Hum Along

The mornings are too cold, and dark. The sun doesn’t rise until about 9am and the heat from it doesn’t seep through until about midday, so beautiful as our location is we need to begin heading south, seriously south. But an inexplicable intrigue draws us first to Santiago de Compostela, the great Catholic pilgrim destination. And thank god for intrigue… or was it a calling from a higher power?

What a city! The best by far on our little journey, the stunning medieval town, centred on the magnificent cathedral is fully in tact yet it operates as a thriving, living, bohemian city overflowing with cafes, bars, restaurants and the sense that there’s stuff happening here, stuff we want to know about. Only our meagre budget forced us to retreat to our van before an evening of pinxtos and cañas blew an irreparable hole in our budget.

Stopping off the next lunch time in Afife for an unsatisfactory bumpy, high tide surf before pushing further south into Portugal coming to rest in the tourist town of Mira.

It’s surprising how busy one’s days are in this transient life, driving, blogging, photographing, finding camp spots, surf spots, food, toilets, water and the occasoional wash. The time and space, to reflect, contemplate and work on the various projects I have in mind has hardly materialised so far, but recently I have noticed a subtle background hum of unease sitting beneath the chatter of my mind. My initial reaction on noticing this just-perceptible anxiety was of disappointment and a sense of unfairness. Leaving the maelstrom of work and life at home, with the 101 things to do in a day which will only allow 74 to be done, was an attempt to leave such feelings behind. But then I realised three things.
The fact that I can notice this ‘hum’, like feeling a distant generator vibrate, is due to some time and space opening in my life allowing me to observe the phenomena. Since deciding to do this trip the level of activity-induced adrenaline to make it happen has been so high and stress- producing that I couldn’t even detect what was going on within me. The unease is a positive sign of slowing down.
Noticing this ‘hum’ is to be distinct from it. Being distant enough from it to observe it is proof that this unease is not actually ME. At overly-busy and stressful times I don’t notice it because I am consumed by it. This mind-made anxiety is just that, mind-made and is not the deeper, inner me.
Time in the water quells the hum. There’s no dwelling on past events, now worry about the the things I ‘have’ to do in the future. The generator, splutters out of fuel and stops for a while as I am content with the hear and now.

Onwards and inwards.

Time and Space (pictures)

Time and Space

Over a week and probably 1000 miles have passed since my last rambling, time which has seen Spain, my first published piece in the Guardian and my birthday come and go. After Zarautz we swung by San Sebastian to find it was (pretty much) closed for winter, and then we hoofed it across the top of Spain, speeding by Mundaka, Rodiles and other world-class waves as the drizzle descended appearing to take the swell with it. Overnighting in a damp Tapia de Caseirega(??) we crossed into the wilder Atlantic outpost of Galicia, a land more soulful for the lack of European Union ‘cleansing’ funding which has seemed to over-sanitise Northern Spain into a land of newbuild bungalows and grandiose yet empty motorways and viaducts.

The rugged, ragged Northern coastline was gratifyingly reminiscent of other Celtic bastions, Cornwall and Brittany, similarly ravaged as they are by the vigor of the North Atlantic Ocean. We settled in bay near the village of Pantin for a couple of cloudless days surfing the amazingly clear waters, lush with seaweed so green you could almost hear it singing the joys of life and spending the evenings in a secluded, almost separate section of beach at the eastern end watching the sun set whilst drinking wine and plotting the next chapters of our lives. On the third day the swell rose with the wind, closing out across the bay with sonic-booms that shook the very suspension of our Neil so we pushed on further to the highly recommended Razo further west. The expanse of open beach didn’t take kindly to the north-easterly wind and the town’s caretaker had already locked up for the season so we carried on to Galicia’s west coast heading for a secret camp-spot shared with us by a friendly Austrian couple a way back down the trail. As evening approached a mediterranean mirage literally stopped us in our tracks, we found a campsite and wandered down through pine trees to a soft white sand beach lapped by a gentle turquoise sea. This gentle landscape seemed incongruous to our rugged Atlantic coast journey and provided welcome respite. This coastline is riven with fjord like Rias, the interiors of which are protected from the harsher ocean borne elements. As we drove South hugging the coast the following day, rounding the headland marking the entrance to Ria de Muros y Noia brought us back to an Atlantic coastline and my all important waves. The dropping swell left waves with enough punch to have some fun and enjoy sharing the squeaky clean Galician waters with a pod of 30 or 40 dolphins racing, leaping and gamboling down the long Praia Furnas to the delight of the much smaller pod of surfers.

Driving back from the Atlantic to the Med we found our dingly dell, a small pine-wood bound clearing behind the dunes on an empty, but alas unsurfable, white sand beach. The next morning, my birthday, we arrived early at Noia market and enjoyed the hubbub of buying fresh caught red mullet, squid & prawns and local sweet delicacies from the bakery before spending a long, languid sunny day in the privacy of our glade decorating our camp, and preparing a bonfire fueled feast atop the dunes soundtracked by beautiful music spanning the genres. As much pleasure was gained in the preparation as the event yet the drunken, gluttonous sunset revelry that resulted aptly concluded a truly magical day. Thankyou Sofie. x

Timing

Turquoise turned to jade green which merged with a deeper grey-blue sliding into seafoam green fragmenting into golden yellow, duck-egg blue and a cool fathomless green, Pantone numbers swimming round my head as the eternal dance progresses as light particles penetrate the pulsating water. Mesmerised yet mindful of my locale I keep an eye on the horizon for the tell-tale darky, inky smears which bleed from the horizon warning of approaching rogue sets. As I scrambled down the rocky hillside from our campsite the beckoning, shimmering waves rolling in to the wide sandy bay were unruffled by wind and peeling left and right from several distinct peaks yet as I paddled out I realised the distance from which I had originally been bewitched was deceiving. These waves were bigger than anticipated, probably four to five feet, and powerful. On the outer rim of limited capability and experience, but if you time your paddle out with the lulls between waves and sit just seaward of their breaking point waiting for your moment then it’s no problem… except, that is, for those sly sets of waves which emerge at irregular, unpredictable intervals a foot or two bigger and harnessing even more of the latent storm energy than their more disciplined cousins.

As these six, maybe seven, foot waves, with faces soaring almost 12 feet above the prone surfer, pitch beyond vertical and the seething apex is launched out beyond the face the explosion as the two water masses collide impacts on all of my senses combining to produce a solitary survival emotion - fear. At the first signs of these deliquent undulations the skirmish begins. I paddle toward the horizon hoping that my timing is fortunate and I manage to scrabble over the back of the beasts traveling in packs of 4 or 5 increasing in size. To be caught just inside the breaking wave with it’s tumbling, towering, impenetrable wall of whitewater is to be spun and tumbled underwater, limbs flayed in unfeasible directions like a rag-doll until it releases it’s grip allowing you to surface 30 yards back toward shore gasping for air. Worse still is to get the timing absolutely, utterly wrong and for the pitching lip of the wave to smash onto you at the point of impact adding a wind-ing body blow to the mix….. But sometimes, and to be fair to myself more often now than not, the timing of the paddle out combines, to quote Hansen, with “Pace, power & technique” and I dive the nose of the board under the water a few feet before the lip crashes down, I dig deep enough with all the might I can muster to get under the impact turbulence and the centrifugal forces which are pitching the lip forward work in my favour and suck me under the wave and out of the back, to momentary safety before the next wave approaches…

The next few days the ferocity of the ocean subsided but we stayed on in Zarautz in the Basque region of Spain and Sofie and I played in the calmer waters together and enjoying the warm, still evenings and the awesome widescreen sky’s created as the ocean meets the mountains.

Poor old Neil

Before leaving Gers we squeezed a Hatha session in, breakfasted then saddled & watered Neil and headed South to the Pyrenees. It’s a momentous day today, we threw caution to the wind and had our first non-van dining experience as we ordered Steak Frites in Eauze town square as we broke the journey toward Oleron in the western Pyrenees.
Arriving late we found a place to park by an Auberge on the side of a mountain and had a cowbell-symphony accompaniment to our omelette making.

We woke with the light and a striking reminder of our location as we drew the curtains back and the Pyrenees slid into view. The ever-changing bedroom window view that defines campervan life is a joy to behold. We’ve enjoyed dunes, ocean, forest, mountains, panoramic countryside vistas, cornfields, widescreen epics and errr…. carparks.

We gathered provisions in the local village and drove up the valley to Borce, the home of the last few remaining wild Pyreneean bears. Parking by the church we walked up winding tracks and found a picnic spot looking up the valley and shared a couple of hours lunching and snoozing with some mountain eagles in the heat of the sun.

After lunch we headed west again ambling towards the Atlantic once more as the promise of waves were on the Magic Seaweed horizon. The route we took was much steeper, treacherous and breathtaking than we had imagined, and the sharp, winding inclines were almost more than poor Neil could take. Dragging his weary frame over these peaks left him hot, bothered and smelling unwell. I can’t quite put my finger on it but the burning, metallic smell reeks of worry.

Our unplanned destination that evening, St Jean pied-de-port, was aptly an ancient pilgrims rest and recuperation site and we followed tradition and recharged in a carpark on the outskirts of town throwing caution beyond the wind this time as we purchased two alcoholic beverages in the towns hostelries, another first for this trip!