Despite getting lost between goat herders and villages, our only sign of direction being the occasional other scruffy campervan to try to follow... they are actually following us... we found BOOM FESTIVAL, alongside a lake near to Idanha-A-Nova in the middle of the Portuguese countryside. We queued, picking up an assortment of hitchers, for 5 hours. Endless tracks through Eucalyptus forests and a phenomenal number of teasing brows of hills, definitely just over the next one...
A festival of oneness, art, environment, music, culture and love. We were blown away (literally) by the spectacular, kaleidoscopic structures, intricate and magnificent and almost entirely bamboo. The festival is rooted in ecology: trying to establish an active, sustainable change beyond the Boom land.
From a workshop in mud-building to gong-yoga to floating on our backs in the lake, to the wavey pulse of a didgeridoo playing live psytrance... Purchases could be made using Bitcoin. The de-criminalisation of drugs allowed a testing centre with intention to reduce health risk, publicly reporting safety and purity.
A gathering of 30,000 people representing over 100 countries, united to visualise and manifest an alternative, positive vision for the future. Completely free of corporate sponsorship, no VIP areas or special treatments. It was a transformational week in a transformational place. Typically hard to put into words, holding a place in our hearts, 2 years, until next time. <3
From transformational to transformation... To Obidos to help Mum and Dad and all the animals move into their new home on a hill. All the furniture from Wales that had been in a temporary void somewhere on the planet, arrived, down the track on a double articulated lorry. Standing in the middle of an expanding terrain of packaged objects, Mum ticked off the list each of the expected 210 items.. 'What is all this fucking junk!?... that we have paid to put in fucking storage!?... and paid to fucking bring to fucking Portugal!?... WE HAVE MANAGED TO LIVE WITHOUT IT FOR THE PAST THREE MONTHS.'
'Why do you have to put a bank card in this calculator to make it work?'
Dad, trying to work out whether or not his beers were good value, holding a bank card-reader.
We drove HOT down to the Algarve HOT to visit Angus's Uncle, Aunt and Cousins. Despite the sweaty and dusty greeting from us, they invited us to stay with them for the last two nights of their holiday in the town house they were renting. Up a cobbled street and through a narrow doorway, we found we were to stay for two days in a castle in a tardis. Two houses knocked into one, with courtyards and olive trees, winding passageways and staircases, and balconies leading to secret corners of roof terraces. Over Winter the house is rented out as an art school and one evening we went for tapas with the owner. He made his fortune in the UK in accounting, grew disgusted with money, quit being an accountant, moved to Portugal and lives giving the 'V's' up to the exploitation and greed he witnessed working in capitalism. And generally being incredibly inspiring. He filled our evening with hilarious and unbelievable stories about the spheres of British culture he'd been involved with for so long.
After two lovely days doing family catching up and getting water taxis to islands, we left them to spend four days in Tavira in the Rio Formosa Natural Park. Four days of cycling to villages through salt flats (after missing a turning and getting HOT and cross going the wrong way uphill along the busiest road in the Algarve), emergency stopping when Angus spots a hoopoe... flamingoes... reading a fiction book (post-uni guilt free)... scrambling around in the sand trying to copy the locals digging for cockles... picking samphire... eating cockles and samphire... and being the hosts and dinner at nightly mosquito parties, inside the van.
Thanks to generous relatives, our days begun with freshly squeezed orange juice, and they finished with port. Cheeeers.
Lesson 3 of living in a van:
Don't leave it until 30 minutes to sunset to try to find somewhere to cook dinner and sleep for the night, when you're relying on a road map that bears 20% resemblance to reality.
West across the Algarve with the intention to stay for a night closer to our next family visit in Loule. Following the map (we still haven't learnt) we thought we'd take the coastal road to try to find a quiet-ish place to park. 'Quiet-ish' and 'parking' don't go together on the Algarve coastal road (duh). After 20 minutes totally lost in traffic, HOT, wedged between hotels and stopping every 3 metres for road-crossing inflatables, we found ourselves at a dead end next to a water pumping station, HOT and in a fucking strop... Rather drive inland and sleep on the side of the main road... There were a few Pine trees on our left with, between piles of dumped rubbish, a path that smelled a bit of the sea.
Leaving the van, the path took us through some more trees and some more rubbish, to a quiet cliff-top between beaches, with tall columns and walls of rock around deep ocean-bottom wells. We picked our way across to the furthest bit jutting into the the sea and watched the sun go down with the fishermen, Azure-Winged Magpies, and the Algarve Party Boats pumping Cascada...
Lesson 4 of living in a van:
Didn't want a bike rack, thought our back door had done enough in life being a door and could do without two bikes hanging from it's neck.
Trying to put two bikes inside the van is like trying to put Edward Scissorhands into a silk box.
To my Auntie Nikki & Uncle Lennies for another wonderful few days of family catch ups and laughs. They took us for their 'alternative Algarve' tour, which included a huge castle made from mud (much inspiration for our mud house plans), and to Alte to swim in a freshwater spring and a waterfall. We helped pick carobs, ate a disproportionate number of figs in various forms, and sat outside each evening wondering about the traffic light star in the sky.
Along mountain roads to Monchique, a spa town in the forest where mountain spring water is bottled and sold around Portugal. We definitely weren't going to be paying for water, filled our bottles with the spring water coming out of the rocks between trees, and dawdled around the steep cobbled streets, following them upwards, after signs for a convent.
We emerged above Monchique in a Cork Oak forest. Quietly, looking for animals... Angus trying to find a snake. So verrrrry peaceful....
Got that disconcerting feeling when you think you might have just walked through a cobweb... peered down, tarantula (basically) on my top. Ran, stretching my top out away from my body, towards Angus. Quickly realised this was totally hopeless because rather than looking at the bit of me that I was holding out at him, he was looking me in the face and telling me to calm down / stop screaming / keep still etc etc.
Threw off off all my clothes, doing the whole-body-shake-dislodge-the-spider dance.
'OH MY GOD HOLLY, A SNAKE!!!' A BIG green snake which had probably been disturbed by the caterwauling through the undergrowth, slithered huge 'S' shapes past us up the path. Somehow it slithered us to silence, forgot all about the spider, as we followed beautiful snakey, along the path and into a bush to the whispered squawks of delight from Angus.
We're no longer ruled by the morning alarm, or a 5 day work week, or job-loss fear.
... But where can we find a tap or spring to fill up our water containers with 50L of drinking water, lost in the middle of nowhere.
And WHERE will we take tomorrow's morning crap.
Lesson 5 of living in a van: Don't leave your bum-bag containing your passport, €50, bank card, driving license, bank card of girlfriend, phone, and camera, on the cistern of the public toilet you've found for your morning crap because you are distracted admiring the cleanliness and innovation of the flushing mechanism.
Hunting for that perfect place to stop for the night has lead us down dirt tracks through building sites, to hotel dead-ends and into private gardens, but sometimes, with fantastic luck, into the middle of the most remarkable wild.
West Coast, with our back doors open to the Atlantic, the sunset and the dolphin pods.
“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialised or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” Michel Foucault
