Oops, we did it again

The ad said "English couple, living on acreage in the South of France. We love to eat, drink and smoke. We have four dogs."

When I wrote about our last hard-labour-for-food exchange, I didn't mention that our hosts were vegans who, if they drank, certainly didn't share any with us. We did, in actual fact, eat very well, but such is our fondness for red wine and cheesy snacks that the words 'eat,' and 'drink' attracted our attention instantly, blinding us to three other really important words in the ad: "English," "smoke," and "dogs."

Cara can smell cigarette smoke from eighty-two miles away, and would ask Churchill himself to put out his cigars if he sat next to her at a table. I have already expressed my misgivings about dogs in other postings, but I haven't yet had cause to mention that I'm also powerfully allergic to them. As for the English part, we assumed that if you are a couple who moves to France, especially if you like to eat and drink, you'd actually like France. We are learning that this is not necessarily so. You might just be the sort of English couple who likes French sunshine, but is actually contemptuous of the language, the food, the wine, the people, and even the cars.

We're also learning that serious alcohol consumption and chain smoking suppress the appetite, so that while the food isn't bad, it's doled out in tiny portions, and Cara and I spend most of our days in a lethargic, grumbling slump, stealing the occasional banana from the fruit bowl to supplement the bags of peanuts and cookies we presciently brought with us for emergency supplies.

Just two more days here, though, and we're off to the seaside town of Sete, where Cara has already made reservations for us at "La Fourchette." After that, it's off to Avignon to meet up with our good friends from Edmonton for a final week of gourmandising, drinking and Francophilia. Then back home. Hmmm.

These Boots are Made for Walking

Well, we’ve done it: we’ve walked from one end of England to the other, and the question that is most important--as it has been at other points of this trip--is ‘have I gained or lost weight?’

If you are a 40-year-old male, mostly human, with a bit of a gut, you need to take in the following fuel in order to walk across a country in sixteen days:

· 32 Cumberland sausages

· 16 fried eggs

· 16 fried tomatoes

· .5 kilogram fried mushrooms

· 32 rashers of bacon

· .5 kilogram baked beans

· 3 kilograms deep-fried potato wedges

· 3 kilograms deep-fried haddock

· 3 kilograms sundry pies

· 20 litres ale or cider

· 16 Snickers or Mars bars

· 16 ham and cheese sandwiches

· 16 bags crisps

This all works out to 30, 852 calories. (Go ahead, Malcolm, check my facts.) If you’re a male, mostly human, 40-year-old with a bit of a gut, you burn about 408 calories every hour when you walk vigorously across a country with lots of hilly bits. Cara and I figure that we crossed the country in about 96 hours, so I burned about 39, 168 calories. That means I burned 8, 316 calories more than I consumed.

It takes 3, 500 calories to make a pound of fat, which means that I should have lost 2.376 pounds. You’re not going to believe this, but that is, in fact, just about exactly how much weight I lost. All in all, what my calculations show, is that our cross-country trip was in no way worth the effort: I could lose 2.376 pounds just by snoring slightly more vigorously while I sleep instead of humping my way across boggy hills for sixteen days.

Ah, but what a trip. You’ll have to excuse me for taking refuge in calorie counting rather than trying to describe this magnificent walk from West to East. Wordsworth lived right in the middle of this trail, and he’s a pretty good poet, and he had to invent Romanticism just to begin to do justice to the Lake District. So, our trip in three photos:

Dipping our boots in the Irish Sea


Lots of lovely bits in between seas


Dipping our boots in the North Sea

Coast to Coast

I wore a red and black windbreaker when I was six, maybe seven, years old. Sometime around that age, I had a recurring dream in which I was wearing this coat and standing at the top of a steeply sloped valley. In the distance, at the bottom of the valley, was a sparkling lake. I’d open my coat wide, wing-like, and jump into the air, gliding down the valley, then skimming across the lake. Well, never quite across the lake; I’d always wake up when I reached the middle and realized that I could drown. Even as a dreaming child, I was pretty risk-averse.

Still, hiking in the Lake District reminds me of those dreams. Cara and I passed through there a few days ago (and by ‘passed through,’ I mean that we slogged up and down 50 miles of mountains over three days). Hour after hour, we’d find ourselves at the top of dreamlike valleys with views across all of England, and, if it’s possible to swoop on foot, we’d swoop down them-sometimes to lakes, but always to quaint villages with happy pubs and comfortable beds.

My gear is not as simple as it was in my dreams when I was six and flying on polyester wings. Now, I am garbed, armored perhaps, in various layers of exotic materials: Gor-Tex this, Vibram that. My pack is made of something unpronounceable, no doubt salvaged from falling space shuttles, and is so light that it carries itself. It’s already a pretty sophisticated looking piece of kit, but I’ve added a complicated web of straps to form a holster for my camera, holding it snug to my chest and giving my ticklish trigger finger a gunslinger’s access. The result is that I have almost as much bulk preceding me as I do clinging to my back. Now, walking ought to be a simple activity--it is, after all, the evolutionary party trick that we homo erectus have been dining out on for a couple of million years--but my fellow hikers could be forgiven for thinking--what with all the life support I’m carrying--that I was planning an ascent of Everest, and that I took a wrong turn at Dover. I have so many straps, buckles, buttons, clasps, clips and zips that getting ready in the morning is like rigging a six-mast schooner.

Thus, Cara and the Good Ship Watson wend their way across the land. Strangely enough, given my already-reported ineptitude with this kind of thing, I am the navigator for this trip. We’re supposed to be crossing the country from West to East, but Cara hasn’t checked my work recently, and we’re quite probably headed to Land’s End. Still, we seem to have made it through the Lake District without too many mishaps. I’m pretty sure that we’re now in the Yorkshire Dales, though I have to confess I don’t actually know what a ‘dale’ is. Whatever they are, these ‘Dales’ are quite beautiful (a few too many dead rabbits around, though: it’s like some kind of rabbity Ghengis Khan has been marauding just ahead of us) and a welcome change from the boggy moorlands of Cumbria that were our soggy home for the last two days. Eight more days of walking, ‘til we reach the safe harbour of Robin Hood’s Bay. At least, that’s where I think we’re going. I’ll let you know.

Heaven and Hell

We’re sitting on a bench in a garden in the heart of Devon, England. We’re overlooking a pond that is flanked by giant, gnarled Oaks. The trees are made hazy by a green flush, the first leaves pushing forth into the spring warmth. A hill rises up just beyond the pond. On its slope is a circle of trees that just perfectly frames a patch of meadow in the sunshine. It’s a stage upon which half a dozen rabbits are playing. They are, indeed, playing, not browsing or performing some unrelated function that I am anthropomorphizing. They’re flinging themselves into the air, kicking out their hind legs, in joyous abandon. ‘Binking’ it’s called by rabbit cognoscenti. There’s a robin in the bushes singing its head off; there are doves cooing somewhere behind us; there are ducks escorting ducklings across the pond; there are lambs-just a few weeks old-bleating in the meadows around us; daffodils practically explode from the grass before our eyes. It’s achingly, absurdly, pretty. It’s like Walt Disney sat down with the Telly Tubbies over cream tea to conjure this up.

Like Disneyland, Theme-Park Gaia here commands an exorbitant entrance fee, one that you pay at The Stables.

The Stables are inside an immense concrete warehouse divided into twelve cells, each of which is fitted with iron bars that slide shut with a maximum-security clang. The Stables haven’t been used in a couple of years, so every horizontal surface is caked with pigeon shit. The walls, where they are visible through the cobwebs, are yellow with animal grime. There are thousands of feet of this. Thousands of feet of shit-covered floors and grimy walls. Our job--the fee that is exacted for our hour in paradise--is to wash all of it and then paint it brilliant white.

We scrubbed for four days, and now we’ve been applying white paint for five. Endless stretches of white. Like Nelson Mandela in the white limestone quarries of Robben Island, we are going blind from all the white. Our bodies are contorting to the shape of the brush and roller; Cara can no longer make a fist to shake behind our oppressors’ backs.

Two things make our labours harder to bear. The first is that our hosts--the owners of our idyllic pond, and these Hellish Stables--are rich. They own a Porsche that our hostess parks overnight in the stables, moving it in the morning so that the yokels won’t get paint on it. Our hosts own 91 hectares of some of the finest grazing land in Britain. Our hosts own three thoroughbred horses (from ‘proper pedigrees’ we’re told) that have their own stables adjacent to those we are now painting. Our hosts built our stables, the ones we’re now painting, for their daughter so she could run a commercial “equicentre.” Our hosts, then, don’t need free labour; they could pay someone to paint these stables; they could pay us to paint these stable. Hell, they could pay Mark Rothko to paint these stables. Instead, we’re painting them for groceries and a room at the back of their 17th century house. That’s the second thing that is hard to bear: we don’t need groceries and a room. There is nothing in our material circumstances that obliges us to submit to this Depression-era arrangement. We’re professionals, dammit! If we wanted to, we could leave this place, book a B&B down the road, and pay someone to cook our breakfasts for us.

And yet, here we are. Washing shit-covered floors and painting grimy walls. And that, really, is the third thing that makes this hard to bear: we are the masters of our own misery; we are our own tormentors, our own oppressors. Our wealthy hosts have provided the means for our incarceration, but we ourselves are own judge and jury, and ultimately, our own jailers.

Update

Aw crap, nearly a month since my last post. Seems I've not done anything stupid enough to warrant writing about lately. Still, an update's probably in order, so short and sweet:

I'm in Oxford, England visiting my parents.

Cara's in Aberdeen, Scotland building a drystone wall. Not exactly intentionally. She signed up to volunteer for a week with the National Trust, thinking she'd be helping to plant a garden. Instead, she's building a wall. Sadly, it's also snowing up there. I don't know how she's doing, actually, since she's remote enough that she has no internet access and no cell phone reception. For the next few days, therefore, I can only hope that she's surviving the experience and that she hasn't run away without me to some warmer climate (she's been talking a lot lately about a return trip to South Africa).

Backtracking slightly: we had a very interesting, though cold, time in Portugal (hence the recent interest in SA Take Two). We arrived in the UK on March 9th, then went almost immediately to a lovely bed and breakfast in a tiny village called Lee on the North coast of Devon. We spent a week doing hard labour in exchange for room and board, actually a very nice change from a somewhat indolent and luxurious year.

Here's a picture of Cara undertaking the world's largest weeding job. See that field? It used to be covered in 10 year's worth of brambles. Now it's not.



Once Cara's done the Papillon thing up North, we'll both be heading back to Devon to clean a horse stable, again in exchange for room and board. Chris, take note.

Then, on the 23rd of April, we'll be starting a cross-country walk across the very narrowest portion of the UK possible. No doubt I'll find something to write about then.

Tourists are Terror

“Tourists are Terror,” it says on a Lisbon wall. As my photos can generally attest, though, I am a timid terrorist; I have taken about seven thousand photos, mostly of buildings and landscape, and almost none of people. This is because of two rules that I wrote into my Traveller’s Charter early in this trip-- not because they are matters of principle, but because they satisfy the needs of my inner coward. They are: never take photos of locals unless you use a telephoto lens or you can pretend that you’re taking a picture of an especially interesting cornice; and, never engage a local in conversation unless they first ask you a question like “will that be cash or credit card?”

My traveller’s constitution has been torn to shreds since the arrival of Cara’s parents here in Portugal. Timidity is not a failing of either redoubtable Schlenker.

Witness our Blitzkrieg on the harmless little village of Viano do Alentejo: as we passed through, Art spied a bench-full of black-coated Portuguese elders at a café discussing whatever these marathon talkers discuss on a Sunday morning. Determined to snap their photo, he spun twice around the village roundabout and then stopped dead in front of them, snarling traffic on all four entries. He got his photo. Think how a National Geographic photographer might curl up in a hide for days to snap a picture of a rare mountain ocelot, leaving the shy creature unmolested and unaware of any human presence. Now think of Art in a tutu, brandishing a tuba to get the same photo. The effect on the villagers was much the same.

A few miles down the road, we stopped in another tiny hamlet for lunch. Thinking that we’d try being a little more Portuguese in our habits, we parked our car as the Portuguese do: anywhere we damn well wanted to, which today meant directly under a traffic light. When we finished our superb lunch of chicken stew and mackerel, we met a gendarme waiting for us outside. There must be twelve people living in this village, but one of them happened to be a traffic cop. I suspect he was hanging out with the rest of his cronies, black cap and all, having coffee when he spied our illegal parking job. I’m sure he ran home when he saw his chance, got into his traffic cop leathers and ran back to look all official. Speaking not one word of English, he motioned at our vehicle, and said something like “Alerta!” Eileen figured this canny fellow had somehow sussed that we come from Alberta, so- hand gestures and all-began to tell him all about the Rocky Mountains. After several minutes of this, the poor defeated fellow shook his head, showed Eileen the pad he’d been writing in, and scratched out the ticket. We hadn’t noticed before that afternoon the common road sign saying “Alerta!” or “Warning!”

Lest there be any doubt, Art and Eileen have been perfect travel companions. Art has planned these three weeks with an unerring feel for interesting places and excellent food. I do my usual stunned Chihuahua thing, cooking whenever Eileen lets me, while Art, guided by two expert navigators, does the majority of the driving. For three weeks, it’s been like having a private guided tour of this marvelous country of cork forests and wild beaches. As for the people, I’ll have to ask Art and Eileen what they’re like.

Alimentary, my dear Watson

We have begun exploring the levadas of Madeira, a series of aqueducts that snake for some two thousand kilometers in and out of the lush volcanic folds that characterize the mountain slopes of the island. The levadas carry water from the North side of the island to the South, but they also serve as accessible, easy walking paths that enable tourists to walk past small groves of bananas and avocados on one side while admiring infinite views of the sea on the other. These canal walks are all the more enjoyable since for the last few days I've been preoccupied with canals a different kind - my own alimentary version - which had become host to something nasty.

I watched a lot of TV while being chained to the immediate vicinity of the toilet. Madeira is practically an occupied territory since the local population seems dwarfed by the tourist population, 40% of which is British. There’s plenty of English television, therefore, and I’ve been able to catch up on an entire season of House, and to educate myself on the full spectrum of music videos that ‘the kids are watching these days.’ I feel that I am now quite au fait, and I have to admit, I quite like Lady Gaga; she’s sexy, she’s weird, and her name is ‘Lady Gaga.’ What’s not to like?

I never watch music videos at home. I don’t like watching all that ‘booty’ shaking around. It makes me feel even worse about my own absurd proportions and that, somewhere out there, a lot of people are having a lot more fun than me; nevertheless, they make compelling viewing when you’re suffering end-stage dehydration. In the nightmarish, hallucinatory hours I spent in a dark hotel room as my body tried to evert itself, I watched the Black Eyed Peas’ horrible video that accompanies its horrible, but aggravatingly catchy, ‘I got a feeling.’ In one of the video’s more adolescent moments, I was startled to see a breast, nipple and all, pop right out of a dress. It’s nothing, of course, to see Fergie grinding away in her thong like a pole dancing cat in heat, but actual nudity, real nipples, that’s perverted, which is why it never happens. Except that it did. I had two opposing thoughts on the matter: the world is going to hell in a hand-basket; and, things are lookin’up.

I saw the video again a few days later, despite that fact that I was now well enough to exercise better judgment, but there was that nipple, and it seemed important to confirm its presence. This time, though, it wasn’t there. Nothing. Lots of vulgarity. Lots of lewdness. Lots of adolescent masturbatory fantasy. But no nipple. Where’d it go? Did I imagine the whole thing? If so, was adding a nipple to a ‘Black Eyed Peas’ video the best I could do? The matter has niggled at me this week, so much so that I felt I had to enlist Cara’s help. She performed a Google search and found out that there are, indeed, two versions of the video: one sans nipple and one a la mode. The sanitized one--the one that merely depicts Fergie in a thong, playing lipstick-lesbian while her party friends drink themselves unconscious--plays in North America during the day when no kiddies will be maimed by the sight of a real breast. The dirty one--the one with the 0.7 second view of a nipple--plays only on specialty channels in the US. In Europe, however, where the kiddies are less psychologically fragile, the video plays anywhere, anytime. Apparently, I’d been watching a Portuguese show the first time, and had then switched to MTV. I had two thoughts concerning this; the world is going to hell in a hand-basket; and, I’m moving to Europe.