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Part 1 can be found here.

For about 90 kilometers the highway wound through the open countryside, full of sloping, featureless farmland and terrain that seem to have been transplanted from western Pennsylvania. The novelty of tooling around Europe in a funny little hatchback was starting to wear off, so I turned on Spanish radio for a while. Ever get the impression that foreign languages are spoken at a far faster clip than English? By the time an English speaker hammers out “I’ll have a coffee and an amaretto sour,” a Spanish man will have already explained the plot details of Wuthering Heights and seduced your wife in the process. I tried to decipher some of the verbal barrage machine-gunning through the cabin, and an angrily-driven Peugeot 308, lights flashing, almost plowed into the back of our glacially-accelerating Corsa at approximately half the speed of sound. So I turned the radio back off.

Eventually, we got off the motorway and onto the smaller roads. Here we were just a stone’s throw from France, 40km, a country whose language I could actually somewhat speak. At the very edge of the horizon peered the white tips of the Pyrenees. Underneath them, the rolling plains gave way to squat, squared-off industrial buildings, gas stations and big-box stores: we were driving through a Spanish strip mall. And between the highway and our little resort town, we had to traverse the entire continent’s supply of roundabouts.

“Drive, 200 metres, then enter roundabout. Take the, third, exit. Followed by, a roundabout.”

Despite the signs, Cadaqués didn’t seem to get any closer. Little white houses dotted the base of the mountains like powdered sugar on ice cream. I would build up speed in 3^rd gear, then 20 seconds later slow to 2^nd, circumnavigate half the roundabout, and upshift just in time to frustratingly slam on the brakes for the next one. A Peugeot minivan passed us in a huff, children glaring at me in the back row. This went on for about 20 minutes.

After a while, the flat, featureless highway gave way to an even narrower two-lane road, the last of the side exits disappeared, and the cars slowly thinned out.

It was the sort of driving road car enthusiasts wept over in magazines. The coastal road—the only road into Cadaqués—quickly narrowed, the space between oncoming corners fell to a few feet, rendering every oncoming car a sphincter-tightening moment.  To the right was a sheer 40-foot drop into a tree-lined valley with the guardrail missing in many places. Empty grape vines crossed the hills in neat, evenly-spaced rows, scrounging whatever heat they could extract from the crisp winter air. Beyond the mountains, the Mediterranean stretched out in front of us on the horizon—a tranquil, picture-perfect view of the Old World and the mysteries and the adventures that lay ahead. And then, we got stuck behind a cement truck.

I worked the gearbox furiously between second and third, daring to pick up extra speed, while my mom yelled angrily from the backseat. “DON’T DRIVE SO FAST!” she hollered in that tone mothers get when they insist, almost militantly, on your safety. Only I wasn’t; I was merely keeping the 1.2 liter engine above sea level and with enough power to get around the next corner.

Clearly, the locals knew every corner and could nail every apex with aplomb with the sort of experience garnered only through years and years of imitating Jacky Ickx. The cement truck pulled over at a scenic turnoff to let us pass: us and three cars behind me that had gathered. This included a bright red Volvo 240 wagon that flew up seemingly from nowhere, an inch off my rear bumper—he was goading me to move faster, only slowing to brake early and keep its massive heft in check, keeping pace right behind me in a 20-year old Swedish meatball with the handling properties of a double-wide outhouse. If I obliged, my mother would yell louder and angrier. If I didn’t, the Volvo’s gigantic metal bumper would gladly punt me off the cliff. They wouldn’t find us for days, just a couple of Yank tourists lost in the mountains.

In the end, however, I was relieved of my road-blocking duties by yet another bright red wagon: a nippy little Honda Jazz that had tore past the Volvo at breakneck speed and now had me in my sights. Had he been a less brave man he could have waited for one of the relatively few straights, but he took his chances around the outside corner of a tight right-hander. Here was a man who knew how the game worked. Oncoming traffic was bearing down on him, the corner was blind, off-camber, and pants-wettingly treacherous, but the foolhardy Spaniard could care less.  A gigantic eye-searing tomato streaking past my window, the tiny Honda passed me with a vigor that could have only come from years of practice on these very roads. After he merged back in front of me he gunned it with a shriek, and in three corners he disappeared out of sight.

Screw this. I hung it in 3^rd, leaned back, and enjoyed the scenery.

We slowly found our way into the center of the sleepy fishing town, past the narrow, stone-white buildings and the occasional brightly-colored storefront breaking the monotony. Most of them were closed for the holidays. What stroller-pushing tourists that weren’t already seated at a café were wandering the streets aimlessly. Down the hill, a line of orange-reddish terra cotta roofs dotted the coastline: small roads were cut into the hills and one-garage duplexes sprouted atop. It looked like a scaled-down version of the Los Angeles hills.

I parked the car in the first space I saw. The short strip of rock-strewn sand quickly gave way to the icy Mediterranean. The two sizeable restaurants by the water were packed—understandably—and the lone waiter hurried from table to outdoor table, packed with errant Americans and coffee-swilling fathers—no position to even notice us. Even in the dead of winter the tourists came in droves; they just didn’t stay around very long.

Picasso had stayed here for a summer when he was 29, painting The Port at Cadaques as a reflection of the harbor; though in his famous Cubist style it’s hard to tell at first glance. Marcel Duchamp, the famous French surrealist, honed his passion for chess against the local fishermen, whom he found to be formidable opponents. Salvador Dali proclaimed that he had been “quenched by light and colour” when he visited in 1920—his house today is a museum dedicated to his work.

We didn’t notice any of these things at the time, however, because we were craving seafood. So we went to a restaurant that was all out of it.

“Codfish?” I asked, pointing at the menu like I was hungover at a Denny’s.

“No.” She shook her head slowly.

“Ok, then.” Sardines it is.

“No,” she repeated, shaking her head again, as if she was comforting someone who had just lost a dog.

Surprisingly, however, the enormous plate steamed mussels coupled with gazpacho managed to be filling in a way clams usually aren’t expected to. The bartender hurried over, a lanky, frizzy-haired man who we were told understood English, and enthusiastically showed us the 2008 Don Hugo Tempranillo Rosado we had just dusted off in addition to our pitcher of sangria, diced orange chunks floating merrily on top. We finished our dessert coffees, paid the bill, and ambled about town a bit: my mother took some pictures, and my dad instructed me on the finer points of uphill clutch dumping. The town held no more secrets for us (not that we had tried to uncover any), and we soon left the way we came.

Back on the road, we took a right turn down another scenic drive and promptly ended up in La Port de Selva, a grim little seafaring town with no discernable life whatsoever. The brochure claimed that this was a charming little tourist spot during the summertime, but here in the dead of December it was a grey, lifeless ghost town. Dusty yachts sat naked on the side of the road. Construction zones popped up every 10 feet. Everything appeared a monotonous shade of grey, from the top of the roofs snaking along the mountains to the few cars strewn about the parking lot in front of the communal beach. It was also a town without a bathroom, as I learned from a stone-faced bartender and a supermarket checkout girl, the latter who gawked at me like I had crawled naked out of a storm drain.

At this point, we gave up on the lighthouse (and my bathroom) and started to head back home.

I passed the helm onto my dad, in whom I had supreme confidence in his driving abilities. Here was the man who had taught me to drive, doing loops in the high school parking lot in our 1996 Nissan Sentra XE. He hadn’t flinched when I suggested that his next car (he got bored with cars easily, switching them out every 3 or 4 years) should sprout a third pedal. So I was surprised, to say the least, when he took a wrong turn, backed the car down a slight incline, put it in 1^st and promptly lurched forward into a curbstone with a piercing CRUNCH. Some locals looked up from their Diari de Girona. “I know how to drive manual,” he explained, “I just haven’t done it in 20 years.”

“You better drive,” he then said, hurriedly stopping the car and almost forgetting to set the parking brake.

(Stay tuned for Part 3…)

- Blake Rong

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Editorials, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.