Walking and running in the clouds

The rain hadn’t abated overnight, so we pulled our coats over our heads and ran to breakfast in the workers’ canteen at the farm. Another excellent meal, with scrambled eggs from the farm’s own free-range hens and bread and coffee and cereal and homemade jams and, and, and… Sometimes it is hard not to eat too much; sometimes it is impossible. It was for Ottawacker Jr. too, who discovered something called Yoghurt Cake. We showered and packed up and checked out, with today’s destination being Marvão, which was one of Ottawacker Jr.’s picks to visit. I think he wanted to be able to cross from Portugal to Spain – or at least see Spain from the mountaintop castle. And why not?
 
We made reasonable time and, after all, it was only 120-odd km to travel. We took the IP2 most of the way, through rain that was more drizzle than downpour. As we moved towards Spain, we started our climb through the Parque Natural da Serra de São Mamede, passing through Portalegre and Ribeira de Nisa. Marvão, I discovered, is both a region and a town, and as we drove up, climbing almost 1km along the narrow hairpin bends, I realised I knew bugger all about it. Thank goodness, then, for Wikipedia.
 
Marvao, it claimed, is perched on a quartzite crag of the Serra de São Mamede. Its name is derived from an 8th-century Muwallad rebel, named Ibn Marwan, who built the Castle of Marvão on the site of an earlier Roman watchtower. The castle and walled village were further fortified through the centuries, notably under Sancho II of Portugal (13th century) and Denis of Portugal. “Ah!” I thought, “Denis of Portugal. There’s a name to conjure with.” Honestly, who calls their king Denis? Then I was told that José Saramago had written of the village, "From Marvão one can see the entire land ... It is understandable that from this place, high up in the keep at Marvão Castle, visitors may respectfully murmur, 'How great is the world'.” Good choice, then, Ottawacker Jr.
 
The countryside was spending, the roads were good, and in general there was little or no traffic. So, it was all smooth sailing. Or rather it was until we reached the walled town; there, the road just seemed to stop. We’d booked in at a place called Dom Dinis, and the directions sent clearly said to carry on to the top until we reached the hotel. Yet, here we were, outside the city walls, with the road turning into a single-track route, obviously for pedestrians, and nowhere to go. As if to make it clear there was to be no entrance, there were two gates, one at an angle to the other, which clearly precluded entry by anything bigger than a Shetland Pony. There was a small area for half-a-dozen or so cars to our left, all of which were taken. Other than that, there was a steep drop on one side and a 100-foot wall on the other. So, we got out and double parked, then walked through the two gates, single file along the narrow track, until we reached a small building, grandly called the Tourist Office.
 
“Bom dia,” I said. “Fala inglês?”
“Yes, of course,” came the inevitable reply.
“How do we get to Dom Dinis?”
“You drive.”
“OK. How do we get there? Where do we go?”
“The road is behind you,” said the woman, clearly believing I was the leading member of a small party of simpletons.
“Behind me?” I repeated, rather incredulously.
“Yes,” she repeated. Speaking more slowly this time, she said again, “behind you”. She pointed over my shoulder in rather an exaggerated way, slowly, with a flourish at the end to add emphasis, mouthing the words once more to give me more time to understand.
 
I turned around, as did Mrs. Ottawacker. This time, given my lack of success, she took over the questioning.
“But there is no road there,” she said. “There is just some sort of goat track.”
“That is the road,” said the ever-so-helpful tourist office woman, clearly believing that the leading member of the small party of simpletons had been usurped.
"But, how do we access the road?” asked Mrs. Ottawacker. “There is no way in.”
 
By this time, it was obvious the woman had had enough of helping us. She clicked her fingers to attract our attention (the three of us were staring at the road, open mouthed, as if we couldn’t believe its existence) and started drawing on a large map of the town. She circled the gates we had just walked through, placed a series of arrows on the road we had to take (i.e., the goat track), and told us that we had simply to follow the road around until we got to the castle and we would see Dom Dinis. Then she climbed over the counter and, giving a brusque “Follow me” in our direction, opened the door of the Tourist Office and went outside. We followed. (Well, what else could we do?) Then she pointed at the gates we had come through, and, speaking even more slowly than Mrs. Ottawacker does to me when she is pursing her lips, she said:
 
“There. Is. The. Gate. Drive. Through. It. Follow. This. Road. Keep. The Wall. To. Your. Right. Stop. When. You. Can’t. Go. Any. Further.”
 
As if to emphasise her point, a car sped past at around 90 km/h towards the gate, screeched its tires, executed a perilous three-point turn to get through the two gates, and left. When we turned round to thank the woman for her help, she was no longer there. She was sitting inside the Tourist Office, pointing at us and engaging in an animated conversation with an old crone who hadn’t been there when we had arrived.
 
“I’m not bloody driving,” said Mrs. Ottawacker. It’s suicide.”
“We-e-ell,” I said, we obviously can get in – that car just got out.”
“Not with me in the car,” said my wife. “I’ll stand here and guide you.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, and stormed off to get the car.
“Don’t forget it’s a rental,” she shouted after me. “And you declined the extra insurance.”
 
In the end, we passed through quite comfortably, once the mirrors had been retracted. Ottawacker Jr. was quite a good navigator, only shouting twice that I was too close to the wall and needed to stop immediately. Mrs. Ottawacker’s gesticulating had attracted a crowd of locals, all of whom had crowded under a solitary umbrella to watch the action, and seemed disappointed when I managed to avoid either knocking down the millennium-old wall or scratching the Kia. As Ottawacker Jr. had claimed the front seat, Mrs. Ottawacker leapt into the back, and provided a very helpful stream of narrative as we drove along the narrow, cobbled streets, slick with rain, and climbed the steep hill towards the towering castle and our accommodation.
 
When we arrived at the top, thankfully only having met the one car travelling in the opposite direction, the rain had intensified. We found a parking spot nearby – the beauty of travelling in November – and climbed out, running to get into the hotel. We entered the darkened hall and rang the bell at reception. There was no answer. We rang again. We shouted ‘hello’. We shouted louder. We banged on the door. There was still no answer.
 
“What do you reckon?” I said. “The quickening? Alien attack? Siesta time? All three?”
Mrs. Ottawacker gave me a look of sheer contempt and then said, “There’s a restaurant of some type opposite, let’s get something to eat and decide what we do next.”
 
The restaurant was more of a café and was called “O Castelo”. It was very nice, and we managed to get a table right in front of the open fire. There were only a couple of people in there, so we asked about lunch and were told there was a three-course lunch as a menu du jour for a pretty reasonable price. I supplemented the meal (tomato soup with an egg in it, chicken with home fries and apple cake) with several large glasses of white wine, on the basis that I was fucked if I was going to drive anywhere else in Marvão today. Mrs. Ottawacker was about to say something, but then thought better of it.
 
Once lunch had been finished, we looked at the guide book and developed a plan of attack. First, of course, we would have to unload the car and see if any stragglers at the hotel had escaped from the alien attack. We crossed the road, and were warmly welcomed at 3pm on the dot (the time we had given as our arrival) by a very nice elderly woman with whom I had had a brief conversation at O Castelo. She was obviously doubling up jobs out-of-season. She showed us to our room, which might have been grand had a large extra bed not been placed in it for Ottawacker Jr., told us the jacuzzi wasn’t working, the swimming pool was closed, and, if we wanted dinner, she’d be happy to give us the names of a few places we could go to. “In the meantime,” she waved at the door (what is it with people in Marvão and doors?), “the castle is open and the rain has stopped. Away you go.”
 
Away we went. Off to discover Marvão.
 
To be honest, it was fantastic. A real mediaeval walled town, on top of a mountain, with views of Portugal on one side and Spain on the other. You walk along cobbled streets, looking at the old houses, fully in character, and you can almost smell the history. Unfortunately, there isn’t much of it (the town, I mean, not the history). We did a pretty comprehensive tour of the castle (and were the only ones in it). We booed in the general direction of the Spanish (who are among my favourite people in the world, but if you are going to be in a pantomime, you have to do it right), flicked them the “V” sign, and then ran to the other side of the castle to cheer the Portuguese. Then Mrs. Ottawacker pointed out that we didn’t really know which side was Portugal and which side was Spain (again, the lack of interpretative signs in Portugal could be improved), so we reversed the cheers and insults just to make sure we had all our bases covered. My fear of heights was only really tested at one time (I came through not so much with flying colours as with my trousers at half-mast), and by the time we had left, and spent a further 45 minutes in the fascinating municipal museum, which had archaeological remains, ethnographic thingies AND the bullets and gun that killed the king of Portugal in 1908 (which tied in nicely with our visit to Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio earlier on), we’d most definitely got our 1€ 50 entrance fee’s worth.
 
We wandered through the town for a further hour or more before Ottawacker Jr. indicated that he’d had enough and wanted to lie down and watch Netflix. Mrs. Ottawacker said the same. So they did. I took my journal and my notebook and my novel (Slow Horses, by Mick Herron) and went back to O Castelo, where I ordered several local beers (as part of my own ethnographic research, concluded that the Seara porter was probably the best, so ordered a couple more, chatted to a couple of German tourists about the general feeling in Canada about the Trump election win (the more I drink, the more of a spokesman for the whole of Canada I become), and stayed until well after dark. Then I wandered back to the hotel (all of 10 metres), collected the remaining Ottawackers, and informed them I was hungry, so maybe we should try and find a restaurant.
 
The nice lady at the front desk recommended the Varanda do Alentejo, so there we went. It was quiet and the food was good and reasonably inexpensive. I had the dogfish, which looked fantastic, but my taste buds seem to have taken a bit of a caning. (I lost my sense of smell in December 2019 following a visit to see Raheny_Eye in Dublin, it might have been an early version of Covid, as it has never really returned; the sense of taste was slightly impaired but otherwise intact – yet, of late, certain “notes” have been diminished, including, devastatingly, garlic and tannins.) We sat and chatted and teased each other about our reactions to things; Ottawacker Jr. was keeping an eye on the Portugal vs. Poland match on the TV; the dessert trolley appeared… All of a sudden it was late, and the clouds had rolled in. It was snowing, mixed in with heavy rain and wind. We were in the clouds. We left the restaurant and made our way back to Dom Dinis. When we arrived near the castle, it was lit up green and red – but you could only see it for a few seconds. The clouds would completely cover it up and you could only see a few feet in front of you. Ottawacker Jr. said, “Can I run in the clouds?” and, for some reason, we said yes. So, off he went, running towards the castle, along the cobbled streets of Marvão, hiding in doorways, reaching the castle and laughing. We followed, telling him to be careful. He came sprinting back, giddy with the happiness of being an 11-year-old boy, out of school, up late and soaking wet. We walked home laughing and giggling.