Threads: Kimberley, Grahamstown and Santarem

I grew up in Kimberley - a city in the middle of the Karoo with hot summers and cold winter nights.  Most of my social life revolved around the English Baptist church where we spent a great deal of time on Fridays and Sundays.

Of course the attraction of this social life involved the normal dynamics of teenagers hanging out together and we had a group of friends that we cultivated over those years and then lost touch with once we all moved on.  When Facebook exploded onto the scene in the early 2000's I reconnected with a few of them even though our lives were far apart and we had evolved into people in some ways quite different from those young kids teasing and joking with each other at church gatherings.

Among these friends were two attractive girls with infectious laughs whose parents were Portuguese.  Their mother who was very direct, taught me how to greet people in Portuguese when I visited them a few times at their home.  I've been using those few words quite a bit since we made the trip to Portugal this month.

I had reconnected briefly with both of them when we were living in Grahamstown about 8 years after I left Kimberley and then lost touch again when we moved to the USA 15 years later.  At some point I learned that Armanda, the younger of the two, had moved to Portugal.  So before we left for Portugal I made contact with her through her sister-in-law, because neither of them are on Facebook and Anne and I asked if we could add a stop to visit her on our way down from Porto to the Algarve.

But first we spent a total of 8 days in Porto, taking time to visit the center of the city twice - the first I have written about in a previous post. 

The second trip was to see a famous bookshop that had been a frequent stop for J.K. Rowling when she had taught English in Porto years before she wrote the Harry Potter books.  The bookshop is described as the most beautiful in the world and it has a reputation for being the inspiration for some of the settings described in the Harry Potter books.  On any given day there are lines of people waiting to go inside for an Instagram moment.

You can get a ticket to visit online for 5 Euros but it can be used against a book purchase so entrance ends up being free if you buy a book.

The entrance to the bookshop has beautiful wood panels and elaborate carved stairs curving up to the upper floor.  Despite the crowds, we were able to make our way through the shop and Anne bought a couple of books while I photographed the interior.

A large silver display booth houses a framed letter from a 19 year old Robert Zimmerman (Bob Dylan) to a woman named Barbara describing a dream he had had about her.  It turns out that the bookshop paid over half a million dollars (which was more than double the expected price) to win the collection of 42 letters at an auction in the USA.

Our feelings about Porto were a little colored by Anne getting sick and the fact that it rained for most of the time in an AirBnb that appears to be less than waterproof but we did have a few sunny days at the tail end and were able to walk daily along the long beach of Matosinhos (pronounced Mah-tuzi-nush).

The waves were pretty wild, breaking quite a bit further out than those we'd seen on the south coast of Mexico.  There was lots of evidence of surf schools and it seems like a beach very well suited to that.

A walled structure at one end of the beach is a castle called Castelo do Queijo which is thought to have been built by the Celtic tribe called the Draganes who arrived in the 6th century.  Porto has emblems showing a dragon in various places and their football (soccer) team is nicknamed Dragōes probably after these original Celts.

The view of the beach from near this structure is impressive and we spent an hour walking there and watching the waves on our second last day.

The Friday I took a day off work because Armanda and her husband had invited us to stay with them and I figured it would be pretty rude to spend that night working.  We caught a train from Porto to Santarem - a two and a half hour trip through some countryside that reminded us of the west coast of South Africa and of the countryside outside of San Franciso.

We pulled into the small station and were picked up by Armanda and her husband Luis, and taken to their home for lunch and some conversation before heading out for a walk around the town.  Armanda has not changed at all, other than the greying of her hair, and it amazes me how easily we reconnect with people we haven't seen for years - so much common ground and history that ties us together.  They are such a lovely couple.

We took a walk through the town and there was a sense of tranquillity there.

I suspect some of this is problematic because, like many small towns in Portugal, it is suffering from a drain of young people who are attracted to working in the cities.  They have as their pick more or less any city in Europe as long as they can overcome any language barriers.

So, in addition to the somewhat empty streets there were a few that had evidence of many shops that had closed down and were shuttered.

The walk took us past a few old buildings and into a few beautiful cathedrals to a small park with stone walled structures called Portas do Sol (doors of the sun) 

which look out over the river Teju (Tagus in English) which is the main river of Portugal - originating in Spain and providing the wide deep river that the Romans used to establish the port of Lisbon.

There is a building called the Torre das Cabaças because it has eight calabashes (gourds) mounted on the tower - local lore has these as emblems of displeasure by the king who reputedly did not like the structure when he saw it but the Wikipedia entry lists these gourds as amplifiers of the tower's warning bells.

On our way back we stopped at a really old Gothic cathedral where a young man gave us an impromptu tour. He was so earnest and engaging that I called Anne into the church just to listen to him. 

Outside on a wall opposite the cathedral we saw some very stylized graffiti which appeared to be a comment on the Portuguese colonization of Brazil. 

We sat at a small coffee house in the evening near the main cathedral.  Lots of young people nearby were playing cards and having a great evening.

Portugal and the town of Santarem experienced major political upheaval in the mid-70s during the Portugal Carnation revolution.  It was a military coup organized by left-leaning military leaders who led the country to democracy and hastened the end of the colonial wars that Portugal was fighting.  Luis experienced this first-hand as a young 14-year old, with factions in a popular resistance that emerged during the revolution.  He has stories about some tense moments with protestors in the town and near his house.

These threads reach back to Kimberley too, though.  In the mid-70s a teenager came to our church after his family was exiled from Portugal.  They had left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and ended up in Kimberly.  The fall of the dictatorship in Portugal and the new left-wing government had taken steps to withdraw from their colonial wars in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau.  We became friends and have lost touch - but we used to hang out with Armanda and her sister as well.

The rest of the weekend was a whirlwind of conversations about work and politics and vacations, interspersed with trips, one to a Knights Templar castle inland from us - which the King of Portugal had protected when their order came under threat for being too powerful by renaming them the "Order of Christ".   

He appreciated the protection that they were giving to areas of his domain.

The castle is built on an island in a river, giving it a natural moat, and looks imposing from the viewpoints on either side.

We visited a quaint town on a hill with a beautiful cathedral

and then a stop at a huge dam that now holds back the river Teju further upstream, reducing the number of floods near the town of Santarem.

Luis and Armanda drove us to Lisbon on the Sunday with a detour to the walled city of Obidos, an ancient walled city that was having a chocolate festival.

Luis navigated the narrow streets and found us parking on the far side of the city from which we walked to an entrance and then down one of the main streets with some beautiful stores,

some selling the famous cherry liqueur Ginginha (or Ginja).  

The city is build on an original Roman settlement and was taken by the Moors in 713.

They built fortifications and the city was retaken by the first king of Portugal where legend has it that a single knight was responsible for breaching the walls to aid the conquest of the city in 1148. 

We climbed up to the walls and the teenager in me was imagining what it took to defend a fortification like this. 

The passage along the top of the wall had a perilous drop behind it and I imagine invaders who managed to get onto the wall were encouraged by many hands to keep going and fall to serious injury below.

The drive to Lisbon featured similarly familiar countryside, rolling hills and green fields.  We stopped at a beautiful lookout over the ocean and a beach on the way down to Lisbon.

First looks of the city of Lisbon revealed tall, tightly compacted apartment buildings.  We spent a night in Lisbon before our train ride to the Southern Coast.

Armanda taught Jessica in Sunday School in Grahamstown and has a photograph that Jess took to her with "love Jessica" on the back written in her 6 year old hand with a green felt-tipped pen.   

It was wonderful to pull on the threads that joined us through all of those years and places.

First glimpse , Portugal

The week of the 6th of March saw major industrial action in France, bringing the center of Paris to a standstill on the Monday and Tuesday.  Our flight to Portugal on KLM was scheduled with a layover in Paris because of their partnership with Air France and we got an email letting us know that if we liked we could re-book on a different flight for no change fee.

Anne had picked a Tuesday evening flight because the ticket prices were half that of weekend flights.  Our thinking was that with the 5 hour time difference I'd be able work in the airport on Tuesday and we'd get to our AirBnb before my next day's work started (1pm in the afternoon).  Rebooking turned out to be out of the question because although the change fees were waived, the tickets were double what we had paid and KLM then allowed us to check in for the scheduled flight so we were going to take our chances.

We were also told that JFK was going to have many delays so we should be at the airport four hours before our 5:30pm flight.  I had to take a couple of meetings while going through customs and again at the gate, which was problematic.  Taking a vacation day to do this was an option but I think all considered I was able to put in a solid day's work outside of the disrupted meetings.

Anne had a cold that she'd picked up in Zicatela (symptoms started in Mexico) but it wasn't more than a mild annoyance and we have both been wearing masks in public transport so we felt comfortable about traveling anyway.

It was impossible to sleep on the flight - the seats are fairly close together and the people in front of us decided to lower their seat-backs which made it really hard to go to the bathroom without bumping their seats several times on the way out and back which annoyed them a bit... but not as much as I was annoyed about the seat being in my face all the way to France.  I looked around and most of the flight had kept their seats upright which I think is polite practice for most flyers.

We landed in France really early and I think because our flight was a connection we transitioned through Schengen customs and to our connection without any delays.  The flight to Porto - our next destination in Portugal - was delayed by about 30 minutes.  Our pilot informed us that it was due to the strikes but it was far better than getting stuck in Paris.

We were in our AirBnb by about 1pm - an hour before my day started but I needed to get 90min sleep to keep me sane for the day.

We have been doing this 90 min ritual for a few years of visiting our daughters in England.  With little sleep on the plane we figure that a shower and one REM sleep cycle will get us enough gas in the tank to last until the regular bed-time of the country we are visiting.  It works well and we've been able to slot into the new time zone fairly easily.

On Tuesday evening Anne had a tele-consult with a doctor in Romania of all places because the cold had gone to her chest and was affecting her breathing.  The doctor sent her a pdf prescription for medicines to treat her asthma and infection which I was able to fill at the pharmacy around the corner from the AirBnb.  The medicines cost a fraction of what we pay out of pocket for them, after medical insurance, in the USA.

That night Anne couldn't sleep because she had a fever and the chest infection had caused a major asthma attack.  I was oblivious to this and she didn't wake me, so when I did wake up at about 10am she was really struggling to breathe.  She said that we needed to find an emergency room.

The Uber came quickly and I told the driver: "Não falo português" which google translate had told me means "I don't speak Portuguese".  The driver was very chatty and went on and on in Portuguese I think telling us how many Uber drivers there are in Porto and how you long you wait depending on where the driver is.  I think he was just trying to be friendly but we could only guess what he was saying.

Hospital waiting room (Anne's photo)

Despite being a Latin language and similar to French and Spanish the pronunciation rules for Portuguese are so different that knowing some Spanish is pretty useless.  Spanish is spelled phonetically with few variations on how vowels and consonants are pronounced.  Portuguese has rules for how some letters are pronounced depending on where in the word they are, whether they are the last letter of a syllable and depending on the letters that follow them (or not).

I made a tactical error of not listening to Anne while the Uber driver was jabbering.  She was saying - "to the emergency room" as we went past the sign "Emergency Room" and we ended up getting dropped at the general admissions which forced Anne to walk down a hill and across a parking lot without being able to breathe.  Later I asked her if this was as bad as when I formatted her C: drive and lost all her email and lesson plans in 1989.  She admitted that 1989 was much worse.

We spent the whole day in 4 different waiting rooms - seeing the first doctor within 3 hours of arriving and then getting some medication that made her feel much more comfortable within 30 minutes.  After that we were shuffled to X-Ray, blood-work and an ECG and then waiting till 5:30pm before seeing a second doctor. 

The COVID tests were negative (we did two before we left for the hospital and they did one) and the diagnosis was acute asthma triggered by the infection.

The most amazing thing about all of this was that as non-residents we had to pay the full price for the day's treatments and diagnostics.  The final total came to roughly what I owed once our medical insurance had paid their portion of my last 15-minute annual dermatological skin exam in the USA.

The medicine kicked in overnight and Anne was breathing comfortably enough on the Saturday for us to take the Metro into Porto itself for some sightseeing.

A view from the Metro stop in Matosinhos, near Porto

It was overcast and bleak but the city is very quaint with narrow streets and tall multi-colored apartments.  The city is build on a river not very far from the sea (our AirBnb is right near the beach on the outskirts of the city).

We walked down one of the narrow streets towards the water.

Street musicians.

Wall art.

And beautiful mosaic tiles in a station

and near the river bank.

We decided to pay for the rather expensive boat ride on the river to see the city from the water.

What was astonishing was the number of river frontage buildings that are abandoned and run down.  We read an article describing how Portugal suffered from the housing bubble bursting, leaving people with properties that they couldn't afford.  I have also read that there are laws in Portugal about renovations and inherited properties that make them too expensive to manage.  Added to that are the difficulties in managing rental tenants, often resulting in the properties being left to disintegrate rather than pouring money into them.

We ended our Saturday with a ride in a little scooter - what we called a "Tuk-tuk" in Guatemala - driven by a man from Chile who agreed that Portuguese is hard.  He said that in Brazil it is easier to understand the Portuguese but that the European Portuguese pronunciation was really difficult.

I'm determined to learn how to greet and how to order food in Portuguese - also how to apologize, which it turns our is very important in a country where you know nothing.

Closing a chapter

We had one last tranquil week in Mexico and a rude awakening during our layover in New York city that closed the chapter on our adventures in Central America.

We spent our second week in Zicatela with an already established daily routine that included trips to one or other of the local restaurants and a late afternoon trip to one of the beaches. 

Anne started referring to the several young baristas and waitresses that I struck up conversations with in Spanish as "your girls" - a reference to how charmed I was by them.  At one coffee shop in particular there was a lovely young girl who was happy to correct my Spanish and suggest ways to greet her, place orders and promise to return soon.

Our casual Spanish conversation is improving and I’m almost at the point where I’ll be able to say that my Spanish is as good as my Afrikaans.  As I'm writing this I'm imagining my friend Kees saying loudly “and that’s not saying much!”

Kees and his family are South African friends we met in 2001 after we had been in the USA for about 9 months and he is off on his own journey right now with an RV, his destinations unfolding a little like ours, excepting his wheels never leave the tarmac.  He has also been documenting his travels.

We have more or less been insisting to our waiters that we’d like to use Spanish where possible.  The waiters in Zicatela and La Punta come from all over the world and all speak fluent Spanish after spending a few months at the coast. 

A French girl told us that she came to Puerto Escondido for a 5 day holiday two years before and had never left and an Italian waiter insisted we try his home-made pesto to remind us of Italy when he heard we'd visited Florence.

A sweet Argentinian girl (another one of “mis chicas” according to Anne) said “Oh I remember you!  En Español!” when we stopped by for the second time and passed us a menu in Spanish as she led us to our table.

At one lunch in a quiet restaurant near our AirBnb  I asked the waiter if the woman behind the counter in the kitchen was his mother.  He is young, perhaps early twenties and we discovered the restaurant (in retrospect this is probably true of many of them) was run by his mom and his two brothers and when I asked where his dad was, he shrugged matter of factly and said "who knows?"

Our beach trips - after my workday ended or on weekend days - continued to feature crazy big waves on most days and mostly vain attempts on my part to body surf. 

I did catch a few good waves but invariably got tumbled and ended up with a pile of sand in my hair.

There is a portion of the main beach that has a rocky outcrop in the ocean close to the beach and has slightly less violent waves.  Anne took to going there in the early afternoons because of the flocks of pelicans that hovered and dove into the sea there.  She called it Pelican Beach.  

Really close to Pelican Beach is a lookout where on the Saturday we saw a girl and her family dressed up beautifully for the young girl's quinceañera.  Turning 15 is a huge deal for young girls in Central America and there are usually large parties to celebrate the right of passage into womanhood.  The young girl wore a peach colored dress and her mother wore a head-dress that reminded us of Frida Kahlo's. 

I remembered that at the Frida Kahlo museum they mentioned that she had adopted some of the traditional clothing and headdresses of the Tehuana in the Oaxaca region because this was where her mother was from.

 

Our sunsets on the beach also came with some pretty spectacular surfing and wake board action which were amazing to watch.

The beach had this sign as you enter that said “no smoking” multiple times in multiple languages but was largely ignored.  We usually had to navigate to a spot closest to the water to allow the sea breeze to  reduce the chance of cigarette smoke triggering Anne's asthma.

 

Since we’d given up the scooter, our taxi rides were filled with conversations with the drivers and a chance to repeat a set of common topics.  Where are you from?  How long did you live there? Where are you going next?  Do you have children?  All of which offer a wealth of phrases to practice and to listen to how the taxi drivers phrased things.

At the end of our 11th week in Central America we headed back to Mexico for one day.   We spent the day visiting Nick and the small coffee shop near him where we were greeted warmly.  We also met his girlfriend from Colombia who speaks a little English. 

She loved hearing some of our family anecdotes told in halting Spanish.

The trip to New York involved an Uber ride from JFK airport.  The driver was from Venezuela and apologized at the start that her English was weak so we ended up with the same pattern of questions and phrases in Spanish that we had practiced in Mexico for the hour long trip to Manhattan.  She was quite interested in the composition of people and languages of South Africa and complemented us on what she considered unaccented Spanish. 

Our hotel in New York was in the evocative Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan, just a few blocks from Times Square.  

A restaurant in Hell's Kitchen

 We met Matt, who took the train trip from New Haven especially to meet us and his girlfriend joined us at an Indian restaurant for a surprisingly affordable meal on the Sunday evening.  We were so engrossed in our conversation with them that we forgot to take a photo of all of us.

 

On the Monday evening after work we headed out to find a clothing store.  I am traveling really light and my jeans were showing signs of falling apart so we had decided to find a new pair and to look for some new shoes for Anne because her shoes had suffered the same fate as my jeans.

We have been to New York about 5 times altogether and Times Square is one of the places we've always visited.  This time around, though, we really had no intention of going there but our route to the nearest Levi store went right through it so we had no choice. 

If you've never visited there you should know that it is always teaming with people and has probably the most expensive restaurants in the country.  

 

It was loud as usual and had a bunch of crazy costumed characters who we deftly avoided only to be interrupted by a man with the question “do you have a minute?”  It was innocent enough and our guard was down so we politely replied that we didn't - to which he, with a broad disarming grin replied "it’s because I’m black isn’t it?" which made us both laugh.  "No, it’s not…"

He then asked where we were from and Anne said "South Africa" to which he replied: "Well then, you’re blacker than me!" which was pretty funny too.

I got sidelined by what appeared to be his friend who passed me a small CD sized sleeve with a marketing card in it and QR codes while he did the same for Anne. 

He said that he and his mates were in a band and were promoting their tour.  He asked my name and then invented a gansta slag nickname for me "T-smooth" which wasn't too original (Anne was given the nickname "A-sexy") and then dropped the question of whether we were going to be able to help them with a donation.

 

I'll claim that our recent visits to Central America, where we didn't really experience any "hard sells" lulled us into complacency and we ended up donating to "their band" at which point they revealed that they were in different bands!  Who would have thought!  One even offered to bring over a credit card machine for a donation which left me gasping.

Anne stopped donating after handing out 3 bills and we made our way out of the group which was now 5 people, two of them complaining rather aggressively that they were being short-changed.

As we walked away I said to Anne “did we just get fleeced?”  She was unfazed.  “We did!”  But I think we were also a little impressed at how it had gone down.  “Damn we were so naive, but they were so entertaining!”

One the way home we found a little Italian restaurant off a side road. Also affordable and with a server from Uruguay and a waitress from Kazakhstan.

On the way home a older guy with a white cane tried to strike up a conversation near our hotel in Hells Kitchen and we brushed him off rather rudely.  We had learned our lesson.