Ola Oporto

We wake up in the hotel room in Porto, it has been extremely hot for the last few days in Portugal. On Wednesday we crossed the border from Spain. Before entering Portugal we pulled up for a coffee near the border and to check that we had our passports and Covid documentation all in check.

I had read that RATs were acceptable for Portugal, but that they needed to have been taken no more than 24 hours in advance of departure…. the ones we had were now fast-approaching 72 hours old. I had an ingenious plan up my sleeve. Say we were stopped, I was going to explain in my best Portuguese that we had taken PCR tests, you could take a PCR test up to 72 hours in advance of departure. If they looked closely at the certificate and saw that no, this was in fact a RAT, I would do my best confused impression and the worst they could do would be to deny us entry and send us to a local place in Spain to take another test. If they do not question it, we would go through and all would be well. In actual fact I didn’t need to do a thing, there was no border control and we sailed on through into Portugal without so much as a passport stamp in sight.

We couldn’t believe it, with so much fear mongering about European travel fuelled by the British media over the last year, it would have seemed that even we had been fooled. My mind raced back to Lavender— “get out of the UK guys, once you get into Europe, all this bull-shit ends.”

Lavender was the name we had affectionately given to an ex-fireman, ex-navy, tattoo-bearing, carnivorous, forward-thinking con-artist we had once bought an overpriced white transit van from. We had met him in a Tesco’s car park back in Cornwall one hot sunny Saturday. As we approached, we saw Lavender, or Dane as he is known to most, hop out of the van and approach another man who he subsequently embraced in a warming bear-hug. Oh, he looks nice, I thought to myself. He then turned to us and waved, flashing the biggest grin you’d ever seen. “Hey guys”, he grabs us both warmly by the hand, with one of those hand shakes where the other person uses both hands, to really get across to you the idea that they are genuine. Looking us square in the eye and refusing to drop that grin, “good to meet you!” he said. “Well, here she is''. He looked towards the transit van as if she were the most precious thing anyone had ever seen. He had a nostalgic look within his eyes, as if they contained a thousand tales of adventures just waiting to be told. At that same time, he looked down to see a toy car near his foot. With a sentimental gleam, he swooped down to collect the tiny toy car in his hand—”oh my boy would love this!”. “Oh you have a son?”, I said. “Yeah—Dane”. “But that’s your name?” I went onto question.  “Dane Junior”, the senior replied. “Doesn’t that get confusing?” I wondered.

Dane opened the side-door to reveal a completely blackened  interior, with a raised box toward the back that looked like it was big enough to sit a king-size mattress. There were 4 tyres stacked behind the driver’s seat. The word plain doesn't quite do it justice. “Isn't she beautiful” that look came back into his eyes again “2 years my wife and I travelled around in this van, all over Europe. She carried us safely across mountainous terrain, all along the coast, we have been everywhere. Regarding the interior”, he went onto sell “we kept it minimum, when driving around Europe we liked the idea of being incognito, hence why never adding any windows. She’s insulated, and that air vent”, he said, pointing to a barely visible hole in the roof “well that kept us cool in the summer, and the insulation kept us warm and dry in the winter–shall we take her for a spin?”

Before I knew it I was sandwiched in between Dane and Peter, chugging along in the gleaming white van. Dane was driving, changing gears with tender care. I had not noticed exactly what he had tattooed across his body. Sitting next to him in the van, my eye was drawn to the writing on the inside of his arm where the word Carnivore was inscribed in big embossed bolded letters. I muttered a long and drawn out “riigght”, under my breath. On the inside of his left arm, appeared to be tally marks, 15 to be precise “probably the number of kills he’s made” I pondered. Dane drove for what felt like an age, enough time for me to decide that Peter and I would be the next 2 tally marks to feature on his arm, when all of a sudden, he pulled up on the side of the road and asked which one of us wanted to drive back to the carpark. “That’ll be me” I replied. We hopped out, Peter shuffled up next to me, Dane hopped in on the left of Peter and I settled into the driver’s seat. 

The long and the short of it is that we went on to buy that van. When Dane dropped it off a couple of weeks later, he sat with us for 2 hours talking about the adventures he had, how he had not eaten a vegetable since 1997 and instead had sustained a diet of one portion of meat per day, this was the reason for Carnivore on his arm. He told us about the research that had been made into the nutritional value of such a diet. He talked about his lack of trust for the government, we bonded over some mutual ideas, we drank tea, shared cigarettes and by the end of it all, when it was time to leave, Dane picked up his rucksack containing packets of minced meat, fondly stroked the van, held back tears and insisted that we visit him and his wife in Slovakia, once we get out of the UK—had we just made our new best friend? Only time would tell.

And time did tell, all of 6 hours later, when we were driving back from our first outing and the damn engine suddenly cut out on the motorway forcing the van into “limp-mode”. Bollox, the smell of bull shit stank as I cast my mind back to all the other piles of shit he had laid, the toy car in the car park suddenly seemed to me, to be something he had planted to make us soften to him, the man he bear hugged was also probably part of the set up, he probably doesn’t even have a wife in Slovakia, suddenly everything Dane had told us, seemed to sum up to be the makings of a good old fashioned con. For the next couple of months, the term limp-mode was our most overused expression.

Dane refused to take the van back, there really is no safety net when purchasing vans through Gumtree, he must have spotted our lack of knowledge from a mile off. After multiple trips to the garage, which revealed even more dodgy van past life, I finally got the limp mode stuff sorted. BUT after a few months of driving the clunky thing around, sleepless nights in the back on camping trips that just weren’t as idyllic as what they are made out to be on Instagram, we realised van life actually isn't us. So we and the van parted ways. We sold it to a lovely couple, who took it off our hands to live in, she was a bartender and he, a chef. He told us to come and eat in his restaurant one day. We kept the invitation in the back pocket.

One evening, a few months later, we decided to check out The Seafood Bar, where the guy we sold the van to worked. The Seafood Bar is an awesome concept restaurant in the centre of Falmouth. A cosy little place serving up small plates of amazing sea-food with Verdant beer on tap, as well as a selection of other fine wines and spirits. If you haven’t been, check it out. It is one of the coolest places in Falmouth. We were enjoying the place so much, we asked to speak with our guy we sold the van to, to give compliments to the chef and all that. After a lot of singing his praises, we finally asked, “so, how's the van?” “not too bad”, came his reply, “...but she has gone into limp mode a couple of times.” Damnit.

So I digress, where were we. Ah yes, Portugal. We were finally here, I had been fantasising about Portugal for the last 3 years, had it not been for Covid I would have tried to have gone a few years back. The silver lining of course, was that it was actually thanks to Covid that I now had the opportunity to work remotely from wherever I liked.

We had decided to arrive in Portugal at the hottest time of the year. We had heard mention of wildfires from frantic loved-ones who’d been glued to the British media. You shouldn't watch the news, I had told my worried Mum over Facetime back in Spain. They always sensationalise these things. But as we crossed the border, on this particularly hot day, we noticed plumes of smoke in the far off distance, on both the left and right side of the motorway. This was a very real threat after all, and I realised that it shouldn’t be taken lightly. We worked out where the plumes were coming from, a good 50-100 miles away. We knew there were none in Porto, and thought our best bet would be to stay close to the coast, so that is where we headed.