Sunday 4 September
The week has been dominated by the dreadful news coming from America's Gulf Coast. Each day the plight of the unhappy people stranded in New Orleans and elsewhere has been getting more desperate. Only today, a full week after the hurricane, does it look as though the evacuation has been more or less completed.
It's easy to criticise the lack of preparedness and the slow and lackadaisical response of the federal authorities, in fact it's impossible not to. But there's no point in me repeating what everyone else already feels. Instead, I have been wondering whether Britain would have coped better with such a massive catastrophe. Suppose, for instance, some disaster made the whole greater Glasgow area uninhabitable. (Some people would say it already is, and has been for decades, but let's not be flippant about this.) Would the government have the resources to bring food and water to the refugees within hours, and to relocate them within a couple of days? Could temporary accommodation be found for tens or hundreds of thousands of homeless people? Then what happens in the longer term? How do poor people with no insurance or savings start from scratch to rebuild their lives?
The closest Britain has come to a major disaster in recent years was the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle four years ago. After some weeks of hamfisted and ineffectual attempts by the Ministry of Agriculture (as it then was) to control the epidemic, the government had to admit that the civil authorities couldn't cope with disposing of all the carcases. They called in the army, which had the situation under control within a week or so. In such a crisis, only the military have the logistic and leadership skills to take effective action. But even a week is too long where people are concerned. You can't leave babies without water, or hospitals without power or food, for that long without a lot of people dying. The sad fact is that it may be literally impossible to prevent mass deaths after a major natural disaster.
One thing that would have been different if it was Glasgow that was underwater would be that the United States would be quick to offer assistance, as it was after the Indian Ocean tsunami last winter. I think it's a shame that other countries don't seem to have been so quick to offer help for the victims of hurricane Katrina. I heard that President Bush initially refused offers of help. I don't know if that is true. But it would have been good if, say, Médecins Sans Frontières had been there to help the injured. On the other hand, it might be just too dangerous for foreign medics to set foot in New Orleans, which looks more like Baghdad every day, with heavily armed gangs of insurgents looting, pillaging and burning the city.
I see on today's news that Bush has now accepted Kofi Annan's offer of help from the U.N. Better late than never.
On a personal note, I am relieved to hear from the one person I know in that part of the world, my online friend James in Mississippi, that he and his mother are doing okay (apart from having to boil water, and queue for hours to get petrol).
It is nearly a year since we saw our grandchildren. Usually we try to go to Spain twice a year to visit the family. But Mary has been very busy this year, and we just couldn't find time for a visit in May. It's too cold there for our liking in the winter, and too hot in the summer. May and September are the times to go. So we shall be in Spain for the next two weeks. We'll stay with Steve and Jo for the first week or so and then take off to do a bit of touring round Andalucía. There won't be any more updates here until the last week of the month or thereabouts.
Thursday 22 September
We arrived home from Spain at 3 a.m. yesterday morning, after a late-evening flight from Seville to Stansted followed by a three-hour drive back from Stansted to Leeds. We flew out of Stansted in order to take advantage of Ryanair's dirt cheap flights, but we paid the price by having a 180-mile drive to get to and from Stansted, and also by having to use the extortionately expensive long-term car park there.
We had a great time with the family. We hadn't seen the grandchildren for practically a whole year, and of course they have grown a lot since then. Last year, at five years old, Tom was aggressively bossy and demanding, and we found him a bit of a trial. But he has now got over that stage, and is as cute and endearing as he ever was. Little David, at two and a quarter, is full of fun and very active. He is much more self-contained than Tom, and often seems to be in a world of his own, oblivious to everyone around him. He isn't talking at all yet, but apparently that's quite within the normal range for speech development. Jo thinks that he takes after his other grandfather (her father), who was an exact contemporary of mine at the same Cambridge college although we never knew each other there. She suspects that he was also a late developer. "But," she said scornfully, "I don't suppose he has any idea how old he was when he started to talk. It probably never occurred to him to ask his mother questions like that." At that point, I had to admit that I too haven't the faintest idea how old I was when I started to walk or talk.
This was the first time we had seen Steve and Jo's "new" (200-year-old) house. It is built in a very traditional Spanish style, with massive thick walls that keep out the heat in summer and the cold in winter. It's a huge improvement on the brand new flat that they had before, which fried in summer and froze in winter. They moved into this house last December but they still hadn't acquired the title to it owing to typical Spanish bureaucratic delays. The previous owner died, and under strict Spanish inheritance laws the ownership of the house passed jointly to her three daughters. Each of them had to produce paperwork proving their share of the title and their willingness to sell. Also, the bank manager forgot to arrange a mortgage. From Steve and Jo's point of view, the delay has been a blessing, because they have moved into the house and have been living there rent- and mortgage-free for nine months. Even so, they were hoping that the paperwork would finally all be assembled for them to complete the purchase. They had a meeting lined up with the notary on the last day of our stay and they were all set to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate. But inevitably when the time came there was still one document missing, so the meeting was postponed and we were deprived of our champagne. Steve phoned yesterday, soon after we arrived home, to let us know that the missing piece of paper had been found and the house is finally theirs.
It's quite a large house, with four bedrooms and plenty of potential for further expansion. But it's in a very rundown state. Now that it's theirs, they will have to have it rewired and re-roofed, and install some modern plumbing. They don't have a guest room because the fourth bedroom is needed for Jo's study. So we stayed in a nearby hotel. We were in Spain for two weeks, but we took a mini-holiday in the middle of that time, and I'll report on that in the next entry. For now, I'm still cross-eyed with tiredness after yesterday's journey, and I need an early night.
Monday 26 September
Our days in Spain visiting Steve and Jo followed a set pattern. We slept in fairly late at the hotel, and woke to look out of the window at the neatly cobbled street with kids walking to school and cars cruising along looking for parking places. You know you're not in England any more when you see an old woman walking slowly down the centre of the road leading a donkey which was laden with two saddlebags each containing a large milk churn. That's what I love about travel. You see things that you would never imagine seeing at home, and yet they look perfectly natural and everyday in a foreign context.
After a leisurely breakfast at the hotel we wandered across town to Steve and Jo's place, stopping on route at one of the many little supermercados to buy groceries for the day. We spent the mornings playing with David while Tom was at school, Steve was out at work and Jo was working on her computer. School finished for the day at 2 pm, and Steve came home from work soon after. In typical Spanish style, we had lunch, the main meal of the day, at 2.30 or 3, followed by siesta. In mid-September it was still hot enough in the afternoons that a siesta was essential. Mary and I went back to the hotel for this. She went up to our room and rested, and I stayed in the hotel lounge and read my book (appropriately this was Don Quixote, which is the assigned text for the next meeting of my monthly reading group, this year being the 400th anniversary of its first publication).
Around 6 pm we went back to Steve and Jo's, and took the boys out to play in the park or on one of the local squares. We were constantly surprised at how well-behaved Spanish kids are. If little David trotted across an area where some bigger boys were having a football game, they would stop the game and wait patiently until he was out of the way; and if a ball from another game bounced into where they were playing they would politely send it back where it came from. I don't think British teenagers would be nearly so civilised.
After working off their surplus energy we took them home for the bath and bedtime ritual, which in Tom's case involved reading him a chapter from the latest Harry Potter book. *yawn*
One evening, instead of going to the park, we all went for a drive to a nearby village. We couldn't all fit into one car, so Steve and Jo took David, and Tom came with us. He is a real little chatterbox and never stopped talking for the whole journey. He told us at length about a terrible storm that had flooded a city called Nuevo Orleáns, and how a lot of people had drowned because a bad man called Bush had not done enough to help them. Of course, he was only repeating what he had heard from his parents and teachers, but it was good to hear our six-year-old grandson taking an interest in current affairs and beginning to develop sound political views.
In the middle of our stay, we took a mini-break and went travelling around a part of Spain that we hadn't previously visited (more about that in the next entry). This was a very successful strategy, and we'll probably do something similar next time we go there. We spent five days with the family, then four days on the road, then another five days with them. That way, we saw quite a lot of them, but we weren't with them for long enough to start getting bored, or tired of each other's company. At the end, we all said that we wished the visit could have been a bit longer.
Thursday 29 September
For the mini-break in the middle of our Spanish holiday, Mary and I had very different ideas. She wanted to go to Morocco and I wanted to explore the province of Cádiz in the south of Spain. The reason I don't fancy Morocco is that I just hate being pestered by people trying to sell me something, and it seems that is pretty much unavoidable anywhere in Morocco. When we arrived in Spain I started planning a little trip to Cádiz, along the coast to Gibraltar and then back by an inland route. Mary started making enquiries about trips to Tangier. She found that this would be possible, but there were no direct flights from Seville, and we would have to change in Madrid or Barcelona. This seemed so roundabout and time-consuming that I dug my heels in and said I really didn't want to do that. Mary didn't put up any serious resistance (in fact, we never have arguments, we always manage to sort things out by rational discussion), so on Sunday 11 September we set off on our little tour of the Costa de la Luz.
Our first stop was for lunch in an industrial town called Los Palacios, south of Seville. We arrived shortly before 2pm and found a large, almost empty restaurant. We wondered why there was nobody else there, because Spanish families often go out for Sunday lunch. But we had forgotten that they eat late, and by 2.30 the place was completely full with large families and a whole football team wearing their kit (though it didn't look as though they had been playing that morning, and judging by the amount they ate and drank I doubt whether they were planning to play later that day either). I had a very good starter (entremetes variados, a plate of cold meats and prawns), but a truly dire main course of fried chicken, dry, tough and tasteless. I wonder whether to blame it for the troubles that followed.
From there we drove to Cádiz where we stayed the night. Cádiz claims to be the oldest city in Europe, dating back to a Phoenician trading base around 1100 BC. It is famous as the starting point for Columbus's voyages to the New World, but it was almost completely destroyed by a tsunami caused by the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. It was rebuilt in traditional style but on a grid pattern like an American city. We wandered around the narrow alleys, sat at a bar in the main square for beer and tapas and watched the world go by.
Next day we drove down the coast to a picturesque village called Vejer de la Frontera. This is a hilltop village with a castle perched on the summit. We drove up to the village, but unfortunately it was completely choked with tourist traffic, with not a single parking place anywhere. After a while we gave up and drove on. Mary commented how differently they do things in America. We once visited a similar village in New Mexico, the Native American settlement of Acoma. There, you leave your car at a visitor centre at the foot of the mesa, and a shuttle bus takes you up to the traffic-free village. But the Spanish authorities seem to have no idea on how to make the most of their tourist attractions.
We drove on to Tarifa, the southernmost town in mainland Europe. This is an attractive old town which has become very popular with windsurfers, and has a relaxed, surfers' atmosphere about it. It was also full of visitors, and it took us a while to find accommodation. Eventually we found a room in a surfers' hostel, by which time I realised that I was not feeling at all well. I took my temperature (as a card-carrying hypochondriac I always have a thermometer with me when travelling) and found that it was up to 38.5°C. I also had an upset stomach and didn't feel like eating anything that evening. I bought some paracetamol at a local farmacia and we had an early night, with me feeling sorry for myself and wondering if I had caught bird flu from the dire imported chicken at that Sunday lunch in Los Palacios.
In the morning I was still feverish and we realised that we would have to change our plans to go to Gibraltar. One possibility was to stay an extra day in Tarifa, with me staying in the hostel to recover, and Mary taking the ferry to Tangier for a day in Morocco. I wasn't too happy about her going there on her own and she was also apprehensive about the idea. So we looked in the Lonely Planet guide and saw that there was a reasonably affordable four star hotel with a pool in the city of Algeciras, between Tarifa and Gibraltar. We thought that we would treat ourselves to a day or two of luxury there while I recovered.
The Reina Cristina Hotel in Algeciras is a classic example of faded Victorian elegance. It must have been very luxurious a century ago, when Winston Churchill and King Juan Carlos I of Spain stayed there. But Algeciras has become an ugly industrial city with a lot of pollution from petrochemical plants, and the hotel with its fine subtropical gardens is now a bit of an oasis in a desert. At any rate, it's very good value. When we arrived, they offered us a large, comfortable room near the pool for €80 a night, against the listed price of €120 that we were expecting. By late afternoon there, I was already feeling sufficiently recovered to go for a swim. [To be continued.]
Friday 30 September
[Continued from yesterday.] After another early night I woke up with a much reduced fever, though the stomach and guts still felt distinctly wobbly. We decided to go for Gibraltar after all, and drove as far as the frontier town of La Línea. We didn't have the documentation to take the rental car out of Spain, and in any case the roads in Gibraltar are much too narrow and crowded for a non-native to attempt. So we left the car in an underground car park and walked across the border. As soon as we cleared immigration we were swooped upon by a man trying to sell us a guided bus tour of the Rock. I was suspicious about this, thinking that we would do just as well to take the cable car to the top of the Rock and then look around on foot. But he persuaded us that we would see much more on the minibus tour, and we agreed to sign up for it. This turned out to be a good move. The tour was fairly expensive but the driver was a good guide. It lasted two hours and included stops at all the most interesting places on the upper parts of the rock: the natural and manmade caves and tunnels, and the famous Barbary apes. These are the only wild primates left in Europe, except that they have become so used to tourists that they are not actually wild at all. They scurry along the roadside looking cute, hopping onto the roofs of cars and soliciting for food (which you are not supposed to give them).
The tour ended at the main shopping street. The inhabited part of Gibraltar is a narrow strip of land squeezed between the Rock and the ocean, and it has a very claustrophobic feel about it. Like most colonial places, it is more British than Britain. The main street is lined with outlets of all the usual British department stores: Boots, Marks and Spencer and so on. I found an old-fashioned chemist's shop where I bought a bottle of kaolin and morph, which stopped my diarrhoea dead in its tracks, as effectively as inserting a butt plug (but what would I know about such things?). We stopped at a pavement cafe for a drink, and decided that after half a day in Gibraltar we had seen as much of the place as we wanted. The weather was deteriorating, very windy and starting to rain (the only day of our entire stay when the weather was less than perfect), so we took a bus back to the frontier and returned to spend the rest of the day in the sybaritic comforts of the Reina Cristina.
Most of the other guests there seemed to be on some kind of inclusive package. They wore white wristbands that entitled them to drift in and out of the buffet dining room whenever they wanted, eating as much and as often as they liked. We too drifted in and out of the dining room quite a bit, and the head waiter only once noticed that we had no wristbands and asked for our room number. The next morning when checking out I told the receptionist that we had eaten seven meals each, but he didn't want to know. He said that if the meals weren't entered into his computer then he couldn't charge for them. So as well as getting a very good room for only two thirds of the list price, we had two days of meals practically for free. If I hadn't been feeling so queasy for most of the time I would have got even better value out of that. At any rate, we left with happy memories of our two days at the Reina Cristina. One of my guide books recommends it as the best hotel in Algeciras "for anyone unfortunate enough to need overnight accommodation" in that town, and that just about sums it up.
(Scanned postcard from the hotel lobby.)
After the delay caused by my illness we didn't have time to complete the rest of the little tour we had planned. That will have to wait until another visit. We drove back through a hilly wooded sierra, stopping at the delightful village of El Bosque for lunch at an inn called La Bodeguita, where I had surtido Ibérico, a plate of the excellent cold meats that are a speciality in that part of Spain. Fortunately, by now my stomach was sufficiently recovered to appreciate it.
That's the end of the Spanish travelogue. My photos of the trip are on the family web site here. There are a few very cute shots of the grandchildren, but I don't seem to have taken as many photos as I intended. In fact, the only times when I took several photos were the days in Tarifa and Gibraltar when I was not feeling well. Strange.
