Apollo and Rupert in Kazakhstan
Another Spanish Summer
It was June in Madrid. Any urgency had left the step of its inhabitants and the city was edging with a languid sigh towards the height of another insufferable Spanish summer. Above, the sky was an electric blue and a fat sun burnt mercilessly down. Below people were hidden behind sunglasses; beneath hats and parasols. They were slouched on terazas, chewing at olives, spitting pipas and sipping on tintos. At Roberto’s bar we listened to slow jazz, smoked cigarettes and sweated. An old man in a shirt told me, ‘Si quieres el perro, acepta las pulgas.’
Most of us are familiar with the flow of a Spanish working year. For teachers it begins somewhere between the middle of September and the middle of October and it stretches, intermittently, though the preceding eight months until it closes, with a jolt, at the end of June. From then onwards teachers are all alone, having been abandoned by their academies like a puppy after Christmas. Suddenly made cultural refugees, their choice is stark. Either they can enlist as a tutor at a summer camp, retreat to their home country or they can go on holiday. In 2006, I settled on the latter option – and I attempted to drive a mini to Mongolia.
The Mongol Rally had a deceptive name. There were no fast cars, no spectator lined routes or ice-cool Finnish drivers. Instead it was styled as a ‘charity touring event’, 9000 miles at whatever speed and by whatever route. It appealed immediately. The rally was run by a clutter of hopelessly organised ex-students who were headed by Tom – an amiable bundle of ideas with an utter disregard for the everyday, mundane procession of life. He was the type of man who thought it was a good idea to float down The Amazon on an inflatable dinghy and who survived on little more than an inspiring breed of mindless optimism.
We were convinced. His website swallowed our £220 entry fee, we filed out our visa applications and raised our mandatory lump for charity and that was that. We were in. The rules of the event were simple. You started in London and you finished at Dave’s Bar in Mongolia. Your car had to be crap and it had to have a small engine (less than one litre in size). It was good luck and off you go.
So it was then, as half of Spain settled themselves beside the pool, a thousand miles to the north – on a cloudy day in mid-July – a colourful horde of Europe’s forgotten cars assembled proudly in Hyde Park. It was like being dragged back in time: a mechanical symphony for the devil. Exhausts wheezed, bumpers shook, exhausts billowed foul fumes and gearboxes rattled like coal scuttles. An acrid smell filled the air as the army of metros, maestros, fiestas, pandas, Ibizas and 2CVs fired up for all they were worth.
I was one part of a team of six and we’d set ourselves the task of driving three old minis – The Mongol Minis – on a 9000 mile journey. According to a time-worn British tradition we had named our cars as if they were family pets and that July day Rupert, Apollo and Mabel waited patiently in line: sprayed, tuned, reinforced, roofracked and braced. A horn was blown and we rolled off towards the south. By midday we had left London. By late afternoon we were in France. One day more and we were in Germany. Then, just outside the Czech Republic, Mabel’s exhaust pipe fell off.
Mabel in Samarkand
No brakes, no tyres
The incident set the tone for the following month. Mabel, the blood red mini that was being driven by a half-Italian-half-West-Midlander named Roberto and myself, was a liability. Bought for £450 two months earlier, it soon became evident that she was structurally unsound. Dangerously so. In Transylvania her rear sub-frame collapsed. The same happened in Russia, in Kazakhstan and worst of all in Uzbekistan, where crowds of locals appeared in the ancient city of Samarkand and laughed. Each breakdown was followed by an anxious search for a garage or twenty minutes of rage, hitting the axels with a hammer.
The month that I spent inside Mabel frightened me stiff. I saw every pot hole as if it was a crater and viewed every crunch of the brakes as a terrifying omen of what was to come. She burnt fuel with the greedy speed of a Harrier jump jet and overheated like a Scotchman in the Sahara. I kept a diary of each of her mechanical faults, which, by the end, stretched to an impressive three long pages.
Mabel’s wretched suffering formed the backbone of a captivating journey. Leaving the European Union behind us we found the rolling hills of northern Romania as still and green as the fields of Asturias. Moldova was modern and lively and Ukraine was hot – its vast highways flanked by enormous fields, tall sunflowers and an endless procession of street hucksters. The further east that we travelled, the easier it became to recognise the old, clumsy stamp of half a century’s Soviet rule. The police were sinister. Some carried rifles and others had pistols strapped to their hips. Five times a day we would be stopped as they did their utmost to fine us. Once we were threatened with prison, another time we were presented with a bottle of vodka.
Trouble with the Police
Playing with the law
Border crossings were the most troublesome and one incident at the checkpoint between Moldova and Russia remains fixed in my memory. We had arrived at the little checkpoint at dusk and were promptly matched to a stark concrete office, which contained nothing more than a table, two chairs and an old map of the USSR. A guard with a sneer and a gun forced us to complete some forms and surrender a pocketful of American dollars. We then went outside and started our engines.
‘Where are you going?’ asked a suited man with a scar and an Oxford accent.
‘Mongolia,’ we replied, as if we were going to the shops.
The official transpired to be the section administrator. Power glimmered in his eyes. He spoke slowly and deliberately and repeated each of our answers with careful precision.
‘Mongolia,’ he nodded inquisitively. ‘You are not carrying any alcohol or cigarettes, are you?’
‘No,’ we lied, in symphony.
The official had the kind of eye that could open an oyster at fifty paces. He ordered us out of the car and pulled down the front seat. I’ll never forget the horrible jangle of two bottles of Romanian vodka.
‘Arrest, arrest, arrest!’ he repeated loudly.
Suddenly I had a vision of the beach at Cadiz. Two guards with truncheons shuffled nervously but didn’t move. Roberto and I looked for a moment like we’d just caught a glimpse of the White Witch in Narnia. The official looked me squarely in the eye, raised one eyebrow and said:
‘You English. I thought that you were supposed to have a sense of humour.’
The Mongol Rally generated this story and a hundred more. As we passed through country after county we remembered that people were people – most good, some bad. We were offered food, beds, mechanical assistance, maps, translators, alcohol and wives. For a short month we became celebrities, signing autographs and holding babies wherever we went. Nowhere to the east of Budapest had ever seen anything as magical as a mini before and everyone was eager to have their moment with the ‘Mr. Beena Machina.’
Mabel’s breakdowns grew more frequent and the one she suffered in the Uzbek city of Samarkand was near terminal. Luckily her shattered driveshaft was repaired against the odds by an inspired mechanic in an old, Soviet aircraft factory. With no brakes and a set of wheelbarrow tyres, we struggled on for another 2,500 miles towards Mongolia, by my calculation narrowly avoiding nasty scrapes on about four occasions. Then, on the edge of a bear-infested wood in eastern Siberia, she broke for the final time. On a misty morning we abandoned her. Ten minutes before we left a travelling man took my guitar and played a wistful lament.
Four days later we stepped off the Trans-Siberian Express at the station in Ulan Batar. It was cloudy and warm; the streets were strangely quiet; the faces around us were different. At Dave’s Bar, Roberto and I had a cold beer. We were filthy, unshaven and jaded. Spain seemed a distant place. We had no idea how or when we were going to get back. I sipped on my beer and pondered. I thought about Madrid; about flights; about Mongolia; about the Argentinean girl with the dark eyes and the musical name. How to get home?
It was about the best problem a man could ever ever have.
Filed under: Spain, Travel | Tagged: Mongol Minis, mongol rally, mongol rally 2006 | Leave a Comment »
St George’s Day
Happy St George's Weekend by xerones
image credit: xerones on Flickr
April the twenty third
All told, 23rd of April is quite a busy date. It’s World Book Day and the anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes and Shakespeare. If you agree with Isaac Newton it is the date upon which Jesus Christ was probably crucified and, of course, it’s St George’s Day.
As saints go, George ranks in the very highest bracket. He’s venerated in England, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Aragon and Catalonia as the resident saint. He is also the patron saint of soldiers, chivalry, farmers and fieldworkers. Boy scouts are instructed to direct their thoughts towards him as are butchers and saddlers, and those that suffer from leprosy, plague or syphilis. Some have gone as far to claim that the Caucasian state Georgia actually derives its name from St. George, although, at closer inspection, the name probably stems from their word for farmer.
The man himself remains something of an enigma. Popular legend has him as a thorn in the side of Roman Emperor Diocletian, a favourite villain of the later Christian scribes. A pious man of noble birth he rose to the lofty position of a Roman cavalry officer before being captured and thrown into prison for his refusal to follow Diocletian’s orders and thereby persecuting his fellow Christians.
As the centuries rolled by, the cult of St George grew. Various anecdotes and colourful details were woven into his life story: tales that he had been tortured by the Romans before being executed and resurrected as many as three times swam through Dark Age folklore. One particularly imaginative fifth century scribe named Theodotus, claimed that St George was the stoic recipient of seven long years of torture, a worst moments of which he details here:
All stirring stuff, I’m sure you’d agree, and throughout the Dark Ages George saw his reputation explode into a hailstorm of myth and legend. Indeed, the clamour for a scrap of his legacy was well in evidence by the 8th Century when, it was claimed, that there were at least five of his heads in existence – one of which was the prized trophy of Pope Zacharias who had ‘amazed and delighted the credulous denizens of Rome by ‘finding’ a head of St George in the decaying Lateran palace.’
Later on one particularly vivid legend gained great and lasting popularity. It told of how St George, astride an ivory white horse, had slain a fire-spitting dragon to protect his people. The legend fitted perfectly with the image that Christians sought – and when an account of the escapade was published in written form in Legenda Santorum, an early book that chronicled the lives of saints, Saint George achieved lasting fame.
In England St George remained a national celebrity well into the Middle Ages. And it’s telling that in his moment of most dreadful peril on the fields of Agincourt, Shakespeare reached for the legacy of Saint George to inspire an English victory, giving King Henry V the immortal lines:
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An interesting antidote to all of this excitement comes from Edward Gibbon in his clean cut classic, The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire. He claimed that if there ever was such a character as St George, then he was probably a 4th century bishop named George of Cappadocia. Far from being a valiant Christian tearaway, this George lived the most base of existences. He began his life as a self-motivated cloth worker from southern Turkey who rose to prominence by stealth and due, in the main, to his luck to have landed a lucrative contract supplying the Roman Army with bacon. He ended his life not brave and martyred, but cruel and avaricious, Gibbon wrote:
Whatever the truth, whether he was a bone fide dragon slayer or corrupt pork salesman, Saint George became one of the most celebrated figures in Christian history. Today he retains a formidable presence across Iberia where St. George’s Day is celebrated with national holidays in Portugal, Aragon and Catalonia. In Barcelona you can find a particularly vibrant tradition.
On the morning of the 23rd April, street hucksters appear at the entrances to metro stations and makeshift stalls are swiftly assembled, lining the long stretch of La Rambla. Couples stroll along the streets in the spring sunshine, searching for a gift for one another. Tradition dictates that the men should buy their girlfriend or wife a red rose, whilst she would present him with a book in return. In a country fond of overt and spectacular cultural displays, there is something subtle and appealing about the Catalan celebration of La Diada de Sant Jordi.
A strange curiosity is that the English barely celebrate St. George’s Day at all. Most people treat the day with cool reserve and, for the most part, it passes without so much as the shy squeak of a spinster’s fart. When the Daily Mail, a newspaper so right wing that it makes Hitler look like a liberal, attempted to whip up national sentiment in 2006 by claiming that St George’s Day was on the verge of being scrapped it failed to make an impression at all. It appears that the English seem to have lost their passion for their patron saint.
If it’s a problem, then it can only be solved by herding up all the people back home and getting Ryan Air to fly them over to Barcelona for the day. An odd move perhaps, but it’s probably the best way of getting us all to rediscover our cultural heritage.
Filed under: Comment, Spain | Tagged: bacon salesman, catalonia, cervantes, england, Shakespeare, st georeges day, world book day | 1 Comment »