Accidental adventures in Spain

HOLIDAY DISASTERS: InterRailing was not the wild dash around Europe that LOUISE EASTimagined, but adventures happen when you least expect them to

IT IS THE summer after the Leaving Certificate and two friends and I are travelling through Spain. It is the early 1990s. Backpacks are still called rucksacks and Thailand and India have yet to be invented. For teenagers who dream of adventure, the golden ticket is not a round-the-world fare but an InterRail pass.

Over the years, we’ve heard countless InterRailing stories and our expectations are vague, but high. We will break into moonlit graveyards with handsome Swedish lute players. We will stay up all night just to watch the sun rise over the Alhambra. We may spend a night or two in police custody.

Three weeks in, and although we are loath to admit it, InterRailing is a disappointment. Adventure eludes us. Moonlit capers with artistic Swedes just do not happen, it seems. Agency is expected of us. We must woo adventure, court and flatter her, but we don’t know how.

There is something oddly dutiful about our procession through Spain. We eat strange paprika-flavoured crisps. We blow our 50-pence-per-day budget on a beer apiece from McDonald’s. We skip Granada, and the Alhambra, because the train connections aren’t good.

In Toledo, there is a promising encounter with two boys from England, who carry a guitar and go by their initials: JP and RJ. These facts alone make them impressive, but JP and RJ prove disappointingly conscientious about youth-hostel curfews and the diktats of their pre-arranged itinerary.

On the plus side, when we ourselves depart Toledo for the south, our entourage has expanded to include a half-blind ginger kitten who lends us a much-needed air of raffishness. We take turns carrying him and call him Toledo.

In Málaga, the banks are closed. What is more, some combination of holy days means they won’t be open again for three days. This is a problem. The era in which teenagers casually wield credit cards is a few years off, so we are relying on travellers’ cheques, which need to be cashed in a bank. Presumably, we could use an exchange bureau but we do not, probably because the exchange rates offered by such places are more terrifying to us than the idea of surviving for three days on £1.30 in pesetas.

We hatch a plan. In a hill village somewhere outside Málaga, there is an Irish couple who are family friends of one of us. The name of the village almost certainly begins with C and is somewhere east of Málaga, not far from another town beginning with C. Doubtless, we will find it easily enough. After calling ahead and getting no reply, we spend our last pesetas on three bus tickets out of Málaga and two bottles of water.

After an hour or two, we arrive at the first town. Worryingly, there are numerous nearby villages with names beginning with C. We ask around. Given our inability to speak Spanish, this means crinkling our eyebrows, and demanding “John L_____?,” the name of the family friend.

Unbelievably, after a few rounds of this, an efficient-looking woman nods and gestures upwards, towards the hills: “Sí. Juan Lucas. Allí.” The name of the village to which she directs us not only begins with C but sounds vaguely familiar. There is a bus, but as we have no money, we must walk.

Our rucksacks are heavy, full of items such as mosquito nets and a portable camp stove, as though our destination were Equatorial Africa rather than the Costa del Sol. Nonetheless, our spirits are good. We have no money but we have a plan. Although we do not discuss it, we are also relieved because soon there will be adults who will take care of things because that is their job.

The road to C_____ is very steep, very narrow, and very, very long. For the first hour or two, we sing the chorus of Starfish and Coffee, and discuss the relative merits of JP and RJ. In the second hour, we have a row about whether or not to drink Toledo’s half-curdled milk. During the third and fourth hour, we don’t speak at all.

As we pass, farm-workers straighten up and stare at us. We shout over, “Juan L_____,” and gesture up the hill, and their faces clear, our strange procession explained.

After five hours of walking, interspersed with several breaks, we finally acknowledge that we will not reach C_____ before nightfall, because night has already fallen. Around us, all is black, soupy and shadowless. We climb through a fence and scout around for somewhere to sleep. As we are trespassing, we do not put up the tent we have lugged several hundred miles, the last 10 by foot, but instead roll out our sleeping bags under a tree.

After much discussion, it is agreed that we will boil the last of our water on the camp stove, in order to make up the two sachets of Knorr Cup-a-Soup we’ve just found underneath the mosquito nets. A bit of scorpion-wary scavenging also turns up five unripe tomatoes growing nearby. We gather around the Calor-blue flames as though it is an open fire, and we are roasting a boar.

Then we watch, wordlessly, as the suddenly boiling water flips the flimsy camp saucepan and drains slowly into the baked soil.

All night, cicadas sing in the dark, and the idea of snakes slithers into the open necks of our sleeping bags. At dawn, we wake, throats prickling with thirst. In the pink light of early morning, we make out a large sign not visible the night before.

Since we don’t read Spanish, we don’t understand it in its entirety, but the words “sanatorio” and “psiquiátrico” don’t need much translation. This field we have just slept in belongs to the insane, and we have eaten their tomatoes.

Back on the road, our pace is notably quicker, although the road to C_____ is, if anything, steeper than the day before. When a flat-back truck slows, the passenger door swung open from inside, we hesitate for no more than a second before climbing in. The driver is toothless, wears a vest, and finds us unspeakably funny. He literally cannot speak, he is laughing so hard. We laugh too, because someone choosing not to kill you with a hatchet is funny, and then ask if he knows Juan L______.

The man wipes his eyes and agrees that sí, claro, he knows Juan L______. He points to himself and to the car, and gestures up ahead.

Somehow, his meaning is unmistakable. He will take us to Juan L_____. Just five minutes later, we pull into the surprisingly sizeable town of C______. After negotiating a bewildering net of back streets and alleys, our hero pulls into a small plaza and brakes sharply.

“Por ahí!” he says with a flourish, and points to a large yellow-fronted estate agent’s office.

Sure enough, in black letters underneath a large photo of a smiling man with a very luxuriant moustache are the words “Juan L_____”.

The only problem is that our Juan L_____, more usually known as John L_____, is not a moustachioed Spanish estate agent but a clean-shaven Irish music teacher. We have spent two days, and all our money, tracking down the wrong Juan L_____.

Strange as it may sound, not once during these long two days, does it occur to us that we are having an adventure. Everything that happens – walking for five hours, sleeping rough in a mental asylum, surviving for two days on £1.30 and five green tomatoes, hitching a lift with the world’s happiest man – happens because we are fending off disaster.

Even when the wife of John L_____ walks across the plaza and happens upon us, slumped over our rucksacks, without a peseta or plan between us, we do not recognise that this is a story we will tell for years, the road growing longer, the night darker, the non-existent moans of the insane ever louder. Sipping café con leche on the L_____’s sunny terrace, Toledo’s fate secure, we have yet to discover that disaster seen in the rear-view mirror looks an awful lot like adventure.