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In Which I Hum A Frank Sidebottom Tune To Myself

September 24, 2007 by Mike

O Barqueiro

Route: Gijon - Navia - Ribadeo - Viveiro - O Barqueiro

I god a cowd id by doze. *At-CHOO*

What does Spain look like?

Hot desert, scrubby hillsides and white-washed villages empty but for the occasional mistreated donkey?

Or high-rise resorts overfilled with sunburnt Brits in Man Yoo shirts scarfing down egg, chips and beans in between the beers?

Or perhaps Spain is a cool, chrome and glass bar in Barcelona, where the beautiful people (and Mick Hucknell) sip cocktails?

It's all those and more, of course. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also the verdant valleys of Asturias and Galicia. I'm in the middle of a eucalyptus forest as I write this, for example. Beneath the canopy of the trees -- which smell divine -- there's a whole world of ferns and plants and creepy-crawlies. Nature is replete.

How did all these green wonders come to be living in this corner of hot, dusty Spain? Because of the rain, naturally. Because the rain in Spain stays mainly in the far northwest. Because a day like today will keep the little dears watered for a month. Sheeesh.

The rain kept me on the motorway today. Might as well get it over and done with, I thought to myself. That cost me 40 miles or so of wiggles on the A-road.. but they wouldn't have been such a lark in the rain anyway. It was a road awash with viaducts and bridges. Impressive engineering (when I could see beyond the end of my nose) but every viaduct meant another steep, windy road down and up the hillsides had been forsaken.

They are still building motorways at a furious pace here. Too fast for the map-makers to keep up, so I am forever being taken by surprise. This region was always remote from the rest of Spain -- beyond the mountains, unseen and unheard -- but change now will surely be keeping pace with that motorway traffic.

This is a land where the people have been poor forever. Many people have taken to painting their houses to brighten lives of drudgery and hardship. They are to be seen everywhere - bright blues and pastel greens and scarlet reds, pinks and yellows and fuchsias. The biggest houses in each village were built by 'Los Indianos' -- emigrants to the Americas who returned having made their fortune to the place of their birth. In every town and village, something new is being built, slowly. But for every new building five have been left to fall down, even more slowly.

Money has arrived now, as it has across Spain, but I sense a smidgen of reticence, of self-conscious unease, in elderly locals driving their new Mercedes and Audis along roads their parents would have been obliged to walk.

This is a land where Banesto, Once and Cofidis mean more than the names of teams in the Tour de France.

This is a land is one where they grow Christmas trees on a commercial basis - that should tell you something about the climate.

This is a land where hawks hover on the high mountain passes. Unless they are eagles. Are there eagles in northwest Spain? I'd like that.

This is also a land where towns can be called things like Las Vegas, Laredo and Salinas, and restaurants can be called El Paso or La Ponderosa, without everybody pointing and giggling or, worse still, wearing plastic cowboy hats.

From Asturias into Galicia: impressive coast here, brash white surf roaring in from the Atlantic with news of the New World. The cliffs are craggy and broken. The rain stops. Off with my waterproofs to give my jacket and trousers a chance to dry off in the wind. It's a cold way to ride but it's instantly liberating to lose the big, baggy waterproofs. And then.. suddenly.. I catch sight of an intimate, jostling port gathered in the folds of steep, forested hills across a river estuary. Ten minutes later the winding road delivers me to the small village of O Barqueiro.

And what should I find when I got down to the port? A motorbike with British plates, parked outside a cheap and cheerful pension. That's recommendation enough for me, even though my compadre is riding a BMW GS1200 (think Ewan and Charlie..)

Perfect: my room has a bath (luxury!) and when I emerge scrubbed and shiny, the sun has even come out. A day that started wet and miserable is perking up.

A precipitous clamber up through Barqueiro and into the eucalyptus forest above the village. The late afternoon sun is golden. The air is as clear as clear can be. Great views. The houses, below me now, are a complete jumble, perched in no kind of order, connected by staircases and paths; one thin road curls along the hillside, but few of the homes have any access to it. There are dogs everywhere: one, chained, barks viciously; others take up the call. A cat scampers. Another cat lies across a doorway and ignores me. A third comes to say Hola. Front doors are wide open in the late afternoon. Inside I spy dark, heavy furniture and a TV on in each house. An umbrella stand sits just inside every front door, in readiness. As many as one in ten of the houses are crumbled beyond repair, their roofs caved in, grass and trees growing where families once ate and cooked and laughed. An elderly man at a window returns my nod. The sound of one man hammering a nail echoes across the harbour. Poor nail, I think to myself.

I'm back down at the port now and find my fellow biker. He has a mullet.

"Don't go to Portugal. Portugal! He's going to Portugal, pheeef! Don't do it man. Portugal!"

Well now, it would be hard to follow Keith's advice. Portugal, which is now a day's ride away even by my slow standards, has plenty of coastline. And now I have to find out for myself if it's as awful as he insists. I'm not sure the roads, the drivers, the food, the attitude *and* the women can *all* be quite as *dreadful* as I've been told. I'll keep you posted.

Keith is from Stafford, which is near enough a Brummie accent to make me feel quite at home.

"I love Spain, man. I'm here all the time, several times a year. But then I get bored and want to get back to Stafford. Not for long, though. The women in Stafford.. pheeef, no chance. So I come back here. And Morocco. And north Wales, the riding there, I tell you. Pheeef, it's something else. I love it, man."

Keith is a Proper Biker. He's an off-road enthusiast, something I couldn't even begin to try with the Bonnie. He's generous: "No way man, pheeef, you haven't got the right suspension.. you'd crack the engine casing" though we both realise it's because I'm not a very good biker. I enjoy his tales of the (not) road.

".. so there I was, on top of this mountain, the front wheel's completely stuck, there's a sheer drop on one side and rockface on the other so I couldn't turn the bike round anyway, it's getting dark and I'm 20 miles from the nearest road. Pheeef, I bloody love it..!"

".. so Steve shoots over the hilltop and down the other side, screaming 'Stop! Don't follow me!' so of course, pheeef, I gun it and roar over the top meself. Sheer drop down the other side, the track's turned into a path as wide as yer arm, Steve's in a heap under his bike and we're both rammed in stuck as you like. Man how we sweated to pull those bikes out. Pheeef, best day of my life..!"

".. so I was only doing 30, like, but so was he.. heh.. so it kinda hurt when we hit each other full on. I was flying through the air. Broken ribs, punctured lung. Had to be air-lifted to hospital, like. Ouch. Pheeef, but that's a beautiful place to go riding."

It's a different world, but his excitement in the telling is infectious. He's tooling around Galicia waiting for a friend to join him for a quick blat down to Morocco. Keith, if you ever take yr bike to New Zealand like I tried to convince you, I promise you won't be disappointed.

Or Argentina. Keith was all set to move to Buenos Aires when he realised the women he was ogling were Argentine. They were in a group of 20 or so -- quite enough to dominate the room even if one of their number hadn't stood up to give a speech.. which quickly became a poem.. then a sung poem.. and a song.. passionate.. back to declamatory poetry.. a riff of speech that became song once again.. prompting oooohs and coo's and sung responses from his audience. It was like watching a secular Al Green working his congregation.

I blame the house red, but I crossed the room to talk to the speechifier. In Spanish. In an Argentine accent -- or so I like to kid myself. He appreciated it -- "It's inCREDible that we are here, talking and shaking hands. An Englishman! An Argentine man! In Galicia!" (He'd been on the sauce too, I suspect.)

And when he told me his group was from the city of La Plata and I told them I'd seen their local team Estudiantes.. striped shirts, black panties*.. playing in La Bombonera in 2001, I got as big a response from the crowd as he had with his singing. One of the women had to dab a tear from her eye.

There are lots of Galicians in Argentina. It's good for my soul to find some Argentinians over here.

* That's the Frank Sidebottom reference, in case you were wondering. I know only about three people will get it, but it makes me giggle.

Comments

By Rachel | October 2, 2007 2:30 PM

I went to the city of Rio Gallegos in Patagonia as I am sure you did too. Full of people called Mr Alan Davis, Mr Fred Smith and Mr Donald McFergus who run the British Club, do a good line in Gallician dancing and can't speak a word of English, Welsh or Gaellic. Very invitational in their (Chilean) Pisco Sours though. R

Beside the Seaside

In Which I Hum A Frank Sidebottom Tune To Myself

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