Our fourth week on the road began with a bang as my intrepid partner became slightly older, if not at all wiser. Having been spoiled on my own name day not three weeks prior, I needed to pull out all of the stops and provide Lowri with a truly thrilling gift, a gift that money simply could not buy, a gift she could cherish for years on end. I settled on tepid running water.
Our third week on the road began with a surprisingly low-key border crossing into Spain - no sign of police, PCR tests, or any sign of a global pandemic at all - and a short dash across the rugged and charming Basque country towards its largest city: Bilbao.
Following last week’s visits to Paris’ teeming tourist attractions, Lowri and I decided we’d had our fill of bustling conurbations and so instigated a five-hundred-kilometre drive westwards across the French farmlands to the Atlantic coast. It was our longest - and most monotonous - leg thus far but, thankfully, made all the more enjoyable by five hours of continual Chanson Française (French folk music) - Lowri did not agree.
October 9th, 2021. The day I moved from four walls to four wheels and embarked on an expedition that, for the first time, has no scheduled end. My new fixed address being a white converted panel van called Vishnu, a vehicle that will, hopefully, transport us to many places far-flung for the foreseeable future.
It’s been over a year since I last saddled my backpack and commenced a new voyage, two years discounting a whistle-stop fortnight in Greece, and so there’s been a copious amount of time to mull over my long-term travel plans (as well as my receding hairline and rapidly sprouting ear hair).
Thessaloniki, as well as scoring very highly in Scrabble, also scores very highly in my ranking of Greek cities – coming top (out of two). Whilst Athens is geared entirely towards wealth, tourism, and sophistication, Thessaloniki is more focussed on graffiti, pollution, and drifters selling meat from unmarked carrier bags. It has an edginess that could easily be mistaken for Barcelona’s Eixample district, Haut-Marais in Paris, or the industrial estate at Slough. I quite liked it.
Cloud-piercing mountains, bottomless gorges, and ancient monasteries are not usually three things that spring to mind when thinking of Greek sightseeing. However, I was reliably informed that the northern reaches of this once great land are awash with exactly these kinds of sights; sights that the average inebriated Mediterranean island-hopper would struggle to believe belonged to the same country as Faliraki’s Bar Street.
You re-join me in an overcast Athens and having been far too petrified to drive my enormous hire-car through the frenzied Greek capital, I was extremely grateful that I could finally abandon its narrow streets for the safety of wide, majestic highways for the first time.
Where is every seventeen-year-old Brits favourite destination for snorting copious amounts of cocaine from sun loungers? For balcony hopping in half-built concrete hotels until dawn? For losing their virginity after a foam party against a palm tree to a pink-eyed shot seller from Chelmsford? The answer: Greece.
Snorting cocaine and sipping on caipirinhas from Pablo Escobar's Colombian rooftop was what I imagined I’d be doing now. Instead, I find myself reverse-snorting phlegm and sipping on Horlicks from Dai Lampost's Kidwellian patio. No, I don't have any particular virus. My body is just bracing itself for a prolonged, frigid winter, trapped inside the reeking bowels of a small Welsh town.
