Thinking back, looking forward...

Thinking back...

Whoosh! there goes another one. Goodbye 2018, hello 2019. So a moment to reflect on our travels and think about future plans, as well as wishing all our friends and fellow travellers 'bon voyage '.  The motorhome is in Malaga, we are at home looking forward to flying back to continue our journey in just over a week. For the first time in ten days or so there is just the two of us at home. It seems very quiet, I try to keep some statistics about our travels, but they become ever more perfunctory as the years roll by. Still, here's the running total updated with 2018's figures. It's important to get that done now. Seeing in the New Year with one eye on Big Ben while updating an Excel spreadsheet really would mark a new milestone in my inexorable march towards the curmudgeonly.

So, in the last twelve months months we've spent just over five of them wandering about. The most exciting part of this was undoubtedly the six weeks we spent in the Far East. We can't really count this as 'Heels for Dust' time as it was a mixture of city breaks and a road trip around New Zealand. This has to be the highlight of the year - in a world that can seem dark and depressing, New Zealand, the place, people and culture, gives you hope. We loved it. So, here's a picture of the pair of us in the Mount Cook National Park.

So, aside from the excitements of long haul, what have been our highlights of this year's moho travels?  Our top five:

1. A new van.

We never set out last January to swap vans. Had Spinney's been able to repair or replace Maisy's electrical block without the thing becoming a saga, then we probably would never have felt the need to make the change. The other factor was happening upon a replacement that ticked all our boxes at Oaktree Motorhomes. Generally dealing with any motortrade dealership is demoralising, but the entire staff at Oaktree Motorhomes buck that trend - straight, trustworthy, professional and friendly. So we made the leap.

It has proved to be a good move. Though we 'christened' the Burster we bought 'Bertie' in fact we seem to have dropped sentimentalising our mode of transport with a name, a good thing, I think, - anthropomorphism has to be one of our more questionable innate human characteristics.

Overall we are delighted with the new moho, it's much easier to drive - more like a car than a small truck, it's quicker, but considerably more fuel efficient, the interior is brighter and all-round visibility better,  the bathroom is bigger and the kitchen, though similar sized, has a more practical layout. All good, as Gill is wont to say. Indeed, when I asked her what was the best thing about this year's travels her immediate answer was 'the new fridge'. There speaks a cook.

2. A year of small plates.

The Spanish tradition of tapas menus seems to be catching on everywhere. This is great because it allows diners to sample a range of 'tasty morsels' rather than having to order a whole meal. Consequently skilled, imaginative cooking is escaping the confines of elite fine dining establishments and turning-up in market cafes, beach restaurants, urban bars and bakeries. Looking back, our top ten, 'in no particular order' to use Ms. Daley's catch-phrase.

i. Beef and ginger, street food, Chinatown, Singapore:

ii. Goats cheese and serrano ham pintxos, Bar Gorriti, San Sebastian

iii.  Patatas bravas, some place on Calle Laurel, Logrono, Rioja.

iv.  Roasted cauliflower salad, Atticus Finch, Rotorua.

v.  Brunch at Castros, Cuba St. Wellington, NZ.

vi.  Grilled fish, Snack Bar Pintorola, Sisimbra, Portugal.

vii. Cheese and spinach pie, The Green Room Cafe, Gore, NZ.

viii. The tuna lady, Olhao fish and vegetable market, Algarve.

ix.  Lunch, Cervecería Giralda Bar, Sevilla.

x. Tagliatelle a ragu Bolognese, Osteria Dell 'Orsa, Bologna


3. Communing with the ancestors

The more we travel the more fascinating prehistory becomes. The past year has found us stumbling across older cultures at opposite ends of the globe. The presumption that traditional tribal and hunter gatherer cultures are more primitive, less developed versions of the modern human is looking ever more shaky. Partly because both recent history and contemporary events indicate that our own culture has developed a proclivity for self destruction, either through nuclear war or environmental degradation. Also, our understanding of  early cultures has improved in the last couple of decades. Many early cultures were more sustainable than ours and Hobbes' idea that in the past, before institutionalised government,  people's lives were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" seems increasingly at odds with recent findings from forensic archaeology.

So these days we are more likely to head towards an archaeological museum than an art gallery. Three anthropological encounters stand out. The first was not museum based at all. You cannot travel from one end of New Zealand to the other without being confronted by the interaction between Maori culture, European settlement and the unique flora, fauna and topography of this fragment of the ancient continent of Zealandia. As we travelled I was reading Captain Cook's journals which provided a fascinating commentary on the hazards and contradictions provoked by the meeting between two startlingly different cultures.

Later in the Spring we headed for Corsica. The mountain villages of the interior preserved a traditional belief system well into the middle of the twentieth century. It was a great place to read Dorothy Carrington's 'The Dream-Hunters of Corsica'. A long time resident from the early 1950s, she learned to speak Corsican and was able to record the activities of the last practitioners of an ancient shamanistic method of prophecy - the village 'mazzeri'. So when we cycled up the valley of the Tavaru towards the island's famous pre-historic remains at Filitosa,  you sense not the magnitude of time past, but the continuity of past and present  - that our distant ancestors remain within touching distance, at least imaginatively.

And so to autumn, a leisurely 3000 mile wander through France, Portugal and Spain - familiar territory. However, even familiar roads prompt unanticipated pleasures. The anthropological theme continued. I had taken James C Scott's 'Against the Grain' with me as reading matter. It's a short, stylish investigation of how recent developments in the scientific analysis of ancient remains and artefacts is challenging our notion of the 'birth of civilisation'. It's a thought provoking and entertaining read, full of startling assertions - such as dogs and pigs domesticated humans as much as we domesticated them, or the Great Wall of China was built as much to keep imperial subjects in as barbarians out!

Purely by accident we parked-up on an unprepossessing scrap of coast on the fringes of Malaga only to discover we were about three hundred metres from one of the most significant paleolithic sites in Europe. It can boast 400,000 years of continuous human habitation - that is 16,000 generations. It's not famous, as you whizz past the low cliffs on the coastal dual carriageway you would never know. We love travel; it is a cliche, but true, you never can tell what around the corner.

Say hi to your grandma....

4. Aleria and thereabouts

The few days we spent in and around Aleria on the west coast of Corsica sums up why we choose live half of our life in a box on wheels. 

Day One - you arrive saying, 'well it will do, it seems ok' - then discover the place is quietly marvellous... Mooching towards a perfect day

Day Two - the tiny archaeological museum tucked away in the middle of nowhere turns out to be the best we've found outside of Greece... Dancing for Dionysus

Day Three - Just us and Kalliste...A field in Corsica

5. Bubulcus and Bolatas

We end up staying overnight in all kinds of places, supermarket car-parks, quaysides, urban car parks, empty fields, and lots of campsites. We are happy if the sites are clean, quiet, with pitches big enough to accommodate the van, with a sanitary block that functions and is, well, sanitary. Lots of places don't even manage those minimum standards. We are pleased to be underwhelmed, rarely wholly satisfied and almost never delighted by the sites we stay in. One exception was Bubulcus and Bolatas, an eco-camp in a remote patch of ground near Evora in central Portugal. We would never have found it by ourselves - but our daughter Sarah and her partner Rob stayed there last spring and reckoned it would be good place to meet up live off-grid for a few days. It was great, magical even, we will never forget it.   Acorns and Butterflies - eco-camping, the real deal

Looking forwards..

Whatever happens, we are destined to travel less in 2019. A week tomorrow we fly back to Malaga driving up the coast towards Valencia, then towards central Spain, which is new territory for us, and homewards through France. Our tunnel crossing is booked for mid-March. We decided, ever cautious, it would be best to return well before Brexit day. Not that I want to be, we are very sad about the whole thing, but head must rule heart and who wants to risk getting stuck in some kind of cross-channel meltdown?

We hope in  May and June to do the Denmark/Sweden trip that we postponed this year. Matthew said he might join us for a week or so in and around Stockholm - which will be great. We carry his tent in the rear garage as a portable 'guest suite'

Summer tends to be UK time - a few months of 'speed gardening' before we depart south in the autumn. In 2019 we have different plans. Sinve last summer we have been dreaming-up a project to remodel the downstairs of the house. Now plans have been drawn, planning approved, builders and kitchen designers appointed. September and October are going to be chaotic - we can live at home while the old conservatory is demolished and a new dining room extension built. However, stage two involves taking out the wall between our present dining room and kitchen, laying a new oak floor through out the downstairs and installing a new 'minimalist white kitchen in an open plan space - 30' x 15' - with a dining area overlooking the garden. Our idea is to connect the internal and external space wth bifold doors and a glass gable. It should look spectacular. While it happens we will live in the van somewhere nearby and project manage. So - here's a few photos of now:

The conservatory - now 22 years old 

The same age as Laura, in fact - note pokey kitchen - very 80s our kids complain..

The dining room - a bit of a squeeze at Christmas

But after the building work:

The dining room extension with a glass gable replaces the old conservatory.

The present kitchen and dining room are merged into an open plan space.

With lots of glass- light oak floors throughout and a 'loft style' minimalist kitchen - room for all the family when they visit - and no more complaints about the '80s' decor.

Why are we doing this?  The cost could fund a lot of exciting long haul holidays. In truth, after almost a quarter of a century living here we had come to point of either moving or investing to refurbish where we live. I do wonder if the effect of living in a 7m box for months on end has made us crave for a more spacious living space at home. Absence too has made us grow fonder of our patch. When we first retired we were determined to move from our spot of Pennine gloom. After looking at lots of houses in many places we concluded that we actually liked where we were. Not the house particularly, it's a Wilcon bog-standard pokey 4 bed detatched built in the 1980s. However, though located near the town centre, the scrap of ancient woodland to the rear means the garden is always full of birds, the squirrels are endlessly entertaining and perhaps some day we will actually glimpse the badgers who sneak in during the night to dig up the lawn.

Our small patch of woodland - in summer. a wall of green.

So, instead of moving we decided to re-model our house and make it a bit more spacious. It looks like a great plan on paper. On the other hand, next autumn while living in a building site I can quite imagine us dreaming of the simplicities of being parked-up on an empty beach with a view of the Aegean. Anyway, 2019 promises to be as exciting as 2018 - not so intrepid, but equally challenging - in a good way.

Journey's End or journeys end?

Gill has a word for the state of mind you get as a trip draws to a close. She calls it 'endishness'. This is the view out of our living room window this morning.

Here's where we were a week ago - the last photo I took before we headed for the airport,  dawn over Malaga, soft pink to the west, golden in the east.

We travel for around five months of the year, usually in three 'installments'. It is difficult to connect our life at home with life on the road. It seems to me we live two separate existences alternating between them. Some people travel long term living in big motorhomes as their only residence. I cannot imagine doing that, it seems to me simply a different version of a settled existence - a gypsy life. I have concluded that what I like is to be slightly unsettled - at home dreaming of new places to go, travelling, but aware I have a home to return to. 

There are practical reasons to do with house insurance why it is tricky for us to travel more than 90 days at a time. Actually, for us we think our limit is around 70 - 80 days (maybe Jules Verne thought so too!). As we move towards our limit the will to keep going begins to fade, I need a break. However, a week back, watching the Christmas Panto last night live from Westminster and then this morning's weather forecast, it seems my tolerance for home-life is much shorter than that. We fly back on the 9th January, that is in 27 days time, that seeems about right.

Look at the forecast! Not just the cold and gloom, but the sunrise and sunset times in the bottom right corner - it's like living in Narnia.

Anyway, thoughts about travelling and staying put reminded me of an Auden poem - it seems very prescient to me about where we are right now here in the UK.. The gaitered gamekeeper at the end, I see Rees Mogg in plus-fours, that's  a highly disturbing thought.

There is no change of place

Who will endure
Heat of day and winter danger,
Journey from one place to another,
Nor be content to lie
Till evening upon headland over bay,
Between the land and sea
Or smoking wait till hour of food,
Leaning on chained-up gate
At edge of wood?

Metals run,
Burnished or rusty in the sun,
From town to town,
And signals all along are down;
Yet nothing passes
But envelopes between these places,
Snatched at the gate and panting read indoors,
And first spring flowers arriving smashed,
Disaster stammered over wires,
And pity flashed.
For should professional traveller come,
Asked at the fireside he is dumb,
Declining with a secret smile,
And all the while
Conjectures on our maps grow stranger
And threaten danger.

There is no change of place:
No one will ever know
For what conversion brilliant capital is waiting,
What ugly feast may village band be celebrating;
For no one goes
Further than railhead or the ends of piers,
Will neither go nor send his son
Further through foothills than the rotting stack
Where gaitered gamekeeper with dog and gun
Will shout ‘Turn back’.

Pure beauty, ambiguous beauty (communing with the ancestors)

I am flicking through our recent photos, deleting some, adjusting others - we generate a lot of pictures between the two of us, three thousand plus over the past six weeks. Most are mundane, ordinary shots outnumbering good by a factor of ten, but they are memory joggers, visual notes that help sometimes when writing the blog. Occasionally one pops up that stops me in my tracks recalling a moment of absolute beauty, like this one.

I am not saying this in itself is a beautiful photo, indeed it is somewhat cliched. What I mean is that it captures something that seems absolutely beautiful to me irrespective of whether I had photographed it or not. In this case the fleeting translucent blue you get as twilight gathers, between the vestiges of sunset on the horizon and darkness at the zenith. I am always bewitched by it.

Something else that affects me similarly are muddy estuaries. I wrote a poem about my predilection a few years ago; it concludes:

Mud flats shine
Beyond the beech trees’ yellow leaves,
the mud flats shine;
duped by beauty, I seek some sign,
a reason why my mind perceives
as lovely, these empty estuaries
where mud flats shine.

It's one of the few things I've written that readers have overtly objected to - the word 'duped'. It seems to cross some unacknowledged line - it's ok. to be 'taken over' by the beautiful but heresy to suggest we are 'taken in'. But we are. The moment we 'suspend disbelief' we embrace the irrational. Not that I think we should shy from it, none of us are entirely rational, I just happen to think we need to to  aware, as much as we are able, as to when we are seeing things rationally and when we respond imaginatively.

Often the two are entwined and we switch from one mode of thinking to the other intuitively; as the the change of perspective dawns on us we are momentarily disorientated, slightly wrong-footed. Such  moments are beautiful too, but it is not the pure, overwhelming sense of beauty I mentioned earlier, but a more ambiguous beauty of unexpected contradictions, startling juxtapositions, the uncanny or slightly surreal. This afternoon happened like that.

Looking east from the area around Malaga beach the area is densely populated, but mainly residential. The view to the west is dominated by a nearby cement works which overshadows the small fishing community of La Araña.

The MA-24 dual carriageway dominates the narrow strip of flat land between the beach and a line of low limestone cliffs. A rusty wire mesh fence separates the busy road from the cycle track that runs alongside it.

The cliffs are covered in cave openings. I noticed on Google maps they were marked as 'Yacimientos Arqueológicos de la Araña'. A small 'interpretation centre' is located in the nearby village. I began to suspect these were not any old caves and suggested to Gill that we walk along the track to La Arana to see what the small museum had to offer.

Last Christmas Gill bought me Cyprien Broodbank's 'The Middle Sea'. It traces the development of Mediterranean human culture from the first incursions of palaeolithic people up until Early Classical times. The book is a monumental work that calls into question all kinds of assumptions concerning human progress by bringing to bear the latest research in archaeology and DNA analysis to challenge more conventional narratives based largely on texts. It highlights some startling facts, not least that our own branch of humankind - Homo Sapiens reached Australia from Africa before the they reached Iberia. Europe was a Neanderthal enclave up until the arrival of Homo Sapiens around 45,000 years ago. The distribution and interaction of both groups was determined by the fluctuations in climate associated with the last ice age.  Few parts of the continent  remained habitable throughout the period, a mere handful of places in Europe can claim uninterrupted human settlement over the past 50,000 years. Cyprien Broodbank mentions two of them, both slivers of south facing Mediterranean coast, one in Dalmatia, the other running along shore from Gibraltar to Almeria with sites concentrated around Malaga. In other words right here, next to the dual carriageway about 200 metres from where we were parked.

Whereas most of Europe during the last ice age consisted of a cold savannah interspersed with glaciers, these south facing shores were covered in spruce forests with a considerably milder climate. Broodbank called the section in his book about the period 'Neanderthals in the Sun' The painting on the door of the interpretation centre captures the ancient landscape perfectly. The human figures are less convincing, Neandethals could not sew, no bone needles have been found from that era, they may have used animal skins as blankets or ponchos, but not for prehistoric Ugg boots or skirts.

The painting on the door was as far as we got so far as the interpretation centre was concerned. It was closed. Subsequently we discovered that the place is not permanently staffed and you have to book tours in advance which includes both a visit to the caves and the museum. Perhaps we might do that when we return in January.

The museum is housed in a tawdry concrete structure on top of a small hill topped by a watch tower. As we climbed towards it, past graffiti sprayed walls and half ruined old houses the contradictions of our surroundings became inescapable. Across the broad bay you could see all the way to the hills beyond Torremilinos; the contrast between the soft greens of the shrubby hill-side and the slate grey sea and sky was very beautiful. Directly below us the dun coloured sands of Playa Peñon del Cuervo were almost deserted, just two tiny figures walking across them. Two specks of humanity that gave scale and perspective to the wide horizons. It was not the seascape that dominated the view; the scene was overshadowed by the steel towers, concrete silos and conveyor belts of the cement works. Man made structures predominated, just as the sound of the sea was drowned by the rumble of traffic on the coastal highway.

We spent a while taking photos and peering through the metal security grill of the closed museum trying to work out the opening times. By the time were heading back the couple on the beach had drawn a little closer. The woman had stripped off for a swim and was splashing through the shallows. Her companion crouched down a few metres distant, taking pictures of her I presume. There was something elemental about the entire scene. The area has been settled by humans for 400,000 years, first by Homo heidelbergensis, supplanted around 200,000 years ago by Neanderthal hunter gatherers,who in turn disappeared 25,000 years ago as our own species, homo sapiens predominated. The surroundings - the cement works, the motorway, the distant urban sprawl of Malaga - all boasted of our technological ingenuity. The bather on the beach told a different story about our frailty, the biological human rather than the technological. At that moment, for me, her slight figure  stood for all 16000 generations of humans who have dwelt here previously, the sprawl posing the question - how many more generations can the earth sustain if we persist in devouring its resources thoughtlessly. It was a powerful moment, beautifully ambiguous.

Malaga Beach - a fascinating scrap of nowhere.

Malaga Beach area autocaravanas at first sight has little going for it. It's a fenced square of gravel with about 60 roped-off parking bays, each long enough to accommodate a big motorhome and just wide enough for owners to squeeze a small table and a couple of chairs beside it. Access is off a slip road of the busy dual carriageway that connects nearby Malaga to the coastal town to the east.

So why do we prefer this place to the campsite we were on previously? Firstly it's designed for motorhomes and somewhat counter-intuitively its more utilitarian aspects actually make it more amenable. If you are after a personal space that you can prettify into a home from home in the sun, then point your giant satellite dish towards the Bundersrepublik or Blighty in the sky, then you are going to head for the kind of camp site we have just run away from. The place was weirdly territorial and exuded a fake bonhomie that was hard to bear.

Here is simpler, more laid-back, and on a practical note, because it is designed for motorhomes the service point is easily accessible and well designed. The staff are friendly, it's well looked after, and best of all right next to the beach and a coastal footpath that runs for miles in both directions.

After weeks of mixed weather, as we prepare to fly home it has become more settled, warm days, clear blue sky, spectacular sunsets and dusty pink dawns. 

Hereabouts is an urbanised coast; what were once separate communities now connected to the eastern suburbs of Malaga. The 'area autocaravanas' is on the edge of La Cala del Moral. The village merges

into the town of Ricón de la Vitoria, a promenade connecting them, running alongside a beach dotted with chiringuitos.

Out of season they are closed weekdays, however on Saturday and Sunday they do a brisk trade as local Spanish families crowd into them for their weekly fix of grilled fish and gossip. It's a heartwarming sight and shows that these coastal communities are more than mere resort towns. When we return in January we have promised ourselves a meal out at one of them.

La Cala del Moral itself is a pleasant place. I like the way even ordinary Spanish towns make an effort to look attractive. The modern water feature outside the town hall reflects a Moorish influence. The public spaces were well maintained and used as a communal meeting place

The grid of streets behind the promenade has a couple of small supermarkets. The Coviran particularly has excellent vegetable and butchery counters. More or less next door is a craft bakery. Because it's coming up Christmas as well fresh bread the counter was piled with home-made Polvorón. These are Andalucian seasonal sweets. They come wrapped individually, about the size of a macaroon, but nothing like them in taste or texture. They are very crumbly, dry on the tongue with a texture Greek halvah. Typical flavours are sesame or almond, but spiced with cinnamon or sweetened by coconut. We bought a selection from Mercadona a few days ago - we enjoyed them. However, the Polvorón we bought from the craft bakery were in another league; they were truly delicious. When we investigated further we discovered the small town of Estapa near Sevilla is where they originated, and as we suspected their origin is Arabic; similar products can be found in Lebanon and Turkey.

To use Gill's term, endishness is setting in. Slowly we are eating the contents of the fridge. As departure looms a kind of gentle melancholia envelopes you knowing that discovering new places and tastes everyday will end in a day or two. Soon we will be enmeshed by the familiar. However after 75 days on the road it is difficult to maintain energy and motivation.

Travel above all else is an act of will, eventually your willpower wanes; we need a break, a blast of the mundane to recharge our enthusiasm. We have met other long term travellers who take a winter let or even do house-sitting in order to take time off the road. It's a good solution, but flying home gives us the opportunity to catch-up with the family and check the house. Absence does make the heart grow fonder; when we lived in Buxton all the time I never saw it as home really, just somewhere we happened to live. Alternating between moho and house has increased my sense belonging, both to the town, our neighbourhood and house. 

Even so, we are busy making plans for our journey in January, researching new places to stay on Campercontacts. If weather permits we might visit central Spain - Toledo, Avila and Segovia - all new territory. We would be close to Madrid too, perhaps visiting it by train from Toledo. These days I am not quite so interested in Art History, but I don't think anyone wholly escapes the clutches of their undergraduate studies. I do have to get to the Prado, I need to see the Goyas and Velasquez, of course Guernica is in Madrid too, the greatest painting of the twentieth century in my view. We shall see, it's not quite a plan, more a nagging aspiration.