no 3: Santander to Tenerife (three more sleeps till the ship to Brazil!)

This should carry on neatly from my first blog, posted a few days ago.... 

I arrived in Santander after the second night on the ferry and was met by my lovely friend Kate who I’ve known since we were in our 20s and who’s lived in Cantabria for many years.  (there's a very long story about how she ended up there,  which I was reminded the other day was down to a tenuous set of events which all started with me meeting Alfonso Garcia Oliva, a Spanish bagpipe player and musical instrument maker, at a traditional folk event in Geneva in 1986 - he was living with his Swiss then girlfriend Sylvie at the time . Kate met her Spanish former partner Marcos through this connection with Alfonso, and ended up living in Spain and having a long musical career there...)   

On the way back to Kate's we  went for a walk on the most gorgeous beach at Liencres, 

before arriving at her house. She’s actually sold her lovely house  where she's lived for years, and is having a bungalow built not far from her current home in  – people our age have various things wrong with our knees and hips, and she’s getting this done while she still can.  Her daughter  Lara (who I’ve known since she was tiny) is now a qualified architect and has done the plans – it’s pretty spectacular and includes an extra  little house across the garden for Lara to live in.

Kate then had to go to work (she teaches English now, but still does the occasional music gig) and she’d arranged for me to meet up with Madi and Manu, other old friends from our 20s.  Madi and Kate had a wonderful close harmony singing trio with Sylvie when she came to live in Spain for a bit....   I've just found some lovely pix from the 80s of Kate, Sylvie and Alfonso in this article  by Basque musician Gorka Hermosa about the  folk revival in Cantabria (see p.34) - we were all so young! 

Manu had cooked the most beautiful simple food, pasta with mushrooms he’d foraged and vegetables he’d grown...   Kate and another friend, Olga, arrived after lunch, and we sat in the sun and drank tea and chatted about how all of us had a Lancaster connection... Madi and Kate had both studied at Lancaster uni, I was living in Lancaster now, and Olga had come over for 6 months a few years ago to stay in Lancaster Cohousing, where I've been living for the past 10 years)..... 

kate, me and Olga, 2023

Olga at Lancaster Cohousing, 2014, with one of our neighbours

Just as we were leaving, Manu’s son Aetor arrived – who looked uncannily like Manu had looked when we had first met back in the 1980s.  Manu, the former hairy hippy, was now a recently retired headmaster (and had been Kate’s boss) – how we have all grown up!

We slobbed around a bit in Kate’s house then went out again for a drink with Olga. We were going to sit with some Spanish friends, but my Spanish has gone downhill since I’ve been concentrating on Portuguese for this trip to Brazil.  All my ‘thankyous’ come out as Obrigada rather than Gracias... it takes me all my time to work out if I’m trying to say falar, parlar or hablar... and it’s generally much  harder work to speak Spanish now than it was last time i was in Spain. I’m meant to be a linguist – I did a French and Italian degree and have picked up Spanish along the way, but it’s been much harder to revive my Portuguese  this year than it was to learn it for the first time in 2001 when I first went to Brazil.

We had dinner and then Kate drove me back to Santander, where we wandered around a bit near the bus station till we found some other people who were catching the 1 am bus to Madrid, and so Kate felt comfortable leaving me there!  I’d booked a second seat on the bus with the idea that I could spread out, but that proved  rather too hopeful so I just put my sleeping bag on over my clothes and lay back on one of the seats, which tipped back quite a lot.  (Thanks Sarah P for the tip.  And I was VERY grateful for my new blowup neck pillow, which worked much better than my real pillow would have done – many thanks to Tina for triaging my luggage).

Reasonably refreshed after about four and a half hours sleep, we arrived at Madrid airport coach station, and I went into Madrid with a young man from Senegal who was very happy to be able to speak French to me. He was on his way from Bilbao where he'd been working, to the Senegalese embassy to renew his passport and was then moving to the south of Spain where he had a friend, to find work.... I am guessing  that he may well have had ALL HIS STUFF with him, and it was about half the amount of stuff  than I have with me for my year away.  Pretty humbling..... 

Thanks to my neighbour Mirian for telling me about Atocha Station's best kept secret - a tropical garden, tucked away with absolutely no signs or info about it that I could find.... 

So I hung out there for a couple of hours till it was time for my train  - idly reading the reports of the national train strike booked for that day in Spain, and the other reports of how it had been called off..... hmmm! 

The train DID set off, though its platform wasn't announced on the board till ten minutes after it was meant to have set off, which was a bit worrying.  There's a real design fault at the station - once you go through their security barrier, all the seats are UNDERNEATH the information boards, facing in the same direction - so everyone had to keep getting up to check the info... 

After an uneventful train ride to Huelva in the south of Spain - dozing and looking out at the wild countryside, grasslands..... arriving at 2 p.m. and with the ferry not till midnight, I had decided I'd find a cheap Airbnb so I could slob out, nap for a bit, and cook food, rather than sit politely in a cafe trying not to doze for 6 hours.   The hosts were very friendly, I hadn't noticed it was on the 3rd floor but luckily the guy carried my case upstairs for me.... This was definitely one of my good ideas for the journey - £25 well spent.    

You've already seen my sunrise photos from the ferry if you've read my other blog post... 30 hours on the Huelva to Tenerife ferry including two overnights was quite pleasant. It would have been more pleasant with a cabin than sleeping in the business lounge on my new Alpkit blow up mattress and in my new Alpkit sleeping bag despite them being pretty comfortable.  But the cabins were 400 euros supplement on top of the ferry fare - I couldn't bring myself to pay that though patently LOTS of people had.  What I should have known about was to ask a local resident if I could financially contribute to her  cut-price local rate cabin, and use her spare bed!   (I'd made friends with just such a person right at the beginning, but I didn't realise she had a cabin, and she didn't realise that I DIDN'T have one! Follow Rebecca on her new youtube channel '|Vegan Voyage Guide'  and you too can find out about being Vegan in Tenerife, and get a good deal next time you find yourself on the same ferry from Huelva to Tenerife with her). 

I'm staying in the most BEAUTIFUL hostel in the north of the island, about 20 miles from Santa Cruz where we landed.  I got a lift here (I tried to put up a 'lift wanted' sign but apparently it's against the policy of the boat... so at the suggestion of the guy on reception, I approached a few passengers, asking for a lift - and I hit the jackpot on my third one - a programmer who spends winters in his van in Tenerife, and had been planning to come to this area anyway :-) 

The hostel owners provide guests with home grown salad veg, and i've supplemented that with locally grown veg from the very close green supermarket, and eaten the most gorgeous vegetable stews for the past three days. 

Yesterday the hostel recommended a Whale Watching trip at Los Gigantes, about an hour and a half away by bus.... it cost £25, which is the upper limit of what I think is reasonable to pay for an activity just 'for me' - but the guy who gave me a lift to the hostel recommended it too - and I'm SO GLAD that I went!  I sat with some really nice people, we saw whales AND dolphins, and went swimming off the boat in the bay afterwards. HIGHLY recommended.  The company is Maritima Acantilados , the trips are two and a half hours long, they have a couple of glass bottomed sections in the boat so you can see fishy wildlife close up too... a wonderful day out.  

All this was rather spoiled by having had to spend about four hours the night before trying to get rid of a Russian Bot which had hacked into my instagram and posted lots of nonsense about crypto currency... I think I've finally done it now but Instagram still has my wrong birthday.... what a big pain that was.  It took hours because every time I got a code from Instagram, the hackers got in before me and stopped me using it. I think they'd managed to mirror bits of my phone, so I removed Insta and Gmail from my new-to-me google phone and put them back on my old Iphone, which doesn't have a sim card, which feels much safer - and finally i've stopped getting unsolicited security codes arriving in my inbox every five minutes.   

I was having a (very) late lunch in 'my usual cafe' near the hostel, this evening, when the hostel owner texted me about 'a traditional festival' that I should go and see.  And it turns out to be St Andrews Day , weirdly, celebrated here by kids pulling long chains of tin cans around the street and making as much noise as possible!  

Today I've done my very last Halton Mill directors zoom meeting - coming to the end of my UK responsibilities.   I have a little bit of admin still to do, not least being the fact that our friends in Lençóis  are setting up a Hannah Frank art exhibition, which I've just heard will be touring to two other galleries in the Chapada Diamantina area right through from Christmas to Easter! and I have to write some press materials for it.... and Brazilian artist Artur Soar, the son of the same family, arrives in Halton this weekend (train strike permitting) to start a week long residency at the Good Things Collective in Morecambe and to host a 'Meet the Artist' event in Halton.... so though I won't be there, there's a bit of coordination I'm doing for that..... and the Dom, Bruno and the Amazon exhibition is currently up in 3 different places, and will be going to three MORE different places in the New Year..... so I need to make sure everything's in place for that to happen....  (Beki, Susanna, Minna and Mirian are 'on it' and despite all of them having more things going on in their lives than you'd want even without this, they are doing a sterling job at keeping all the plates in the air...)

So hopefully by the time I get to Brazil on 11th December - after the ten day www.nomadcruise.com ship-journey from Santa Cruz to Salvador - I will arrive with nothing hanging over me, open and ready to find out what my next project will be.   I have a completely open mind, a few ideas, accommodation booked till the end of February in Salvador and Lençóis, a 3 week language course to improve my Portuguese set up for January with a view to at least be able to attend some talks and events through the rest of the 6 months I'm allowed to stay in Brazil,  but no firm plans.... 

Watch this space!  

comments welcome below

Fiona xxx