Making It Up As I Go Along (16 page)

Portugal! Myself and Himself suddenly found four
days when we could go away, and decisions had to be made fast because we had no notice and
it’s the only chance we’ll have this summer, so we needed a direct flight from
Dublin (because if you go via Heathrow you lose five hours, also the will to live), and Lisbon
was only two hours away, and half an hour’s drive from there was Sintra, and it was
unexpectedly atmospheric and wonderful!

I was enchanted: all those mountains and huge,
prehistoric trees and the switchback roads and the green light and – best of all –
those mad Gothic castles and houses, with their underground tunnels and the Initiation Well. It
reminded me of Donna Tartt’s
The Secret History
, and I swear I could imagine
Byron and his ilk (who spent a lot of time there) dancing around in their pelt, smeared with the
blood of a sacrificed rabbit, beneath a full moon. Magnificent!

The whole thing was an absolute delight, and not
a screed of jet lag because Portugal sticks out so far into the Atlantic that it’s on the
same time zone as Ireland. This has never happened to me before.

While we were there the European football yoke
was on and Portugal were playing, and in honour of the delightful time we were having we decided
to support them, but on account of being the kiss of death for any team I support, I should have
supported the other team. Because any team I (or Himself) support, they
take a sudden and inexplicable nosedive. On the rare occasions I put money on a horse, it
breaks its leg and has to be shot at the end of the race.

Portugal lost, of course they lost. All the same,
it was a laugh: we were in the bar with lots of other people (an alarming number of Irish people
– I always get a fright when I’m on holiday and I hear Irish accents – and
apparently Irish people love Portugal. As indeed so do I now. It wasn’t just the landscape
and the weather: the people were sweet and kind and sort of innocent).

If I had any complaint at all, it would be that
the food was beyond bland. One night we went out to a seaside place for our dinner and the
waiter tried to tempt me with fish made with ‘a traditional Portuguese sauce’. And
when I enquired about what went into this traditional Portuguese sauce, he replied, with great
pride, ‘Boiling water.’

‘Just boiling water?’ I asked.

‘Well, a little bit of bread,’ he
sez, ‘but mostly just boiling water.’

So of course I
had
to have it to see if
it was as bad as it sounded. And I’m happy to report that it was – it tasted of
absolutely nothing!

And now I know why Irish people love Portugal!
Ireland is famed for its crap cuisine; we are known the world over for boiling our vegetables
until all flavour has been bet right out of them. It’s almost a national slogan –
‘Guaranteed! No pesky flavours present in our food.’

But in Portugal, we Irish are able to swank
around, behaving as if our native cuisine is as flavoursome and tasty as Korean, or French, or
Peruvian.

mariankeyes.com
,
June 2008.

Yes, well, lookit, I went to Chile with Himself.

It all began because I have a ‘thing’
about Easter Island – well, a combination of ‘things’: the hundreds of massive
carved stone heads dotted about the place; it being the most remote inhabited island on the
planet; etc., etc.

And because it belongs to Chile you have to fly
via Santiago, and Himself said that if we were going to Santiago could we please go to the
Atacama Desert. Please. You see, Himself subscribes to a magazine called
Wanderlust
and
it’s always urging people to go to remote, rough places, and now and then he comes to see
me, with his
Wanderlust
in his hand, trying to get me enthused about some faraway
undeveloped place, and in the old days I used to say, ‘Does it have shops? Does it have a
Prada outlet? Well, does it? No? That’s right, no. So be off with you and take your
ridiculous magazine with you.’ And he’d slink away, head bowed, good and chastised.

But I’m different now and I haven’t a
clue when the change happened, except that it has and I’m now open to
‘activity’ holidays. Well, in a way. I still don’t like getting my hair wet,
but I’ll walk. Oh yes. Even in hideously unattractive ‘technical’ clothing. Up
hills and things, so long as they’re not steep. So I graciously granted him a go in the
Atacama Desert and off we went.

First to Easter Island. Which was everything
I’d expected and more. The stone heads were EVERYWHERE, there are nearly
900 of them and they’re thrun all over the place, and the island is made out of
volcanoes and is entirely free from modern-day ugliness. There is only one town and hardly any
other buildings, and there are no power lines or rubbish, and even though it’s in the
middle of the Pacific it reminded me of County Clare. Except it was warm.

The population is 4,500, and they all know each
other and each do about thirteen different jobs – we met a fisherman who is also an air
host on Lan Chile – and there are 6,000 semi-wild horses, and the people are a mix of God
knows how many races because colonizers kept coming along and interfering with them, but
there’s a very strong Polynesian strain and as a result they are INCREDIBLY good-looking.

The first person we met at the airport was a girl
called Tammy and you should have seen her, the almond-shaped eyes and the radiant skin and shiny
long hair. But the gas thing is that even better-looking than the girls are the men. Mother of
God!

It’s hard to describe them without sounding
like a lecherous old woman, but I’ll give it a go. Right! They’re big. Like, tall
and very muscular and broad-chested and with beautiful Polynesian-style tattoos, and
they’ll take their shirt off at the drop of a hat. Tanned and brown-eyed (mostly), but the
best bit,
the very best bit of all
, is their hair. Long and lustrous and thick and
flowy. I would KILL to have hair like theirs. And they’re great men for ‘items of
flair’, like feathery yokes in their hair or shell necklaces or shark’s tooth
bracelets, you know yourself. But mostly stuff in their hair.

I get the impression that these young men (every
one of them looked like they were twenty-two, but surely they can’t ALL be) have the time
of their lives with the visiting girl tourists. We had one ‘guide’ who went haring
up the side of a volcano, on the trail
of two blondey girls, leaving me and
Himself for dust. When we finally caught up with him, he waved us vaguely in the direction of
the petroglyphs and the other archaeological wonders we were after hiking up the side of a
volcano to see and he glommed on to the blonde girlies, and after Himself and myself did our
best to figure things out, we went back to your man, who had the nerve, yes the BLOODY NERVE, to
ask us for a pen! (To get the blonde girlies’ phone numbers, of course.)

Even Himself got annoyed. I’m always
getting annoyed, but Himself hardly ever does. So when your man asked us if we had a pen, I
stared at him stonily but Himself said, with unconvincing bluster ‘… Er, no. Ah, no!
I haven’t.’ And as we made our way back down the mountain, Himself whispered to me,
‘I actually do have a pen.’ I whispered back, ‘I know you do.’ Himself
always has a pen. Himself is an organized person. Which is why I married him. One of the
reasons, anyway.

But all the other guides were delightful:
charming and informative and caring. With lovely hair.

We stayed in a place called Explora and
everything about it was perfect. It’s hidden in the landscape and made of wood and natural
stuff and there’s no excess, but it’s very comfortable and the views are stunning
and the food is fantastic – but again no excess: you get two choices for your dinner and
that’s plenty.

The staff are charming – very warm, but
also efficient. They know everything about your activities, but not in a spooky authoritarian
way.

Like when Himself and myself booked to go to a
show, the kitchen staff knew about it and fed us earlier than the normal dinner hour so we
wouldn’t be late for the show. Which actually I didn’t want to go to because it was
described as ‘local dancing’ and I thought it would be the usual oul’ tourist
shite.

And as we sat in a taxi,
bumping down an unpaved boreen, and drew up outside a corrugated iron barn, my expectations were
in the gutter.

Cripes, was I wrong! It was extraordinarily
powerful: the dancers took what they were doing very seriously and not once did I feel that it
was a tongue-in-cheek money-making exercise. The dancing felt mystical and ancient and deeply
authentic, almost spiritual.

The gas thing was that the first dancer out
looked really like Tammy, the stunner who’d met us on our first night at the airport. We
spent most of the first half going, Is-she-or-isn’t-she? Until Himself positively
identified her, based on her tattoos. Normally I would hit Himself a clatter for having paid
another woman so much attention, but honestly, she was so beautiful that I didn’t blame
him.

The thing about Explora is that it’s an
‘all-included’ place, so you can have as much Sprite Zero as you like (it
doesn’t have to be Sprite Zero though, it can be wine or pisco sour or whatever), and I
spent some of the most peaceful times of my life just sitting in their open-to-the-elements bar
area, looking out at the sea and the grass and the wild horses and the absence of ugliness. I
was very, very happy … nearly as happy as the time I overdosed on the Emla cream.

Then we went off to Santiago for a couple of
days. We’d been strongly advised that a couple of days in Santiago is a couple of days too
long, but bullishly we insisted that we wanted to see the real Chile.

Well, how can I put it? It’s no Rio de
Janeiro, is probably the best thing to say. You see, what I hadn’t appreciated is that
Chile is the most successful economy in the region, so they’re a right crowd of diligent
hard workers. And even though they have the
biggest Palestinian population
in the world outside of Palestine, and a big Serbian community, there was no evidence of a
vibrant, melting-pot culture. And the shops were
crap
. Whatever it is they’re
making with their successful economy, it isn’t shoes.

Next we headed to the Atacama Desert, for
trekking and suchlike. This was Himself’s side of the trip, so I hadn’t paid it much
attention. I just thought it would be miles and miles of nothingness, it being the driest place
on earth and all that. God,
how wrong I was.

So yes, the Atacama. Very high up. Very cold at
night. Near the Andes. Every day we went a bit higher (we were there for five days, so we had to
do it slowly in case we got altitude sickness).

On our second-to-last day we were up to 14,000
feet (4,300m) and we were about to start our walk and the guide says, ‘We’ll start
our trek here.’ And I thought, ‘TREK? Good God, am I …
trekking
?’ Then I looked around and couldn’t see some of the smaller Andes,
and when I asked Himself about where they’d gone, he said we were actually
on
them.

‘The Andes?’ I said. ‘I’m
on
the Andes? And I’m trekking. So does that mean, I’m … trekking in
the Andes?’

And yes, it turned out that I was. The oddest
bloody thing, if you ask me. I don’t know when I turned into a trekking-in-the-Andes
person, but it appears that I have. Just goes to show.

mariankeyes.com
,
January 2009.

As I’ve said before, I know my life seems
like one long holiday, but I HAD to go to Bulgaria, to do my patriotic duty, because Ireland
were playing Bulgaria in the World Cup qualifiers (football,
football
, not rugby).

So off we went, with our green jerseys and our
tricolour wigs, to Sofia, with Tadhg and Susie. And I had no idea AT ALL what to expect from
Bulgaria.

Apparently it drives them mad, their lack of
coherent identity in the world. All I knew was that they had nice yoghurt. However, from the
small bit of dealing with them on the phone while I was trying to find out about hotels and
that, they seemed warm and pleasant. And so they were!

The Sofia people were astonishingly welcoming.
With very good English. Which I didn’t expect at all. Also, very cheap shops. VERY
cheap.

The result (a draw) was a good one and we were
there for three days and it was the best fun. There were five Irish pubs in Sofia, but they
obviously weren’t
real
Irish pubs because on the first night one of them
(McCarthy’s, I think) RAN OUT OF DRINK!!!!! For the love of God!

Also, one of the others – the one we went
to the most, JJ Murphy’s – had bar staff that were in no way equipped for a stampede
of Irish fans. It took up to an hour to get a drink, and the staff were so overwhelmed that the
fans were telling them how to pull
pints, and when one punter ordered ten
pints the barman just walked away and was last seen sobbing in a corner.

Then we said goodbye to Tadhg and Susie, and
Himself and I went to Amsterdam for the promotion of the Dutch publication of
This Charming
Man
.

And such beauty! I’d never been to the
Netherlands before and I’m not sure why. Maybe it was that most of the people singing
Amsterdam’s praises in my past were stoner gobshites who kept going on about blem being
legal, and the funny thing is that, even though I’m a TOTAL addict and could get addicted
to just about anything, the few times I got stoned in my youth, I hated it.

I hated the way time slowed down and I’d
think, ‘I have to stand up now. I have to stand up and I’ll have to do it soon.
Maybe in twelve seconds, maybe in thirty-seven,’ and I’d be lying there
incapacitated and paralysed and then a sentence would speak in my head and several hours would
pass and I’d think, ‘Did I say that with my mouth or just in my head?’
HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE!!!!! So, yes, I think that must be why I never went, because I was
afraid I’d have to smoke a load of the quare stuff.

But Amsterdam is NOTHING like that. We arrived on
the Sunday evening, and it was raining, which I found astonishing because I’ve always had
this belief that it never rains ‘on the continent’.

The light was very North European (sort of thin
and clear, which I love), and I knew in theory that there were canals in Amsterdam, but when you
see them for real! There are loads!

It’s all so pretty and clean and intact.
Hundreds and hundreds of narrow merchants’ houses from the eighteenth century, and cobbles
and bridges and trams, and people on bicycles.

I was working, so I didn’t have much time
to sightsee, but
when I finished work on the Monday evening I a) bought a
chocolate bun, and b) went on a boat on the canal, and because I was wrecked from the interviews
it was indescribably pleasurable to just lie back and watch the beautiful city drift past me.

Apparently there’s a handbag museum! Yes!
Can you credit it! But sadly I didn’t have time to see it. And there many other museums in
Amsterdam, including the Van Gogh one. I love his paintings, I find them very heart-wrenching.
Before we went, Himself and I went on Pronunciation Guy to learn how to pronounce ‘Vincent
Van Gogh’, and God, it’s hard. You say it like this: ‘Finchent Fen’
– and this is the really hard bit: you have to cough. ‘Finchent Fen COUGH!’

We didn’t have time to go to the Finchent
Fen COUGH gallery, so that’ll have to wait till another time. Also, I have a confession to
make. On our first night, when we were staggering around, trying to get a feel for the place, I
passed a shoe shop! Yes! What are the chances! And they had the most amazing shoes in the
window, sort of like pieces of architecture. But the shop (Jan Jensen) was closed. So I took a
note of the name and mentioned it to some of the journalists who were interviewing me, and they
all said, ‘He is the Netherlands’ most famous shoe designer.’

So on the Wednesday, just before I left for the
airport, I ran over there and thought, ‘They’ll never have anything in my
size,’ and sure enough they didn’t, but they had one size up (36) and the girl put
new holes in the strap and gave me – free! – gel insole yokes and, amigos, they fit!
They are astonishingly beautiful and architectural. According to Himself the heel is
‘cantilevered’.

Even though they’re works of art and indeed
architecture, I felt guilty about buying them (oh, why break the habits of a lifetime?), because
I was after getting a pair of FitFlops. Are you
familiar with same?
They’ve a funny-shaped sole so that you exercise your legs and bum while you’re
walking, and I walked down to the cinema in them the first night I had them, to see the Eric
Cantona film (God, I love him), and the next morning I could hardly get out of bed, my leg
muscles were so exercised. Could I justify a pair of Jan Jensen sandals as well as my FitFlops?
Well … I decided that they fulfilled two very different roles in my life.

mariankeyes.com
,
June 2009.