by Joe Cawley
At the time, there were no direct flights between Tenerife and Florence. The easiest way to get there was to fly back to the UK and then join a flight from London. The art of ‘comping’, or asking for complimentary flights, accommodation, car hire and so on in return for a mention in the article, hadn’t even entered my head at this stage. Every single expense was borne by my own wallet.
Nor did it dawn on me to contact the tourist board to see if they could help out with any guides, tours or even itinerary suggestions. This was all part of an expensive personal discovery tour.
From nine in the morning until five in the evening I spent four full days tramping the streets of Florence, trying to get a feel for the city. I needed to explore every quarter, test its boundaries and get lost in its maze of unmapped walkways linking one tiny plaza to another.
I watched camera-clicking tourists framing the great works of A-list Renaissance artists. I observed shoppers pumping millions of lire into Armani, Versace and Gucci on the main shopping artery of the Via Roma. And with elbows resting on the ubiquitous checked tablecloths of backstreet trattorias and osterias, I became immersed in the storm of breadcrumbs, ranting gabble and waving arms that Italians like to call ‘lunch’.
Dining alone was a new experience. Suspicious waiters showed me to the furthest table in the darkest corner, usually sandwiched between a payphone and the toilet doorway. I could feel the stares of neighbouring diners as they conjured reasons as to why I was eating on my own. I hid my self-consciousness in a flurry of note-taking.
Digging out the best accommodation for ‘On the Cheap’ was the most laborious and soul-destroying task. It required foot-slogging from one end of the city to the other, asking in dozens of guesthouses and pensions if I could see a room. I discovered to my dismay that Florence had an inordinate number of lodgings. They ranged from chic five-star hotels offering front-line views of the River Arno and featuring mints on the pillows, to backpacker hostels offering clothes-line views of the neighbour’s smalls and featuring pillowcases on the pillows if you were lucky. I only had three nights to try out three different hotels. Choose the wrong one and it was a night wasted.
In four days I managed to cover most of the major sights, including the Uffizi gallery, the Ponte Vecchio, the painted dome of the cathedral and the statues in the Piazza della Signoria, with just enough time left to dribble ice cream down my T-shirt at Florence’s finest gelateria, Vivoli.
Back in Tenerife, I tipped all the brochures, flyers and dog-eared notepads onto my desk and wrote up ‘Florence – On the Cheap’.
‘Brilliant,’ was the response from Max. ‘We’ll buy that and run it next month.’
I’d done it. I was going to have my by-line in the Sunday Times. I was an artist with a gallery, not a street busker anymore.
The Sunday Times was by far the best-paying travel section of the UK national newspapers at the time. However, as Joy ran through my receipts for plane tickets, accommodation, museum entrance fees and food bills, she announced that I had made the grand total of minus £480 on this one article. But we both realised it was about way more than that: I now had my first foot in the big-league door.
My request for another commission was met with the same response. I still had to prove that these weren’t just exceptions. ‘Send us another one and I promise to take a look again,’ said Max.
And so I headed to Barcelona for another ‘On the Cheap’. I absorbed the buzz along La Rambla, Spain’s most famous street. I wandered down the narrow alleyways of the Ciutat Vella and Barri Gòtic quarters, where short zigzags of laundry hung between balconies like faded carnival pennants that nobody had bothered to take down. And in the Seu Plaza I watched a flash mob of senior citizens appear from nowhere to form small circles and dance the sardana, a kind of Catalan hokey-cokey, before calmly gathering up their shopping bags and vanishing back into the crowd.
Rotterdam was to prove my most challenging, and thankfully final, test. It wasn’t a city I would have chosen for a leisure visit, but it revealed a surprisingly beguiling side. If straight-laced industry was its day job, after dark it moonlighted as a pole-dancing ladyboy with a tendency to flash at you then retreat into the shadows.
What I did manage to decipher about that surprising city must have been okay, as within a few days of filing my copy, two things happened in short succession. Both would further boost my confidence and my travel-writing journey.
Firstly, the travel editor invited me to meet her for lunch the next time I was in London. Making another trip to London hadn’t even entered my head, but wanting to grab the opportunity by the horns, I made up a reason why ‘surprisingly’ I would be in the big smoke the following week. Dates were set, flights were booked, and my bank account was lightened yet again.
A reasonably lengthy lunch in a media-flavoured restaurant was followed by a swift pint in a neighbouring pub. I was asked whether I’d thought of moving to London, and then came what I perceived as hints that a more permanent position on the travel desk might be a possibility.
Tempted though I was to swap my place at Island Connections for a desk with the big boys at the Sunday Times, I politely declined and said I was happy commuting from my hillside home to wherever in the world the commissioning editors might choose to send me. ‘Give it some thought,’ were the parting words, and I made my way home feeling that somehow, somewhere, I must have cheated to have been virtually offered a position on the biggest travel section in the UK after such a short time in this new trade and following such a steep learning curve.
Back in Tenerife, my head was reeling as I told Joy what had happened; even more so when the phone rang and I received my first non-probationary commission. And as if reeling had no limits, my head was at it again when three days later I received a call from another national paper asking if I’d like to submit some travel story ideas as they’d read my work in the Sunday Times and would be very interested in commissioning something from me.
Blimey! The ST were sending me to Seville, and now another broadsheet was basically asking, ‘Where would you like to go and what would you like to write about?’ Blimey again. Where would I like to go?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
On our first night in Tejina, I had gazed across the valley appreciatively, relishing not only the view, with the moon casting a pearly sheen over the clusters of cacti, figworts and silver thistle, but also the silence. There was no thump-thump from downtown wafting in and out with the sea breeze, no post-midnight karaoke treats from local wannabes, no scooter boys revving their mobile hairdryers to squealing point. It was quiet, so quiet that for a while it was a little disturbing.
But as I was to discover over the coming days, as soon as the lights went out in the far-off fincas, the real sound of rural ‘silence’ began. This usually started at about eleven thirty, when one particularly gruff bark would signal the onset of that night’s canine crooners. With more verses than ‘American Pie’, the melee would seem to last forever, peppered with intermittent ‘everybody now’ choruses from the Tejina de Isora Motley Mutt Choir. The dynamics of the song were admittedly very impressive, dropping to a solitary pining about a long-lost bitch, then rising dramatically in one of those rousing Chas & Dave knees-up party songs.
We were never the only ones to have been disturbed by the dogs. Sometimes a rooster, presumably confused by the rabble-rousing into thinking it had overslept, would burst into alarm mode. Now, if you think the sound of a dozen dogs barking and a slightly demented rooster is as loud as it gets on a country night, you’ve not heard three cats fighting on your windowsill. On one such night, I feared the pane was going to implode as fur flew, claws slashed and feline obscenities were mashed up with the party sounds from across the way. Flinging open the curtains only caused the decibels to rise; the curling howls of ‘It was him’, ‘It was her’ increased, with none of the cats willing to back down despite my flailing attempts to shoo them away.
And if you think the sound of dogs singing, a ro
oster crowing and a group of stray cats squabbling is as loud as it can get, then you’ve not heard a goat at full throttle, so full that its voice begins to break, with the vibrato bleating turning to a croaked stutter before crumpling into a goatish coughing fit. That, I can tell you, trumps a party of dogs, a gang of cats and a zany rooster.
Either this welcoming committee disbanded after a few nights or I managed to tune out of the cacophony. Whatever the reason, peace finally prevailed. But there were other perils lurking that Alison had warned us about.
Rigsby himself, for one. His impressive disregard for our safety became something of a menace on two counts. Electrical sockets were jumping out of the wall in various rooms like popcorn in a microwave, some accompanied by a burning odour and plumes of smoke. When we pointed these out on Rigsby’s weekly visits, his level of interest barely touched apathy on the concerned scale. Even the blackened walls around the sockets didn’t register with him. And when we did manage to get him to do something, rather than bring in professional help, he would attempt to patch up the problem using whatever he had on his person at the time. This could be anything from a roll of toilet paper to a misshapen vegetable. Very occasionally we were lucky enough to warrant a five-minute drive back to his house to pick up a handful of mismatching screws and a hammer. He always managed to curtail the smoking and reinsert the wall socket, but the smell of electrical burning lingered.
The other, albeit lesser, hazard associated with Rigsby was his insistence on keeping us regularly supplied with carrier bags full of produce from his plot of land below the house. Much of what he thrust into our arms with a toothless beam was unrecognisable, though we guessed that most were delinquent relatives of the marrow family. We thanked him anyway, then kept them in the fridge until the weekly purchase of employable vegetables required that his donations be peeled from the bottom of the plastic salad drawer and tossed in the bin. It was only later that we learned we had been right: they were a mixture of bubangos, calabacin and other vegetables that Canarians use to stodge up stews, soups and casseroles. Despite this, they still had the taste and texture of AstroTurf.
Encouraged by the success of Rigsby’s vegetable crop, I decided to dabble with seedlings that would create something a little more conducive to the English palate. If it involved alcohol, all the better. Being a man of the countryside now, I deemed it my duty to produce home-grown wine. How hard could it be? Wild vines grew in abundance in the barranco, wrapping themselves around cacti and draping them with bunches of succulent fruit like Christmas decorations. But, try as I might, I could not get my row of vines to produce anything but dry twigs. They clung exhausted to the supporting bamboo sticks, wilting by the day as they waited for death. I watered them, fed them, I even talked to them, mainly about Fugly, but sadly it remained nothing but a one-way relationship.
This new kinship with nature was something we had to get used to. As my experience with the vines had taught me, newcomers couldn’t just wade in and tinker with Mother Earth, expecting her to produce on demand. You had to build a relationship. Overall, however, rural life suited us, and we suited it. Seclusion had become more than just a pleasant novelty after the goldfish-bowl existence of El Beril; it was now our preferred lifestyle. But it did have its downsides.
Whereas before we’d had numerous bars, restaurants and supermarkets on tap, in the western hills, to restock at the village shop required a fifteen-minute trek down through the village and a twenty-minute trudge back up, laden with bags.
I suppose it was the equivalent of a convenience shop, except without, well… the convenience. The opening hours put paid to that. Each day had its own schedule. For example, opening times on Monday were ten till six, on Tuesday it was closed all day, and on Wednesday it was open from eight till ten, twelve till two, and then four till five. And so on. Which was all well and good if you had the memory of an elephant. There was also the additional problem that the advertised opening times rarely matched the actual opening times. On several frustrating occasions I marched down to the shop only to find the lights out, the doors closed and a handwritten note informing customers that the shop was currently closed for ‘stock-taking’, ‘circumstances beyond our control’ or ‘staff shortages’.
The latter I could believe. The shop seemed to be run by two identical twin sisters of remarkably short stature, which I guessed would make stock-taking more time-consuming if you couldn’t actually reach, or even see, what was on the top shelves. I later learned that one was called Gloria, the other Encarna, though to this day I couldn’t say which was which. Both women seemed deeply suspicious of my presence in the shop, despite my efforts to appear friendly and my overabundant expressions of gratitude. In hindsight, as for most Canarians that deal with the British, this probably got on their nerves.
The shop’s three dark aisles contained a jumble of groceries placed next to hardware items that in normal shops you wouldn’t expect to be shelf buddies. Packets of sliced bread sat next to wooden rat-catchers, and tins of tuna were parked alongside brass rings and other pieces of plumbing systems.
They did have a good fresh bread and cheese section though. Brown paper sacks contained baguettes with aniseed, grainy rolls, and crusty, flour-dusted half-footballs of surprising weight. The glass counter showcased smoked goats cheese, cheese speckled with red pepper, and full rounds that had rinds like car tyres and soft insides that shone like luminous gold. The sisters were very proud of that part of the shop. You could tell from the way they cossetted the produce like adoring mothers.
Not so much pride went into the other parts of the shop, however. There was only one thing that this village supermarket had in abundance. Empty shelves. The proprietors couldn’t be bothered, or perhaps couldn’t afford, to replenish items that had sold out. Thus many shelves, particularly the top ones, carried nothing but a profuse collection of dust.
There was a nice little bar next door though. Despite the frosty reception I received when I ventured in for the first time clutching a jar of mothballs that I’d inadvertently purchased, it became a regular stop-off for a hot café con leche. Sitting outside, watching the delivery men to-ing and fro-ing with all the haste of a funeral cortege, became part of my twice-weekly shopping ritual.
To reach the shop and bar, I had to walk past a laurel-shaded church plaza on my way in and out of the village. It was a thirty-minute workout there and back, plus a ten-minute break in the shop while other villagers caught up with the local gossip courtesy of Gloria and Encarna. But it wasn’t just my legs that got some exercise.
The more frequently I made the journey, the more waving it seemed to entail. As a pale-skinned, blonde-ish foreigner in a village of mainly leather-faced residents, it was fair to say I stood out. Particularly as I was male and strolling around carefree during working hours rather than sitting behind the wheel of a tractor or clutching livestock under my arm.
In addition to every pedestrian I encountered, almost every driver waved as they passed. I noticed this happened with particular frequency near the church and I soon got used to shaking an arm and smiling inanely at every motorist. Until I discovered they weren’t waving at me. The drivers that I thought were being especially neighbourly had actually been crossing themselves as they passed the church. It was an act of piety, not of neighbourliness. That realisation saved an arm ache or two, not to mention further embarrassment.
Slowly I began to love life in the hills and to loathe the times I had to make the twenty-minute drive south to the tourist area. Entering Playa de las Américas became like driving through the gates of a theme park that I’d outgrown. The high-rise hotels, British bar signs and shops hidden behind racks of beach inflatables felt false, like a lie.
Whereas downtown seemed like a set built for a film, for a specific, profitable and temporary purpose, villages such as Tejina oozed a more permanent vibe. Although some houses, like ours, and Rigsby’s own residence, came with no long-term guarantees that they would remain vertical, most were so
lid structures, not beautiful by any means, but cared for and well tended. There was rarely a day when I didn’t see a villager or two sweeping or mopping not only their own doorstep but also the pavement in front of their neighbour’s homes.
That would never happen in Playa de las Américas or any of the other resorts, where residents are mostly temporary, with no sense of responsibility for the upkeep or pleasantness of their environment. In the resorts, the hotels, streets, bars, beaches, parks and even people are seen as mere props for the visitor’s enjoyment of their holiday. If they get spoiled, damaged or abused, so what? Two weeks later, it won’t be their problem. When we had the bar, we were resigned to that. Many times and in many ways we were treated as nothing more than props. We resented that – although I’d like to think that at the time we hid it well.
Now, in this real village, we had the chance to live as locals, to be an equal part of the community, not to be used and abused. It hadn’t quite worked on my bus journey to integration, but time would tell if it was possible in the long-run.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Much as we loved Tenerife, weekend activities were still somewhat limited, with Spanish still a cerebral challenge. Beach, pool, water park, or a barbecue in the mountains were the principal options. Being an aspiring travel writer, I decided that weekend adventures needn’t be confined to our 785 square miles of island. I began to research incredible journeys that could be consumed in just a few days.
Then I had it. Weekend safaris in Africa! After Joy had finished choking on her coffee, I showed her how neatly timed night flights meant that, in theory, we could leave Tenerife Friday morning, have a gander at the big five in Kenya, and still be back in time for Rigsby’s rent collection on Tuesday. Joy laughed, Fugly scowled, but the editor loved it. Joy’s mockery switched to delirious disbelief when I told her I’d pitched it as a feature for couples and she was coming with me.
