Monthly Archives: October 2012

Waiting for the ferry

The following piece was inspired by the above photograph, taken at Rostock in northern Germany:

At the ferry port the vehicles line up in rows beneath the enormous floodlights that will make the scene as bright as daytime as soon as darkness falls. Families pile out of overloaded cars – playing cards and pillows, crumbled magazines and half-eaten biscuits, fall onto the tarmac as doors open – whilst lorry drivers lean patiently against open windows or watch films on laptops balanced on the dashboard. A coach driver bows to pressure from the back rows and releases the smokers with a pneumatic hiss of the doors, and the foot passengers and bike riders sit on wooden picnic tables lined up by the raised footbridge, next to a row of brilliant blue portaloos.

If travel is as much about the journey as the destination, and anticipation of what is to come heightens the experience when we finally get there, then waiting is part of the deal. Train stations, airports, ferry terminals and even service stations become the moments where the journey must pause, and we find ourselves killing time before we can get on the move again. Sometimes you hear these places – especially airports and service stations – described as neutral, or nowhere zones, because they are designed with a certain uniformity, or they do not necessarily reflect their surroundings. But ask any frequent flier about airports and they will tell you their favourites, the places they are happy to transit through and those which they avoid if they can possibly help it.

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Swallows and Amazons, Red Devils, and Alntorps Island

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When I was younger I loved the Swallows and Amazons series of books. It was not so much the “adventure” aspect, but the fact that the things the kids got up to, and the dangers they faced along the way, were so completely believable. Of course, even my younger self got recognise that this was another world that Arthur Ransome was writing about – from the freedom granted to the children to the gender politics expressed in the stories – but I think that the books and the stories told therein were massively influential in the games that we would play each summer in Rhoscolyn.

We were from a few different families and we called ourselves the Red Devils. We mapped the headland and (with Capt’n Rob) took to the high seas, went exploring and made a magazine… it is amazing to think back now about the range of ages in the group, and somehow we all managed to play together as we created our own world in and around Cerrig-yr-adar and the Outdoor Alternative campsite.

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Along the cliffs – Cabo de Gata, Spain

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Our route took us out from San Jose, along a dusty, windswept valley until we began a steep climb up a crumbling track to a lookout point just below an old tower, where once they would light fires to pass messages and warning signals along the coastline. We paused for a moment, to catch our breath and to look back towards the town. The night before we had eaten fish down by the harbour and walked through the quiet streets towards our hotel. It was spring, and there was not much happening in the town, as everyone took to their local bars or their living rooms to watch Madrid in the Champions League.

The coastal path took us north, above jagged and dramatic cliffs, finding its way between the water and the dormant volcanos that give this corner of the national park such a distinctive look. The track had once been a mine road, and we came across abandoned buildings and old quarries that were a reminder of an industrial past in this corner of Andalucia. But all was quiet now, and in the ten kilometres we walked between San Jose and the Castillo San Felipe, where waves crashed against salt-eroded stone walls, we did not meet a single soul.

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Platform 17 at the Grunewald Station, Berlin

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As the S-Bahn swings south at Charlottenburg and heads for Potsdam, the cityscape shifts from six-storey buildings and balconies upon which satellite dishes are precariously balanced to one of detached houses with the occasional, modest apartment block here and there, and the wide expanse of the forest, through which it is possible to glimpse the odd dwelling, tucked away between the trunks and beneath the branches like a fairy-tale cabin.

The S-Bahn drops us on the platform of the Grunewald Station, and we take the steps down to a long brick tunnel that runs beneath the tracks. We emerge into the daylight. At a kiosk cyclists sit lyric clad and lightly sweating, drinking bottles of water and licking ice creams. In front of the station entrance is a cobble-stoned turning circle, a drop off point for the trains into town. You can picture the early days of the railway, when the city still felt separate from this community, as the merchants and bankers caught the Berlin train for another day amassing the wealth upon which these tree-shaded villas were built. But more than that you can picture a very different train, and a memory of this suburban station that is altogether darker.

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