Tales of a travel addict
PARENTAL ARMS ARE being twisted by post-Leaving Cert students this weekend – looking for the cost of a holiday as a reward for good results, or consolation for disappointment. So much has already been spent on them, and yet their fortnight in Ayia Napa, Ibiza, or off inter-railing might prove one of the most profound experiences of all.
Two weeks after my Leaving Cert results in 1989, I was on the Costa del Sol with four friends, drinking beer for breakfast, scorching myself by the pool and dancing until morning.
We ate badly and drank too much, although my diary notes we did have three excellent home-cooked meals – principally because Domini Kemp was with us.
There was something about the freedom to lounge around in a lobotomised stupor all day and dance all night that seared me – a last moment of irresponsibility between infanthood and senility. But after a few days we grew restless and catching a glimpse of Africa across the Mediterranean was like a Pauline revelation.
The nearest Moroccan town was Tétouan, a name with powerful resonances, because the most important band on the planet at the time, The Stars of Heaven, had a song called The Lights of Tétouan. We, as worthless acolytes who were there every time they played the Baggot Inn or the Underground, realised we had to make pilgrimage there.
And so, we hired 50cc motorbikes and set off at dawn towards the port of Algeciras, but the bikes were mere toys and brought us no further than Marbella before burning out. We caught a bus to the ferry terminal and, as the ship steered us away from the Rock of Gibraltar, I felt an excitement of an intensity one only experiences at that age.
The soulless expanse of concrete silos and corrugated hangers bristling with razor wire was hardly the most romantic first encounter with Africa, but the touts and hawkers harassing us felt thrillingly authentic.
We had been rent from the umbilical cord of all we knew, and in our confusion, biddably allowed one man, Abdul, usher us into his battered old Mercedes and whisk us off through the semi-desert and up towards the Rif mountains through a pageantry of almond and pomegranate orchards in rose and gold.
The sight of simple mud homes and shepherds dressed in djelllabas and burnouses astounded me. It was the first time I had been confronted with the timeless existence that still continues across much of the world and I realised how narrow my understanding of humanity was. This was how whole swathes of humanity live, yet I had never seen anything like it before.
The stalls of fly-carpeted meat, sacks of spices and fruit piled on boards in the cobbled alleys of Tétuoan’s medina were my first experience of what shopping meant for the world outside my tiny Western bubble. I had seen children working looms, streets with open sewers and donkeys used as transport on television, but experiencing them in reality brought home to me the tiny gilded cage I lived in.
No wonder life didn’t make sense. I had been reared in the VIP section of an elite club. We roamed around the souks of cubby-hole shops brimming with teetering piles of salted fish, safety pins and shampoo, until it was time to take the ferry back to reality.
Domini might claim my memories are rose-tinted. She’d want me to remember how we were ripped off by Abdul and his carpet dealing “uncle”, how frightened we were as he sped us off into the unknown and how intimidating the whole day had been. She’d be right. It was a relief to get back to my own world, but I was determined not to let it confine me and to return to these wider expanses as soon as I could.