I’ve been back on my old F650 for six weeks and I want to say again how happy I am with the old girl.
I brought her out of her dusty retreat after two years, brightened her up with a new battery, and sailed off down the autobahn to Stuttgart to celebrate my 78th birthday.
My splendid lemon-yellow transcontinental taxi – the F650 I keep parked in Duisburg, which takes me all over Europe
The next day we went further south to Bavaria where I spent the night as the guest of that rare phenomenon, a modest, generous and pleasant multi-millionaire. Roland deserves a big blog all of his own, but he’s a remarkable engineer who built up a tremendous business on his own and then fell in love with the Wild West, which is where I met him of course.
I shall have to come back to him another time.
The next stop was going to be Montpellier, in the south-west of France, where I have old friends, but from Munich it’s a long ride, through Switzerland, so I stopped the first night in Voiron, in the French mountains of Isere.
I’m glad I did, because it’s close to the Carthusian monastery of Grande Chartreuse who make what is probably the most delicious liqueur ever sipped in this vale of tears.
If you’ve never tasted green chartreuse, rush out now and repair the omission. You will thank me.
With the bike running as comfortably as a diesel taxi I arrived, a happy man, in Montpellier where old friends gave me a rapturous welcome.
When you’ve just had a birthday you really need your friends.
I hung around for a few days, until Angel and Teresa from Spain turned up on their 1200 RT and we set off for Madrid.
All of Spain, it seems, is discovering the joys of motorcycling, and so many of them want to read my book that it justified a whole new edition. Angel and Teresa have done a new translation of Jupiter’s Travels, and they did a truly beautiful job.
The book is full of pictures and illustrations and has the size and heft of a bible. We had a date, four days later, to present it at a big bookshop in Madrid, so we had three days to get there.
Those were three fine rides.
First to Girona, where I had been only once so long ago that I had forgotten everything. It’s a beautiful old city, and there was a festival of flowers on. We had to run around a lot to find a hotel, but there were compensations: Huge flower arrangements floating down the river, and a very funny floral “crime scene”, complete with tape and a victim’s body rendered in horticulture.
This was the scene
And here’s the victim
We went to a profoundly authentic bodega where I bought a lot of wonderful red wine called Pais Negre for one euro a pint, highly recommended. Next stop was Zaragossa, 250 miles or so, where I saw many interesting things but can only remember being enthralled by the world’s most fidgety man. And from there over some pretty high passes to Madrid. But first I must tell you about a funny thing that happened outside Girona.
You can read about it here
or you can go on to other stuff.
Ted Conquistador
(Por los que hablan espagnol haz click aqui)
I seem to have made a lot of people laugh in that book shop in Madrid. Perhaps they were laughing at my Spanish. I was there helping to introduce a new translation of Jupiter’s Travels My new friends, Angel Sanz and Teresa Garcia, have teamed up to publish this beautiful new version. The reception promised much success. They plan to translate and publish more of my books soon and I couldn’t be happier.
Ted outside Blanes station
In 1951, when I was struggling to stay alive in Paris, the newspaper I had just started working for shut down. They were generous and gave me three months’ pay in lieu of notice. It wasn’t very much, but it was more than I’d ever had in my life. I decided to take a holiday in Spain. I packed two small suitcases with clothes and a typewriter and took a train to Barcelona. Then, knowing nothing at all about Spain or anyone in it, I looked at a map of the Costa Brava and got on a local train to a place with a name that appealed to me. It was called Lloret de Mar.
When I got off the train it was almost dark. A man in very worn clothes came up and seized my suitcases.
“Hotel?” he asked.
I didn’t want help, but he wouldn’t let go, and I spoke no Spanish beyond “Si” and “No”.
So I said “Si” and he began walking along the platform which was open at each end.
So then I said “No”, and pointed in the opposite direction. I wasn’t going to be hustled. Not me.
So he turned and we went the other way. He led me to a small, two story hotel with a tiled facade and put the luggage down in the hall.
A motherly woman came to meet me and somehow we agreed on a room. When I turned round to give the man something he had disappeared. In Paris you had to tip for everything so I was mystified and determined somehow to uncover his racket. One day I will write more carefully about that episode and many other strange and wonderful things that happened on that holiday in Franco’s Spain. All I need say now is that Lloret was the most primitive of fishing villages. The only structure on the beach was a wooden shack where I drank cafe con leche. And after two weeks I proved, conclusively, that the man had carried my bags out of the goodness of his heart. Nothing less.
Two decades later Lloret became famous as the most egregious example of what package tourism can do to ruin a beautiful place. I heard about the cheap hotels jammed shoulder to shoulder, of the pubs, the fish and chips, the arcades, the souvenir stalls, the mobs of sun-blistered British holidaymakers orgying and vomiting on cheap wine.
For fifty years I have been regaling people, at bars and in restaurants, with the story of my arrival there, and what it was once like. Probably, in my expansive way, I have been encouraging them to top up my glass or snatch the bill from my none too eager fingers. But I had never been back . . . until now.
I was in Girona with Angel and Teresa and told them too about Lloret in 1951, and they insisted that we go and see how it was today.
As we approached it was obvious that Lloret had grown from a village to a large town.
A tourist information office confronted us and I went in to ask a girl behind the counter where the railway station was.
“There is no station,” she said.
“Well, where it used to be then.”
“There has never been a station in Lloret.”
“But I came here by train.”
She glanced helplessly across to an older woman dressed in rather businesslike clothes standing to my left who was talking to someone in French. She plunged into the argument and seemed quite offended, as though I had uttered an insult.
Vehemently she contradicted me.
“I assure you, Monsieur, there has never been a station.”
“But Madame,” I ventured as pleasantly as I could, “I myself took the train here in 1951 from Barcelona. How can you be so sure there was no station here in 1951?”
She grew even more heated.
“I may not have been here in ’51…” after all, that would have reflected badly on her age “… but there has never been a station in MY village. That is quite certain. The day a train comes to Lloret I will go to my grave. The nearest station is at Blanes, 8 kilometres away.”
And so, I’m afraid, it proved to be.
We went to Blanes and took a picture to prove that this time, at least I had been there. There was no time to hunt around for familiar landmarks. It was obvious that everything for miles around had changed, but it did begin to seem probable that I had never been in Lloret after all.
So what, you may say?
Well, I can only say that it feels very peculiar to know that I may have been getting free drinks for fifty years on the basis of a piece of fiction.
Living a lie, so to speak.
Sorry about that, chaps.
