It’s fascinating leaving one country to head off to a new one. As soon as you pass through to the gate lounge, terminal, platform or port you are in a mash up of the place you are and the place you are going to. I’d never been to Spain before so as we boarded Iberia Airlines I was sticky beaking about getting on with the important job of racial stereotyping and massaging my prejudices. The Spanish kind of looked like a banged up version of the Italians I thought to myself. They looked like they were running late because they’d all had a last minute shag before work. Relaxed, slightly disheveled and distracted. Were they a cross between the Italian and the French? The Greek and the Italian? The Greek and the French? Perhaps they were just fucking Spanish and I should stop playing the ‘what do you get when you cross this with that game’. God I am so fucking parochial.
Half way through my time living in Tokyo in 1993 I bumped into a sheila I had worked as a waiter with at the Arts Centre. I think her name was Katrina. She was leaving the Land Of The Rising Yen in a few weeks with her pockets full of cash and told me she was taking the Trans-Siberian express on her way to backpack through Europe.
The mere mention of the famous train trip immediately unlocked three doors in my head. 1. Fuck how cool would it be to be able to say ‘I’m going on the Trans-Siberian in a few weeks.’ 2. How many travel brag stories would I win with that one and 3. I read about the Trans-Siberian in Bob Geldof’s autobiography when I was 13 years old and remembered thinking ‘that sounds so fucking cool’ but thought no more of it.
As a 13 year old reading a biography of Bob Geldof on the bottom bunk of the bedroom I shared with my two sisters in a housing commission house in Reservoir there was no such thing as bucket lists, wish boards or creative visualization. We just had prayer. Praying the shit didn’t hit the fan and begging for favors. Nothing as bold as ‘having dreams’. I would have thought of the Trans Siberian express as something other people did, like being on Young Talent Time, meeting Daryl and Ossie or flying to the moon. I wouldn’t have been jealous or determined to do it. Growing up poor in the ghetto my dream at that stage of my life would simply have been to not get pregnant before marriage.
So the mere mention of the Trans-Siberian express activated that tiny fragment deep down the memory hole. If it was the kind of thing ‘other people did’ clearly I was now one of those other people.
Katrina’s mention of the Trans-Siberian express did activate a rare pang of jealousy. I am not an envious or jealous person at all but I find the rare pangs very illuminating. They show me what it is I would like to do, be or go next.
I booked the trip through a small indi company called Moonsky Star. Moon. Sky. Star. I took a slow boat to Shanghai from Kobe after enduring a night bus from Tokyo. After I arrived in Shanghai I took a train to Beijing where the official trip took off. From the moment I stepped aboard the boat in Kobe I collected other people who were all heading to Beijing to assemble for the Trans-Sib. I love travelling on my own. It never lasts long. People travelling alone quickly meet others and form groups despite how keen you are to go solo.
The train trip from Beijing to Moscow via Mongolia and Siberia took 12 days. You could do a four-day version or a three week version. The decision to only spend one night in Mongolia was perhaps the best of my life. How much mutton can you eat, Passiona can you drink and fermented mare’s milk can you smell and not dry retch?
Watching the Asian faces turn into Caucasian faces the further we travelled north was a revelation. Mongolians faces seemed the perfect half way point. As if they were the result of one of a photo shop app where you could mash up races.
I was very keen to travel a long distance as close to land as possible. I wanted to comprehend how big the world was. Plane travel is very deceptive. One minute you are in Melbourne, an hour later you are in Sydney. But how big is the world? A night bus, a slow boat and several elderly trains from Tokyo to St. Petersburg really made me able to comprehend how big and small the world was and is.
Bear and I landed at Madrid airport and had to get a connecting flight to San Sebastian. What gate was it? How did we get to the gate? How long would it take and hang on I just need to make sure we don’t have to get our luggage here and check it in again here. We followed the signs, ended up in a shuttle and we were in the right terminal with 40 minutes to spare. Cool. Relax. The terminal was super light and sunny, the Spanish wafted around non-chalantly and seemed to be travelling with a ridiculous amount of small dogs in zip up baskets.
‘Please note. There are no boarding announcements at this airport’.
Ah! That explains why it feels so relaxed. We’re not constantly having our fucking brains pierced with information we don’t need. Very fucking civilized.
I tweeted – Madrid airport PA. Please note. There are no boarding announcements at this airport #becausefuckyou
We had a laugh, found our gate, checked our social media and had a drink.
A queue started to form and we rolled our eyes and talked about who these people were who queued up so early, for what? The seats were assigned and it was the crew’s job to find a place to store your hand luggage if the overhead compartments were full. We went back to our screens and felt smug and superior.
We finally moseyed over as the line began to move and I made a comment about how laid back the Spanish were ‘See this flight is supposedly taking off in five minutes and they have only started to board….’
At the same moment I started thinking it Bear said ‘Are we in the right queue?’
Holy fuck. We raced up to the empty check in point two metres from the queue we were in and as we got closer to the bored looking crew member we could clearly see she was standing under a screen that said San Sebastian FLIGHT CLOSED.
As I pulled out our boarding passes and passports we begged to be let on the flight while the Spanish sheila berated us. I just kept saying ‘we were standing in that queue, we didn’t see this queue…’ we ran to the plane hot footed it along the tarmac, climbed the stairs and caught our breath.
That was over a week ago. I can’t tell you how many times I have had flashbacks and shuddered at the remembering how close we were to missing the plane. How did that happen we kept asking each other. We were at the gate. The check in was directly behind our seats. How did we not see a queue? We saw the other longer queue. Rooky mistake that one.
The no boarding announcements really did make a difference when you are used to being micromanaged by PA. It was also a very small flight. Less than 40 people. I don’t think there was any queue. The check in was open and people drifted straight through. The signals to board I am accustomed to are the formation of a queue and the announcement. There were no announcements and there was a long queue that formed about the time we expected and only one metre away from our correct check in.
We landed in San Sebastian around noon. I knew fuck all about it apart from the fact it was supposed to have the best food in Europe and people raved about the place. As we flew in looked gorgeous, beaches, blue skies, dear little houses, no tall buildings, lush hills. Should be good.
In the same way I love seeing performances and films I know nothing about I love rocking up to places about which I know fuck all. I did know San Sebastian was part of Basque Country so we were in Spain but not in Spain.
No Ubers here so we took a cab to the Airbnb. I speak a little French and a little Italian and a bit more Japanese but no Spanish and no Basque. It was very very odd feeling mute. I showed the cab driver the address on the phone and off we went. I peered out the window summing it up.
And you can fuck right off with your ‘I always make sure I know a few phrases in any language before I arrive in another country. Hello, good-bye, excuse me, thank-you. It’s not hard and it’s very disrespectful to land in a new place with a different language and not have made an effort…’
FUCK. RIGHT. OFF. You do it your way you judgey cunt and I’ll do it mine.
The reason we were here was because of my mate Jess. She’s one of my besties, a manager for a tour company in Paris and an intrepid and enthusiastic traveler along with being a cracking sheila. Bear, me and 11yo Charlie hung out with her in Paris in 2014 and had the most incredible time. When we decided on this crazy trip and Bear and I had two weeks to ourselves one of the things we wanted to do was hang out with Jess. I asked her to work out a bit of an adventure for us all. San Sebastian was our first stop.
We couldn’t get into the Airbnb for a couple of hours so food, beer and some sunshine was the plan. For the next two hours we became the pitiful creatures who drag their luggage around a new place having no idea and knowing we are about to have the worst food and most expensive beer in this leg of the trip. We found a chicken shop where everything was written in Basque and I managed to point and mime enough to get some chicken and chips in a polystyrene container. It was humiliating, liberating and equalising in equal proportions. There were some wide stone steps close by so we decided to set ourselves up with our luggage entourage. There was a bloke sitting a few stairs behind us. Big bloke. May or may not be homeless or a tourist but looked harmless enough. We wolfed down our deep fried treats as we watched the people, breathed the air and started to get a lock on the place.
We had almost finished our lunch when a large white van started to reverse park in front of us. Slowly, deliberately and with precision. The vans bumper touched the bumper of the car parked as it reversed.
And kept going.
When I say kept going I mean reversed so much the bumper of the car parked was completely mashed and the reversing cars bumper was being enveloped. There was a strange crunching noise but not as loud or piercing as you’d expect. The van straightened up, drove forward, extricated itself from the car behind and the van driver hopped out without a backward glance.
The large bloke sitting behind us said in a broad Australian accent ‘Fuck me dead. That’s one way to park.’
It’s at these kind of moments I am always very very quiet. The bloke had clearly heard our accents and knew we were Australian so it was too late to pull the ‘No, English pardon monsieur, no English’ so instead we both silently packed up our rubbish and wheeled our cases to the bar around the corner.
You never know when a solo Australian traveler is an independent, fun, well travelled person who’s good value and an excellent chat or when they are travelling alone because it’s their only option.
Apropos the bumper bar that magically sprang back to shape after the Reverse Parking Incident, the driver clearly knew something we didn’t the bumper was made of some thick rubber/plastic deal. ‘That’ said Bear who is constantly annoyed and frustrated by the fact we don’t live in the future where there is universal free wifi, full skeleton replacements, a living wage, free public transport, self driving cars and bicycle docking stations everywhere ‘is how bumpers should be made’.
We were installed into our gorgeous AirBnb with a view of the Old Town and the beach. Jess was arriving from Paris later that night but her friend Emma who we had never met was meeting us at the Airbnb.
Emma rocked up loaded up with backpack and case and in five minutes we had made a new friend. She was a ripper. Which I expected. Jess is a brilliant traveler and excellent people person and there is no way she’d make a wrong call. Many people do. They invite people along to travel who they personally like or want to please and their lack of thought? insight? Consideration? totally fucks up the trip because they have not bothered to think about the symbiosis of the trip as a whole and only of what they want. To bring an annoying person on the trip fucking up other people’s holiday.
We settled in with wine, chat and easy conversation. Emma too was an intrepid traveler, had met Jess when they were exchange students in Belgium in their teens and was running the Berlin Marathon the following Sunday.
It was exactly what travelling in my early 20s was like. Rock up to somewhere with a mate and their mate and suddenly you’re a travel family with in jokes, intimate revelations and a bond forged by close quarters, shared interests and full on chat.
I had to deal with some annoying bullshit from home, which always happens. I love being connected and I don’t mind dealing with the bullshit but it does mean switching into a different mode. Doing what you can, taking counsel from others about what is best to do, how much can be done from here and the best way to minimize negative impact to you travel and your travel companions and maximize any way you can positively affect the situation out of reach.
I always know when I travel shit will hit the fan where I am or on the other side of the world. I expect it and when it happens I am a little relieved. ‘Good, tick, so something has happened. Not to serious, could have been worse, will blow over soon.’
The fear of shit happening when you are travelling either where you are or at home should not stop people travelling. Shit happens all the time whether you are there or here. You just have to manage it. Some serious shit had gone down when I am far away from loved ones. You just have to do your what you can, where you are with what you have and get some perspective. It’s shit when people you love are being affected by something out of their control or caused by a toxic fuckwit. There is a temptation to air lift them out or abandon your adventure to rescue them but the bottom line you know what? If you don’t rescue people and sort out situations they have plan B-Z you’re just Plan A probably because you are the most reliable and available but you may not be the best.
Even when I was single I have memories of being anxious about tiny things or worse still non-existent things so even having no actual worries is no guarantee of not worrying
Em, Bear and I hit the town about 8pm. I was a little distracted with the shit going on but determined to get as much out of the night a possible.
San Sebastian is famous for its pintxos, small cheap bar snacks. It’s a little overwhelming at first but you have to roll your sleeves up, get stuck in and work it out. Going out for pintxos is basically a bar and food crawl. The idea is not to ‘settle in’ somewhere but to have a drink and a bite at once place and then wander to another joint.
We spent our night wandering around beautiful Old Town. Lanes and lanes full of hundreds of little joints with their bars stacked with dozens of little snacks, mostly stuff piled on pieces of baguette. Some of the pintxos you choose from the bar, some off a menu, some written on boards and some you point to and they warm up.
We were told to try the white sparkling wine of the region called txakoli, which is poured in the same, flamboyant way a street food seller in India or the Middle East would poor tea. Suffice to say txakoli is not my cup of my tea. But I did have four glasses of it to make sure.
I was curious as to how often and under what circumstances the locals got their pintxos on. I wasn’t keen to eat like this every night. Not only am I not a massive drinker but also I am more a sitting at the table having a proper meal kind of sheila.
We headed back to the apartment when Jess rolled up. There was hugging and squealing and the dumping of her backpack and we headed back to the bars.
We ended the night at a mad place tucked behind a church called La Cuchara de San Telmo. People had warned us we had to know what we wanted. The place was fast and furious. Luckily Em and Jess speak fairly good bar/taxi/shagging Spanish so after some ‘no you can’t have that, no you can’t sit there, no we’ve run out’ some incredible food arrived and was demolished between delighted moans before the new city excitement was overtaken by food, booze and yawning.
We wandered back home around midnight laughing and chatting through the gorgeous little lanes. We discussed the possibility of a bike tour in the morning, I’d seen three online. Jess said she’d do some research and try to book us something for the morning. We hit the sack and the sack hit us. I didn’t have a lock on the place yet but I was keen and determined.
