or personality for a sport that was all about precision. I prefer sports that demand you react to your opponent’s punch with speed and guile, where it’s about improvisation under pressure, and where you get to wear better clothes.
We got to Manchester Airport and he pulled up to the kerb, and with the engine running, helped me get my bag out the boot.
“Good luck,” he said, then “if you need money to come back at any time, just call,” and then he jumped back in the car and drove off.
I was a little surprised.
I didn’t need him to come in and help me check in. If I was capable of going to Spain with no job, no accommodation and almost no Spanish, I should be able to check in for a flight at Manchester Airport without holding my Father’s hand, but I must have expected him to hang around a little longer than three seconds because I suddenly felt completely alone.
And I loved it.
I walked into the Departures Hall and felt a weight lift from my shoulders. I don’t mean this as the usual clichéd metaphor, I mean it literally: an actual weight literally lifted off my actual literal shoulders. Whatever tension was bundled up in that part of my body dissipated and I felt free and light and able to do anything.
The sensation was intoxicating … and with a smile so broad my face could barely contain it, I scanned the board for my flight to Madrid and skipped off to check in.
I found a seat in the crowded departure lounge, sitting next to a man with his nose in a newspaper.
“Where are you headed?” I asked, desperate to talk about my adventure.
“Johannesburg, you?”
Suddenly my little hop to Madrid didn’t seem so intrepid.
“Madrid”
“Oh nice,” he said, but I think we both knew his was more exciting than mine.
I sat next to a trainee Catholic priest on the flight, me on the aisle, him squashed into the middle seat. This fact alone is an atheist’s knock-down argument because surely no loving deity would allow his employees to suffer the indignity of the middle seat.
I demonstrated my lack of understanding of flight ticket pricing strategies by opening the conversation with “The flight ticket prices were really good, weren’t they? £66 is much cheaper than I expected”
“I think everyone pays a different price, mine was over £300.”
Ah, maybe I needed to be a bit more careful with my conversational gambits.
He then ordered several hundred cigarettes from Duty Free, and I demonstrated my lack of understanding of Catholicism by saying, “Oh, who are the cigarettes for?”
“They’re for me,” he said.
I don’t know why I expected a Catholic priest to abstain from cigarettes, it just seemed to jar with my naïve idea of what a God-fearing sort should do. I was only 22 year-old, my ideas were still idealistic and ill-formed. I knew I didn’t believe in the details of religion, and was repelled by the conformity of it, but I was open to believing in something, and I thought belief itself a positive thing and something worthy of respect. It wasn’t for me, but I was positively disposed toward it and thought priests and other churchy sorts were generally good people trying to do what they thought was right. This led me to assume that they would sufficiently respect God’s creation (i.e. their bodies) to not pollute it with a daily pack of Benson and Hedges.
The smokey Priest was a fun guy, we chatted for most of the rest of the flight, him telling me hilarious stories of the strange world he inhabited, opening my young eyes to the idea that priests are actually people with similar urges and weaknesses as everyone else, although I still never understood why anyone would choose a life of celibacy voluntarily: my celibacy was not voluntary, there’s a difference.
I arrived at Madrid’s Barajas Airport and found a payphone. I had read that it was better to reserve a hostel immediately and not just show up unexpectedly. They got booked up quickly and it could be hard on the shoe leather going door-to-door, and so I set about choosing a candidate from my guidebook.
I picked one and phone them: “Hola, hay habitaciónes libres?” I said. There was a pause, then an incomprehensible jumble of words, none of which I could understand. It’s a pity they didn’t have the same phrasebook handy, because then they could have answered with one of the options listed.
“Er … habla inglés?” I said hopefully, realising I had no other moves to play.
She slammed the phone down.
There was no Trip Advisor in those days, but had there been, that hostel would not have got the full five stars for customer service.
I tried another, this one on a little back street called Calle Infantas that looked fairly central.
“Hola, hay habitaciónes libres?” I asked again, this time with a little more trepidation.
“Sí” he said, then something else.
“Er, habla inglés?“
“Yes, a little”
I confirmed the price and reserved two nights, then continued to explain that I was at the airport and so would be a while before I showed up. He didn’t seem too fussed about the details of my itinerary so I let him go, and left the airport to look for a bus into the city.
After a bus, a metro and a short walk, I was knocking on the door of the Hostal Infantas. It wasn’t much, just an old second-floor apartment, and my chilly room overlooked the narrow unlovely street. This room wasn’t a home-from-home, it was more a room that reminded you that you were not at home.
I needed food, and scanned my guidebook for ideas, but I was fast losing my sense of adventure and so found something close by, ate quickly and cocooned myself back in my room to rest.
The next day I sorted out my bus ticket to Oviedo first thing, and then tentatively explored the city, wandering around aimlessly, missing everything of importance by doggedly refusing to follow the guidebook based on the ridiculous notion that anything that could be described as a tourist attraction needed to be avoided. This was similar to my youthful compulsion to avoid all music that was in the charts, which wasn’t necessarily a bad instinct if it had just been a suspicion of following the crowd, but when it becomes a fixed rule that closes doors, it does more harm than good.
The thing is, some music in the charts is popular because it’s hyped and is nothing but a catchy melody that palls after a few listens, but some stuff is popular because it’s good. Similarly, some tourist attractions are attractive to tourists for no real reason other than the fact that it is well-known – famous for being famous – but some things are actually attractive because they’re interesting; and Madrid has plenty of genuinely interesting attractions for anyone willing to open their mind and learn a bit about the place.
Unfortunately that didn’t include me.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I was young enough to know better, and so spent the rest of the morning wandering around and not seeing much at all. After a quick lunch, I headed back to my room for much of the afternoon.
I was unsure what to do that evening. I had an early start the next day and am not a big drinker, especially not on my own, and so rather than face an evening of feeling awkwardly alone in a midweek bar being ignored by attractive women, I ate early and went back to my room to read Jack Kerouac.
I breathed differently as I got on board the coach heading north to Asturias. I had found the chilly wintery Madrid intimidating and lonely, but back on the move I felt excited again. It was only a coach, but it was the open road, and it thrilled me.
The seats were assigned, and I had an aisle seat about two-thirds of the way back on the right (or the left, depending which way you’re facing. It was on the right once I’d sat down and was facing the front). I was still at the age where I (sort of) believed in fate, or something like it, and I had a feeling that I’d meet the girl of my dreams in Oviedo, and we’d fall in love and be passionate companions for life … so when I saw that the window seat was occupied by the most beautiful girl ever created, I was sure that my fantasy was coming true already!
There is no fixed protocol on speaking to people on long-distance bus journeys (I say “people” but she was not “people”, she was an 11 at least, she transcended mere “people”). A bus is not like a train where you can start a conversation in the buffet car and then either of you can head off back to your seat when you’ve had enough. On a bus you’re stuck, nowhere to hide. I didn’t mind being stuck with her, I would have happily been stuck with her forever, I’d still be stuck with her now if I had a chance, but a lack of language skills made any significant communication impossible, so I got out my book and hoping she’d think me cool for reading Jack Kerouac.
The bus was soon out of Madrid and climbing up toward the mountains along the A6, the motorway that led to Galicia in the far north-west of the country. I had checked the map many times so knew exactly where we were going.
We cut through the lengthy Guadarrama tunnel and emerged into the hills of the Castilla-León region. It was sunny outside, and surprisingly green, and – increasingly distracted from my book – I stared more and more at the view as the hills disappeared behind us and the huge empty plains of León opened out. There are no such wide open spaces in England and I was transfixed by it. The Spanish ignored it, closing the curtains on their windows to better see the movie (Beethoven) showing on the two TV screens. I sniffily ignored such nonsense, and was amazed to see so many adults happily plug in their earphones and laugh along to such inane drivel. I glanced at the beautiful girl, hoping she wasn’t watching it, and was glad to see she was snoozing which I decided was brilliant.
After about three hours we pulled into a service station and the driver said something, opened the door and disappeared. I had no idea what he had said or how much time we had, and so I turned to my beautiful seatmate I asked, “er … perdona, cuanto tiempo?“
“Twenty minutes,” she said in perfect English.
I smiled, “oh thanks.”
“I saw your book, I saw you speak English,” she had a beautifully soft Australian accent.
“Er, yes, I am English, and you?”
“Australian, well, half-Australian half-Spanish.”
The signs were suddenly clear: okay, my plan to spend a gap year travelling around Australia hadn’t worked out, but I hadn’t given up on it and still desperately wanted to tour that vast country and now – right here on a bus to Oviedo – the Universe was handing me that chance, sort of, in a way. The signs couldn’t be clearer!
We went off to the bar to grab a drink and use the loo. I sat outside, perched on a step, smoking a cigarette to feel more like Jack Kerouac, hoping she’d come to talk to me. After a few minutes she walked past and smiled, and got back on the coach. I waited a sensible amount of time so as not to appear desperate, and followed her back onboard.
“Are you going to Oviedo too?” I asked, not really sure where else the bus was going but having no idea what else to talk about. I wanted to come across as a friendly and amusing companion, but also emit an underlying sense of Kerouac cool. I also needed to do some ground work. If we were soul mates destined for a lifelong love affair, I needed to break the ice enough so that me asking to see her again wouldn’t seem completely odd.
“No,” she said.
Oh … so much for the stupid Universe …
“I’m visiting my Grandparents, they’ll pick me up in Oviedo but they live miles away in the middle of nowhere.”
“Oh, right, so … er … is Oviedo nice?”
“Yes, it is small and old, but it’s really nice in the centre.”
We chatted a bit more but soon lapsed into silence. She plugged in her Walkman headphones and I went back to my book.
The bus turned off the A6 on to the A66 toward León and north toward Oviedo … at least I was on Route 66, albeit the Spanish version.
The plains were disappearing, being shoved aside by gentle hills, then mountains. The bus climbed up and up and eventually into a tunnel, then emerged in a rain-swept lunar landscape, snow-peaked mountains in the distance, with what looked like a frozen lake on one side, hills on the other. Another landscape so different from England … I thought about my simple trip across the Pennines two days earlier, the so-called backbone of England, and realised how gentle that ripple of hills was compared to this chain of dramatic mountains.
The weather was awful, and over the next three years of returning to Asturias I don’t think there was a single time when I emerged from that tunnel and it wasn’t raining.
This northern strip of Spain, stuck between the sea and the mountains, is nothing like the sunny costas most of us imagine when we think of Spain. It’s stunningly beautiful, but like all green places, it’s green for a reason.
An hour or so later we were skirting Oviedo and I looked excitedly out the window as the bus slowed to exit the motorway. No city looks good from the perspective of its bus station, nor from the nearest motorway exit. We build cities to live and work in, but usually the person paying to build any particular building doesn’t intend living or working in it themselves, it’s usually a capital investment designed to turn money into more money via bricks and mortar. This means all the incentives are to cram stuff in and make buildings utilitarian rather than beautiful, and although Oviedo was no big offender in this regard, no worse than any other city, it still presented a side that didn’t do this lovely little city justice.
I looked at my seatmate, “Hmmm, doesn’t look so nice,” and she smiled, “maybe I’ll hitch to somewhere else” I added as if hitch-hiking were second-nature to a cool man-of-the-world like me. I had no intention of hitching anywhere, I had never hitched in my life, but she didn’t need to know that.
I said goodbye, accepting that my seatmate was not my soulmate, and left the bus station to find somewhere to stay.
I had no idea where I was going, aware only that walking down a street of an unknown city with nothing but a rucksack on my back, open to whatever happens next, is exactly the feeling of freedom and possibility that I had been craving.
I walked down one anonymous street, then another. This corner of Oviedo was nothing special, just bland streets with unremarkable buildings. It was already late afternoon, and so I looked up at the buildings, looking for a hotel or Hostal sign so I could dump my bag, wash my face, and at least know I had a safe place for a couple of nights. I was all for adventure, but adventure with a bathroom and a comfortable bed!
It didn’t take long, and the next day I met up with Helen who showed me a tatty old shared apartment that wasn’t great, but it was clean, thanks to a weekly clean being wisely included in the rent … I lay down on my new bed and settled down to read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” … my new life was starting.
MrJohn 