Wasting Away in Barcelonaville (5-15 October)

Wasting Away in Barcelonaville (5-15 October)

5 October - 15 October 2009 | Barcelona, Spain

The team (less myself) arrived in Barcelona, Spain on 5 October determined to prove the naysayers wrong. Once there they connected with our local contact - and native Catalan - Carlos. His task was to show us the ropes of the city and help us with all the paperwork for the cars. Trouble arose from the start, though, in procuring the cars for our much-anticipated expedition. It wasn’t so much finding and purchasing the cars, which were done in relatively quick fashion, but rather registering the automobiles that provided the unwelcome difficulty. By the time I arrived a week later our team had found two cars but had yet to register a single one. This had the added consequence of delaying the purchase of our team equipment and trip necessities since no one desired to lug around hundreds of pounds worth of car parts, camping gear, etc. So, in a nutshell, we had accomplished next to nothing in over a week. The chief problem confronting us was the Spanish bureaucracy, which in short order we discovered was hardly the gold standard of government efficiency.

Although far from an authority on anything related to Spain, this struck me as surprising. An avid history buff, I was well aware of the country’s halcyon days. At the height of its power and influence in the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain’s empire spanned the globe. It was said that the sun never set upon its domain, which stretched from Europe to the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Managing an operation of such magnitude surely necessitated a first class administrative system. The country’s contemporary state of affairs, however, is a far cry from the golden age of Habsburg Spain. Today it is a second-rate power with a third world bureaucracy and a populace who relish their siestas, an inconvenient custom in and of itself. "It's worse than Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan combined," John disdainfully tells me. I've never had the luxury to visit either country, but it seemed plausible to me.

Nowhere is this incompetence more evident than in the Spanish customs office. To register a car for export, you must follow a labyrinthine maze of arcane procedures that ended up taking us ten days to decipher, despite the help of our local Spaniard/Catalan. The inanity is beyond frustrating. One anecdote will suffice. At one point in the process you have to purchase an old-fashioned typewriter, then locate the official keeper of the carbon paper to obtain a single sheet, the two of which are finally brought to another man who types one sentence onto it. This paper is then brought to another man...you get the point. The typewriter stage alone can take hours, even days. And time was of the essence.

Both Kim and Jimmy had future engagements that closely coincided with the tentative end date of our trip. Jimmy was fairly flexible, willing to go as far as possible before catching a flight to Cape Town in order to make another prescheduled one to India. Kim was another matter. Already reticent to leave her husband, whom she had been apart from for all of 9 days in the last ten years, she set Friday as a firm deadline for her departure. Trouble was brewing elsewhere as well that only fueled the skepticism permeating the team. A string of events on Wednesday led a couple of our team members to second-guess the rationality of the entire enterprise. Our last minute recruit, another French cohort named Sylvain, lost his passport upon arrival in Barcelona, a city renowned for its gypsies and pickpockets. Learning that it was quicker to have it reissued in France, he had no choice but to book an immediate return flight home with the plan to reconnect with us in Mali. Meanwhile, after finally registering the first of our cars, John got pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt, which alerted the police to our lack of insurance. If not somehow bypassed/resolved, this incident, with a maximum fine of 3000 Euros, spelled financial disaster. I personally don't put too much stock into omens, portents, or signs - be they negative or positive - but Nico and Kim read them like the Bible. Well, probably more like they would a good Russian novel. Nevertheless, the growing pessimism was openly voiced - and felt.

Needless to say, things were getting pretty dicey, placing the trip, and company, in jeopardy. Even though we had moved headquarters to a camping ground in Mataro on the outskirts of town earlier in the week, we decided on Thursday to stay the night with Carlos in the center of Barcelona in recognition of the peril in front of us. Everything hinged on getting the second car registered before the weekend. It appeared that our failure to do so would inevitably lead to mutiny.

And We’re…Off?

16 October 2009 | Barcelona, Spain

We awoke early the next morning eager to keep our team intact. Nico and Carlos got up at the break of dawn to wait in line at the customs office. The rest of us woke up shortly thereafter to sort out the shopping list. After a quick breakfast, we hit the stores. Our best efforts at productivity notwithstanding, we were foiled at every turn. The items we were looking for were either not to be found or were too expensive for our budget. As a result, we resigned ourselves to finding everything in Morocco, where it was hoped we could save money. This misfortune didn’t bode well for those on car duty. Alas, it appeared that the trip might not even get off the ground.

Despite Carlos' assurance that he finally understood the routine, we were unconvinced of the feasibility of processing the second car in one day. It wasn't Carlos that we distrusted, but the other party to the process, the Spanish custom officials, who were the source of our reservations. I don't want to say they're lazy. Everything is relative. So let's just say they're not the most industrious people I've come across. Hence the daily siestas. It didn't help that today was Friday either.

In America, casual Friday means that you dress in comfortable clothes, maybe take a longer lunch break, and, for the daring amongst us, possibly leaving thirty minutes early. In Spain, Friday translates into breaking for siesta and not returning. In other words, a half-day's worth of work. Carlos and Nico essentially had to get done in five hours what had taken them nine days to do earlier (i.e. register the second car), a formidable feat by any measure. They sped through the first couple of steps, formally obtaining the title to the car, before hitting a roadblock. As (bad) luck would have it, the keeper of the carbon paper was nowhere to be found. Why there is one person who has singular control over the carbon paper will forever confound me, but so it was. Our comrades were stranded. No spare key. No reserve carbon stock in a storeroom. And, conveniently for us, the man withholding access to the carbon paper did not carry a cellphone with him. Precious time grinded on. Thirty minutes. Forty-five minutes. After an hour and change of waiting, our antagonist returned. Blast them! Even on a half-day's work, the Spanish are not deterred from taking their siesta.

Onward they rushed, reaching the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the last step, with 45 minutes to spare. They took a number and waited at the end of the line. From experience, they knew that the DMV lost no time in shutting their doors, kicking out those unattended to. It was now 1:50, five minutes past closing time, and they were still five people back.

Meanwhile, John, Jimmy, Kim, and I had returned to our familiar stomping ground, Quin Cafe, where we were set to meet Carlos and Nico at 2:30. This was Carlos' place of work, the parents of whom owned the place. Given this, we had spent the better part of the last two weeks loitering around the cafe - something Carlos' father was beginning to weary of.

"All of Barcelona will be cheering when we leave," Jimmy said, as we all waited impatiently for word from our compatriots. This point was not lost on us. We had definitely worn out our welcome with Carlos, his father, and his roommates. It was high time that we got a move on. We discussed this, the prospects of the trip, and other, more trivial things to pass the time, all the while growing more and more worried. Finally, at ten ‘til three, when all seemed lost, what looked to be a trashcan-on-wheels lurched past us honking the horn and yelling, "Let's go!"

In a reversal of fortune, a man in front of Nico and Carlos had given up on waiting and handed them his ticket stub. They were one of the last to be seen. Good luck and bad luck - two sides of the same coin. It is for this reason that I choose not to heed "signs." It was also a theme that I believed would persist throughout the whole of our journey. At the moment we were only too happy to forget all our recent troubles. We had conquered our adversary and were about to set off on our daring adventure. The moral of the story for you prospective trekkers, as John would later say, “is not to do anything in Spain.”

"I'm oddly happy that we're going," Kim bemusedly thinks aloud in reaction to our favorable circumstances. This came as a relief to the rest of our team. Kim’s departure would have been a considerable loss to our group. She was the organizational guru of our crew, harboring a particular affection for spreadsheets. "Anybody who works with spreadsheets is good in my book" was one of the first things I recall her saying to me. This didn't do our personal relationship any favors, but I knew it would be valuable for the success of our trip. With four brazen, headstrong, and immature men, she also kept us grounded and told us when we were suggesting, or doing, stupid things. In short, she was the “Wendy” to our “Lost Boys.” We could not do without her, and were thus happy that she would be tagging along.

The Transport

Until now, I hadn't had the chance to inspect our modes of transportation. They weren't exactly what I had pictured, but I wasn't discomforted by the idea of them getting us to Cape Town either. The first car was a 1991 Rover 216 GTI. The other, newly registered one was a 1989 Renault 19. Both were hatchbacks looking a little worse for the wear. Nothing majorly problematic though. Only some dents, scratches, stains, and so forth. The Rover was clearly the speedier of the two and looked it as well. Red, with spoiler included, "boy racer," as John would commonly refer to it...The Renault, on the other hand, was a drab shade of grey/silver and slow to the getup. Nico took it upon himself to christen the Renault, Fate, certain that it was she who would take us to the finish line. The Rover we temporarily named Roberta, unoriginally adapted from the previous owner's name for it, Roberto. Thus, not only did we manage to keep Kim onboard, but also found her some female company for the long road ahead.

Looking over the collective parts of his team, John suddenly quipped, "Great! We have an English car and a French car. Not exactly known for their reliability," as if he had not fully registered these facts upon their purchase. We all had a good laugh at this, and our stupidity in general, before piling into the cars to head back to camp.

"And we're off!" Nico jubilantly exclaimed to the sound of the Renault engine striving to turn over. Four, five, six times, we attempted to start the engine, with no luck. Turns out we had dismissed the reliability factor a little too quickly. We all looked at each other dumbfounded. "Vrooom!" it roared to start. No questions were asked. We just pretended it didn't happen and put the car in gear.

Finishing Touch

We jetted back to base camp in Mataro to pick up our gear and do some last minute work. John quickly wired the CB radios in both cars so we could communicate while driving. Since neither car had a stereo, he also tried to install a cheap headset that we had bought at Carrefour to make the long drive ahead a little more bearable - at least for those of us fortunate enough to be in the car with the music. It turned out, though, that the new stereo was too cheap and didn't work properly. Anxious to hit the road, we decided to sort it out later and packed the cars. It was 11:30pm and we had one last stop in Barcelona to make (to say goodbye to Carlos) before heading out.

"Finally heading South!" boomed over the CB radio as we reach the highway from Mataro to Barcelona. Indeed, our trip was finally coming to life. We don’t know quite what to expect over the coming months, save the unexpected, but we embarked with an open mind, ample confidence, and a fair amount of elasticity in our schedule, and dare I say a prayer for safe passage.

“Everything will go swimmingly, right?” Nico said with somewhat feigned confidence.

"Ha! Of course! What could possibly go wrong?" I replied with a smirk. In truth, I'm sure we'll all look back on Barcelona quite fondly, what with the treacherous course that lay ahead.