I was kept awake most of the night by various things; my ongoing stomach problems (later found out to be IBS), being too hot, being too cold, weird nightmares (of Spanish speaking ghosts trying to kill me…) and the general uneasiness of sleeping in a strange bed. Unlike in the Guyanese rainforest, I thankfully didn’t wake everyone else up screaming.
Unsurprisingly, with a slight hangover to boot, I wasn’t feeling in tip-top condition at 10a.m the next morning. The typical Spanish breakfast, a strong milky coffee and a couple of highly processed pastries which come in separate packets and in a variety of shapes, but which all taste the same (overly sweet, processed and devoid of goodness), didn’t do much for my mood nor my stomach. Pushing away my half eaten pastry, I was bombarded with queries as to whether I liked it or if there was a problem and did I want another one, a different one.
We set out around 11 (or 12, frankly my stomach hurt too much for me to take note) and passed through very much the same scenery as the previous day. Eventually however we reached hilly land that signalled the border area of Spain and Portugal, very beautiful, unfortunately it meant the roads became winding and pitched up, then down, then up again, leaving my stomach churning worse than ever.
We reached the Spanish unnamed border checkpoint around 1p.m. The air had been cool and fresh back in Luisa’s village as we had been higher up topographically, during the journey, however, we had obviously descended quite a lot as it was now unbearably sweltering. It was the sort of heat that hits you the moment you open the car door, with sun so bright as it reflects off the light coloured paving and buildings that you unintentionally squint your eyes up tight. The Spanish side was rather uninspiring. There was one large square building with a sign signalling it was the boat house, where you could rent boats across to Alva in Portugal and little else. High above us was an old iron rail-bridge which crossed the waters of the Duero river before it widened into a species of lake, although not wide enough to warrant a separate name. Luisa was eager that we tried to cross the bridge on foot, and persuaded the reluctant and outwardly complaining Ana and Marta to follow her up a scraggy path through undergrowth to the railway line. There had once been a small cafe at the top which undoubtedly served refreshments to weary travellers who had walked the lengths of the abandoned rail-tracks and its tunnels. It was obviously abandoned now and like the path up, being reclaimed by nature.
Marta and Ana were complaining about the heat and needing a coffee. Luisa was enthusiastic despite my apparent disinterest, I was actually just in pain, and in great danger of throwing up, and the moaning of her friends. We started crossing the bridge high above the road where we had left the car. The train tracks ran down the middle of the bridge, flanked on both sides with flimsy pathways made up of 10ft long sheets of metal just wide enough to walk on and, ravaged by the elements, now orange with rust. Their edges were disintegrating and warped, leaving large vertigo inducing gaps looking down to the tarmac 100ft or so beneath us. The railings, in much the same state as the bridge in general, were just as rusted and rickety and didn’t look like they would offer much support to anyone falling or even leaning against them.
The sky was brilliantly blue and completely free of clouds, the sun beat down on our shoulders, none of us had remembered sun-cream.
Luisa set quite a pace across the bridge, I was watching my footing intently so as not to trip on a rogue screw or to stick my foot down a gap and thus end up plummeting to the ground. I was watching so intently in fact that my eyes focused too hard on the repetitive pattern of metal sheet, gap, metal sheet, gap and I got that strange sensation of falling forwards like the sort of involuntary myoclonic jerk experienced when standing too close to a train platform. I had to stop and close my eyes and reach blindly for the railings for support until the dizzy feeling stopped. My hands were sweating profusely, I clutched my camera tightly and feared it would soon sluice clean out of my hand like a wet soap, tumble then plop irretrievably into the gently flowing Duero. We stopped dead in the middle of the bridge for photos as we crossed the imaginary line drawn by us humans to signify a border. The sign on one side read ‘España’ and on the other ‘Portugal’. We cheered triumphantly as we entered a different country.
Encountering a group of 10 or so tourists at the other end, the change was as dramatic as it was sudden. Offering to take a photo of the four of us, one of the men spoke in the strange language with almost Arabic speech intonation, peppered with familiar words that sound like Spanish that could only be Portuguese.* Pointing to himself he shouted, “bombero” or something like it, meaning fireman in Spanish. The ever-friendly Marta jabbered excitedly back to him, “en españa, os llamamos, ‘bombero-torero’!” (translating as “we call you firemen, ‘bullfighting-firemen’ in Spain” which makes more sense in Spanish as it rhymes…but its meaning still isn’t entirely clear for a non-native speaker like myself.) NB: I have since found this site by googling the phrase. Still entirely confused.
Quickly recovering from her bout of enthusiasm, Marta was complaining again about Luisa not warning us about the right footwear (we were all in flipflops) and that her feet hurt and that she was tired from the early start and that we hadn’t had a drink since the house and that she had driven the whole way. Ana added words and nods of compliance, and asked how far it was until somewhere to sit down. Luisa was clearly gritting her teeth (in an almost British fashion!) and encouraged them to push on along the tracks saying it was just around the corner ahead. The tracks, bordered by a sheer wall man-hewn through a cliff on one side, a pile of loose scree on the other, followed a natural curve in the land. Begrudgingly the girls carried on, complaining their legs were being scratched by the dried up weeds, and that Marta (whose skin as I noted was a lot paler than most Spaniards) was burning on her shoulders. We reached some abandoned buildings before which stood what I can only describe as a giant rotating turntable, I assumed it was used to redirect the engines from the tracks into the repairs or maintenance building.
Standing sulkily smoking in the shade of the aforementioned building, Marta and Ana complained more as Luisa tried to get them to smile in a group shot. I mentioned I could hear twittering that to me sounded like bats, the girls assured me they were birds. They were definitely bats.
Finally admitting I felt awful, Marta, a nurse, delved into her bag and produced what looked and tasted like a Rennie. Within 10 minutes I felt so much better, my energy returned and my Spanish with it.
We carried on past the eerie graffitied ruins of the old station platforms. The rooms were still standing but were gutted and filled only with the detritus left behind by junkies and squatters. It was rather sad reading the painted signs ‘Restaurant’ or ‘First Class Lounge’ which lead through to the still beautiful high vaulted rooms now filled with nothing but dust, food containers, vodka bottles and an assortment of scrunched up clothing items.
Finally we reached buildings that were still pretty dilapidated, but were nevertheless inhabited, judging by the washing hanging on lines beneath the first floor windows.
We had a sit and a drink in a small bar. As it was getting late and we still hadn’t had lunch, we abandoned the idea of boating and went in search of the restaurant another friend of Luisa had advised me and her to go to when we’d met up the week before. We asked around for the place, Marta approached two old Portuguese men, but they scratched their heads and spoke in rapid dialect, I understood nothing, the girls didn’t seem to get much more. Eventually we settled on a restaurant which was in the vicinity of the one we were looking for, lo and behold it was the right one under a new name! The aging owner was very excited to meet Luisa, who’s friend was a good patron of theirs. He spoke broken Spanish, inserting Portuguese whenever he was unsure, a mishmash of language like our ‘Spanglish’ which they call, fascinatingly, Portuñol.
His wife, a hefty, tall and broad-shouldered woman took our order. She spoke no Spanish and so resorted to the English tourist favourite of speaking your own language very slowly and loudly. We had wanted to try bacalao (codfish) a Portuguese speciality, “não bacalhau” enunciated the wife clearly, shaking her head to clarify her point. We were given the option of beef or pork instead and I was amused to hear that the Portuguese for pork ‘porco’ resembles the English much more than the Spanish ‘cerdo’. I would rather have had beef, but I conformed with the others, too afraid to try and speak Spanish to a Portuguese, the clash of languages was making my brain hurt. The other dish we had been wanting to try was ‘lulas’ which I had only managed to determine from Luisa that it was “like Spanish ‘rabas’ but not really like them at all.” Clear as mud.
They were a lot more easy to describe when they came out – they were various pieces of octopus cooked in butter. I had only had one experience with octopus before and it had been a bad one but I duly tried a piece with extra tentacles…it was delicious. Granted it didn’t really taste of anything but butter, and the texture was like chewing a springy gummy sweet but it wasn’t at all bad.
The drinks order was more scarring. All I wanted was a glass of cool water, but the owner, singling me out, as tends to happen in Mediterranean Europe, called me “rubiecita” (the diminutive of ‘rubia’ meaning ‘blondie’ or ‘little blonde’) and decided I would like some wine. I didn’t, but couldn’t find the words to decline his offer with out offending. He brought me a glass of very pale white wine which tasted…well, I’m no oenophile, but bloody awful. It was very watery as it’s appearance suggested, but with a tinge of the taste you get from sucking the rubber on the end of a pencil. I suggested to the girls that we poured it off the balcony we were sat on, but they just told me not to drink it and it wouldn’t be impolite. Seems etiquette differed in Portugal. The owner was offended when we came to leave and my glass was still full. In Portuñol he asked why I’d left it, and when I jokingly said I only really like red, he slammed his fist on the till and growled, in a tone I wasn’t sure how to read, that I should have told him so. He would get me a glass of red he said, I would like it he said. Would. Like. It. Despite my protests he put a glass under the tap of a nearby barrel and filled it to the brim with pale red wine. He watched defiantly as I took a sip and smiled in victory as I proclaimed, fakely, that it was really delicious, “mmmmm está muuuy rico…” He insisted I paid him, so I had to take the kitty money from Ana and hand it to him. He beamed and told me a joke I only half understood about his mute cousin who only talked when drunk. I belly-laughed unconvincingly. As soon as his back was turned we legged it. The girls found it hilarious, especially the joke part where they had watched my panicked and baffled face as I waited for some kind of cue that it was the punchline before making an I-totally-don’t-understand laugh.
We traipsed back along the route we had come, back past the derelict station platform and railway maintenance building with its enormous Lazy-Susan. The heat was even closer than before and very oppressive. We moved at snail’s pace across the bridge, vaguely whooping as we crossed the border and re-entered Spain. The car was a veritable sauna which had been roasting slowly in the direct sunlight for a good 5 hours waiting just for our return. I felt like I was about to melt as I lay back in my seat, strapping the black seat-belt, which seemed to be made of molten lava, over my chest.
As I dozed in the back of the car on the 5 hour return journey to Salamanca I smiled blissfully to myself as I recalled our trip. Everything about the last 2 days had been so different and so properly Spanish, right down to the dancing donkey, late night SingStar and the complaining and bickering. I had actually experience proper Spain, probably for the only time in my entire 10 months living there. What a great way to say goodbye.
*I have the luck of having made many Brazilian friends during my time abroad, and their accent is a lot easier for people who understand Spanish to understand. Interestingly it doesn’t have the unusual Arabic twinge to it which surprised me so much in Porto.
