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| Not even this bloke would give us a lift. |
When the time came to leave Alphonse's farm, he drove us to the main road and we set about hitching to Barcelona. We were picked up first by a couple of local women and then by two boisterous young Romanian men who said they could drive us all the way there. They smoked heavily, swore noisily, drove aggressively and generally gave me the feeling that something would go horribly wrong at any moment. When they dropped us off we were initially a little disappointed with Barcelona until the woman behind the bar told us we were actually in a small town about 20km away.
A train took us the rest of the way. It was the end of Holy Week and when we arrived the whole of Spain, most of Europe and some of the more affluent parts of America and Japan seemed to have gathered on Las Ramblas. We ducked for cover in one bar after another.
Like most big cities it's a difficult place to crack and it's easy to feel lonely and outcast among the crowds. We did manage to strike up conversation with one man in a pub called "Bollocks" who introduced us to his Greek friends. Mari tried out some of the Greek language she remembered from a job handing out flyers there but they didn't seem very impressed. I asked her what she'd said.
"I said, 'Hello, I bring you discount vouchers'. Then a few swear words."
"Funny, that."
It was, in fact, the Swedish who eventually reached out a friendly hand to us. One of them flagged us down outside a bar in the Gothic quarter with a lengthy sales pitch about the delicious Swedish alcoholic milk they were selling inside for 9 Euros a bottle and said that if we didn't like it we could have our money back. Then he admitted he didn't actually work there.
I didn't expect a large Swedish community in Barcelona but there were dozens of them in there, lining the bar and drinking their milk. It was, unsurprisingly, sour stuff; more surprisingly it didn't taste very strong. I stuck to beer after the first bottle. The milk seemed to be working for the regulars, though, who were having a whale of a time. While we stood outside smoking Marcus, the first of them we'd met, slapped his arm across my shoulder and said, "Do you know, Craig, that in Barcelona it's possible to buy marijuana at 10 Euros for 4 grams?"
"Who from?"
"From... this guy!" he said, looking round hopefully and suddenly grabbing one of the little old men who wander the streets selling cans of beer from plastic bags. The old man looked confused.
"Sell me marijuana at 10 Euros for 4 grams!" demanded Marcus.
The man did a genuine Manuel "Que?" and tried to wriggle out of Marcus' grasp. It was no good, though: the Swede was too big for him. But soon he found some more passers by to harangue and the old man was released.
Later that night I had my most authentic Barcelona experience when I was the victim of attempted pickpocketing. I say 'pickpocketing' but that really implies subterfuge and stealth. This bloke walked up, clapped his arm around me, and then grabbed my leg with both hands. I thought he was making some sort of sexual advance and said something like "No thank you, I'm not really into that sort of thing," which is a strange thing to say to a pickpocket/mugger, but funnily enough it didn't deter him. Before I'd realised what was happening (I confess I was slightly drunk, by this point), he had the phone out of my pocket and was walking away describing it to his mate as a "piece of shit". That's when I lost my temper.
There was a good deal of pushing and shoving, much shouting - I actually started trying to upbraid the thief for his lack of morals, which was probably a bit of a waste of time - and I got the phone back. The situation was prevented from developing into a proper fistfight by the calming influence of Marcus, the alcoholic milk drinker. One of my enemies did start pointing to his eye and making "I'll remember your face" gestures, although I don't quite see why you'd need to remember the face of someone who's standing right in front of you offering to deal with the situation there and then. Anyway...
We moved on from Barcelona and covered the 900km to Malaga in about five lifts. It wasn't all plain sailing - there was sleeping behind petrol stations, getting dropped off in small villages way off the road we wanted to be on, and lots of very bad food - but we met some fine people and marvelled at the Spanish landscape. A great journey. At the end of it we spent two weeks working on a small farm cut into a hillside with views out over the Mediterrainean to the tip of Africa. We even got to go out drinking in Marbella. Nice.
Making our way back turned out to be a lot harder. After two rainy days camping in Cordoba, we walked to the motorway and tramped along for miles before being told to move on by the Spanish version of CHiPs. We walked five more miles across the fields with our bags to find somewhere we could legally hitch for the motorway. This brought us to Las Palmerias petrol station and services, a lovely place where I genuinely thought my life would end. Mari spent twenty-four hours trying persuade anyone to give us a lift to anywhere while I spent enough money in the bar to have paid for us to travel first class back to Girona and wait in a hotel for our flight. By the second day I was becoming hysterical and completely lost the plot as a result of spilling half a pint of beer. Something had to give.
What gave, eventually, was a charming young couple - he a Spanish criminology professor, she a French engineer - who responded to Mari's increasing desperation at being trapped in Las Palmeiras with a San Miguel-fuelled madman and offered us a lift to Madrid. I've never been so happy to get out of anywhere. Mari, understandably, was even happier. We agreed to use public transport after that.
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