Letter from Espargal: 20 of 2009

While I am not an enthusiastic participant in funerals, I have come to recognise the merits of the Portuguese custom of despatch. This was well illustrated by the funeral last Monday of our friend and neighbour, Jose Luis.


When we arrived at the church in Benafim at the appointed time of 10.45, we found groups of men straggled around the rim of the church yard. It was hot and most of those present were grateful for what little shade was to be had.

Few women were to be seen. As we later discovered, the womenfolk were in the church, awaiting the arrival of the priest, who was late. No surprise there; few events in this country start on time.

Like those around us, we took the opportunity to catch up with the affairs of our friends and neighbours. Snatches of conversation filled the air. Most of the men wore trousers and short-sleeved shirts. There is no dress code in this country for funerals – as for concerts or banquets - apart from the immediate family, who are expected to wear black. Indeed some older widows continue clad in such drab garb for the rest of their lives. After the service, the undertakers emerged with the coffin, which they slid into the hearse.


Then, and this is the important part - the salute to the departed - all the mourners formed up in procession and followed the coffin a kilometre down the road to the cemetery. This is where the size of the crowd reveals the community’s true feelings towards the departed. Traffic comes to a respectful halt while the mourners pass. Jose Luis must have been pleased with his send-off. There were several hundred of us, Portuguese and estrangeiros, to bid him farewell.


At the cemetery, we clustered around the shallow grave, barely a metre deep, for the briefest of services. His coffin was lowered and the grave was immediately filled in. (In a few years time, his remains will be removed, to be placed in a niche, and the grave will serve another client.) We went to express our sympathies and support to his widow, Leonhilde, before making our way back to the Snack Bar Coral for a cold beer in celebration of life.

Most of the rest of the week has passed like the preceding week. Walks, watering and weeding have been the main dishes on our daily menu. Down in the valley, the tiny water melon seedlings that we saw being planted before our Canadian holiday are now producing football sized melons, thousands of them.

It was with some surprise that we heard late in the week from Barbara’s brother in the UK, Llewellyn, that his wife, Lucia, had been offered a new post in her firm. They hoped to celebrate a long weekend with us in Portugal before she began her new job.

We were at the airport to greet them on Friday morning. Ono and Prickles have learned to associate the airport with desirable arrivals and strained at their leashes to welcome all and sundry. L&L got a particularly warm welcome. From the terminal we drove ten minutes down the road to the “Electrico” (tram) snack bar on Faro beach for brunch and catch-ups.

On the way home I stopped at the Honda outlet to take a look at the new CRV that I have ordered, following the arrival in the post of a brochure advertising substantial summer discounts. The car is a silver grey (officially “Whistler Silver”) with black upholstery and a lot of bells and whistles; not that it looked like much clad in its protective white sheaths. I have asked additionally for a tow-bar to be attached and for a few other options. The car should be ready for collection early next week. We shall be trading in our 9-year old CRV.

To return to our guests; we accompanied them Friday night to a concert given in the mother church in central Loule. The catch was that the whole of the old town had been fenced off for the annual Mediterranean festival.
Those attending were required to pay a 12-euro entrance fee, which is steep by local standards. Having obtained tickets, we made our way through the crush in the narrow cobbled streets, past endless stalls hawking knick-knacks (jewellery, clothing and music, adds Jones) to the church.

(Jones complains that I have not done justice to the event, with its alternative flavours, Bohemian atmosphere and smell of hash hanging in the air. It’s life as life has been lived in bazaar towns for centuries – if that’s what you like. Certainly, lots of people did.)

The concert was lovely.I was not familiar with either of the two works, Bizet’s Symphony No 1 (which Jones says she knew well) and Voríšek’s Symphony in D Major, both of them glorious bits of music. Afterwards we found in a table in one of the numerous places to eat, and if service was slow and the ambience distinctly noisy, we didn’t much mind.

Saturday morning we took L&L around to JR’s medronho distillery at Monte Ruivo for a brief tour (which doesn’t take long as there’s just a single room) and to make some purchases.

Saturday night, Jonesy and I attended the annual banquet of the Senior University of Loule, at a splosh hotel on the coast. It’s the sort of place we visit only once a year. But the company is always good and the food delicious and it’s a rare opportunity for such as Jones to trot out their glad rags. I employ my usual jeans and party shirt. The presentations to the teachers - all volunteers - are always of some specially commissioned gift, generally in glass or metal, and this year's was a chromed glass vase, which looks much better than it sounds.

From the pupils in my English class I received a bottle of something special and a card that really takes my fancy. Judge it for yourself.

I have joined Facebook, feeling a bit like a Jew circling the Kaaba. My niece, Anita, encouraged me to do so if I wished to stay up with her life, its public face anyhow, which I do; so I complied. I have written a few notes on other Facebookians’ walls and had a few written on my own. Why the medium is so compulsive I’ve yet to discover. My suspicion is that I have just raised the average age of Facebook fans by several years.

Letter from North America: Part 4: Calgary

The final part of our holiday was really a family affair and this account concerns the two weeks (almost) that we were guests of my brother, Kevin, and his wife, Ann, at their newly-completed home on the outskirts of Calgary.

The house is set in a new community, surrounded by gently rolling hills for about as far as the eye can see. If there’s one thing Canada has lots of, it’s space. The space starts where the city ends and goes on seemingly for ever, or at least as far as the distant Rockies.

Kevin and Ann had recently returned from Chicago, where they’d been based for several years. They are enthusiastic about the work of the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and spent a lot of time and effort planning and building a house in his style.

When we arrived at the start of June, the house itself was complete. Landscape gardeners were building paths and laying out the grounds. Islands of trees and shrubs rose among the planned areas of lawn. Bringing in a garden team is a common practice in Calgary, where the growing season is short and the climate tends to dictate the pattern of life.

The team worked long days, often with bare torsos in the warm sunshine. They brought in heavy machinery to manicure the land into the gentle slopes needed to deal with the snow accumulation and run-off. Grown trees and shrubs were planted and the areas mulched; an irrigation system was installed and finally several large loads of rolled turf were trucked in to give an instant lawn.

Well, not quite instant! It took two days and half a night to roll out the sod. A digger would carry a palette of turf around to the workers, who lugged the rolls further. (Only specialist nurseries actually plant grass!) Everything in the garden has to be done and dusted in the short summer months.

Particular care was given to the building of a water-feature on a sunny patio at the corner of the house. Water bubbles out of the top of a large rock and tumbles down the side into a reservoir beneath a layer of river stones. A garden table, chairs and brolly were moved in once the feature was complete - to the evident satisfaction of the owner.

On the road, trucks equipped with a large, pyramidal apparatus grunted up and down bearing fully-grown trees. We walked up to a nearby property to watch them in action. Large triangular blades on this apparatus are used to dig a hole. The process takes less than a minute.

Then the truck carts off the soil and returns a little later clutching a tree in the grip of the same apparatus. The tree is lowered into the hole, the blades of the machine are withdrawn and the truck moves on to dig another hole. By nightfall, a bare patch of ground can be converted into a mini-forest. The process is quite extraordinary to behold.

REAR VIEW
The Benson house occupies two and a bit levels. The lower level, a walk-out basement, is given over to family visitors - three married children and 6 grandchildren in Calgary as well as more distant relatives.


The lay-out is open plan, with a spacious lounge, dining-room and kitchen/ kitchenette both upstairs and down. The lower lounge doubles as a mini-movie theatre. Our hosts live upstairs, which is the entry level to the house.

Kevin has his office one level higher in a tower, which rises from the centre of the house. The three levels are connected by a small elevator, wonderful for shifting furniture or suitcases, as well as stairs. A three-car garage - some houses have four - is integrated into the design.

We loved the house, as did the other visitors. I found it a little scary how soon we came to take its spaciousness for granted. The building is as comfortable to inhabit as it is pleasing to the eye, which is more than can be said for many of the mansions around it. The latest insulating methods have been employed to keep running costs low.

Our days in Calgary didn’t really have a pattern. Barbara and I generally tried to take a walk, often around the lake at the centre of the community, with a refreshment stop at the small shopping centre on the far side. Once or twice, we were joined by my sister, Catherine, who flew in from Germany for the family reunion, and later her daughter, Anita, who is completing her Master’s studies at Essex University.

ANITA

Kevin was caught up in the bureaucracy of his return from the US to Canada. The most complicated bit was migrating back his vehicles – three cars and an RV. Canada is hugely fussy about the condition of any such vehicles, which have to undergo any manufacturer recalls before their return.

Once the tax has been agreed and paid at the border, the vehicles are subject to two inspections – provincial and federal – before new licence plates are issued. The process is ponderous, drawn-out and largely dependent on the goodwill of the officials concerned for its success. It is also subject to deadlines. So we did a lot of running around to motor dealers and inspection stations, with numerous stops at Starbucks outlets. Spare hours were spent in large (Chapters) book stores, a real pleasure.

It would be fair to add that Kevin is a car enthusiast. His Audi R4 is the delight of his life (along with his wife, Ann, naturally). Ann drives a comfortable Mercedes and the diesel-engined Jeep is the family workhorse, often employed to tow a trailer that lives at a barn on a rural property some ten minutes away.


The trailer was hitched up during our stay to fetch a load of flat-pack cupboards/ drawers from one of Calgary’s big retail outlets and later to remove piles of cardboard wrappings to a recycling centre. I gave Kev a hand to put the cupboards together, and to line them up along the back wall of his garage.

My brother maintains a very-well equipped workshop. He and Ann often spend weekends away assisting an American car-racing team in which they’ve been involved for a number of years.

The rest of the Calgary family live within easy reach and often dropped in for a meal.

The “grandies” would occupy themselves with the collection of toys that are kept for the purpose. Parents and grandparents, when not involved in building models or playing games, kept an eye on proceedings and occasionally the peace.

We lived in style. Jones and I needed mobile phones to communicate across the vast bed that we occupied in the principal guestroom. (She was virtually invisible under the covers, as you can see.) A bottle of aged malt whisky awaited our evening attentions and the wine cellar was raided nightly for refreshments to accompany the meal that Ann generally cooked for us. Alternatively, Kevin would barbeque on the spacious upper deck that overlooked the back garden. Our part was to be appreciative.

The garden merges with a copse that fringes the rear of the property and slopes away to guarantee its privacy. A path winds down to a fire-pit, intended for roasting marshmallows or similar (on such occasions that the myriad mosquitoes permit).

Deer are to be seen wandering through the area and we twice spotted coyote nearby. The latter, whose eerie howls sometimes fill the night, have emulated Britain’s foxes in making themselves at home in urban areas. People are well advised to keep their cats indoors and to walk small dogs only on leads.

Twice we joined my niece, Penny (and husband, Mike) at the community “soccer matches” that involve hundreds of children in their suburb, including their two young sons. Up to age 10 or thereabouts, boys and girls compete together. Teams are colour-coded and coached by a parent volunteer.

The kids rush up and down the field with great vigour, cheered on from the side-lines. Goals are greeted with all the enthusiasm of a World Cup final. It’s a hoot. Before or after the game, or both, we'd gather at Penny's house close by for a light meal and a game of cards.

And so the days passed, melting one into another - like the snow that fell one night - until the Friday of our return. It wasn’t a good day.

On our way to the airport we ran into wicked traffic congestion – the result of several accidents – that extended our travelling time from 40 minutes to nearly two hours. Although we arrived 50 minutes before take-off, we found the flight closed and missed the plane.

So we had to beg an additional night’s hospitality (willingly conceded) from our hosts. We were able to rebook for the following day and had the unexpected and welcome consolation of an upgrade on the way home. The dogs were at Faro airport to meet us, along with our trusty house-sitters. And there, for the moment, our travels end.

Letter from North America: Part 3. Whistler & Coast

Mid-morning we signed out a rental car and threaded our way across the city, through Stanley Park and over Lion’s Gate Bridge in the direction of Whistler.
On a good day one should be able to reach Whistler in a little over an hour. But the road was everywhere being widened or repaired in advance of the 2010 winter Olympics. So our progress was slow. At times we came to a dead halt. We lunched in the mid-point town of Squamish, which seems to serve largely as a dormitory town for the area.

Mid-afternoon we pulled into the driveway of the Belle Neige B&B. We were welcomed by Sola, the Swiss Mountain Dog, and conducted by Myrna, the co-owner, to the very comfortable little apartment where we were to stay for the following three nights. There were delightful views over Myrna's garden and the valley below. Sola never barked, we were informed, unless there were black bears in the garden. The latter came for the berries but were not otherwise obtrusive. Happily, Sola never barked and we saw only birds in the garden.

A sign on the wall warned residents not to smoke. Canadians take smoking seriously. All sorts of buildings have signs warning the public not to light up within two metres of the doors. Our hotels informed us that substantial additional charges would be added to our bills if our rooms had to be cleansed of the effects of tobacco smoke.

The B&B was located in an area known as Alpine Meadows, about 5 kms from the actual resort at Whistler Village. Looking forward to a little exercise, we set out along a series of trails that wind their way through the area. They are used mainly by bikers, who whizzed past us. We needed a little help from passers by at intersections during a walk that took 90 minutes. It was hot, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

Whistler Village is pedestrianised, full of the usual food, clothing and equipment stores, all at ski resort prices. In fact we found prices generally in British Columbia to be much higher than those we were used to back home. At the top of the village were the gondolas to the twin mountains, Whistler and Blackcomb.

Skiers and snowboarders were still using the upper runs on Whistler – due to shut at the end of May. Runs on Blackcomb had already been closed for the season. But the few remaining winter sports enthusiasts were vastly outnumbered by mountain bikers, who were riding up in the gondola and speeding down the lower slopes of the mountain.

The next time we walked into the village, we took a much prettier route through the woods, past the float planes tied to the piers on Green Lake and around the Jack Nicklaus golf course. (A ball bounced off the woodwork of a bridge that we were crossing and splashed into the lake.) I loved watching the floatplanes take off and land. Anglers fished for the trout that populated the lake. Instruction boards informed fishermen that they needed licences, were not permitted to use bait and had to return any catches to the water. Fishing was for sport only.

Each evening we’d stop off at the corner café at the Alpine Meadows turn-off for a coffee or a beer. Around us the youth of the neighbourhood would gather, athletic young men along with their honey-limbed, strapless-top-clad lassies. Few arrived on foot. The preferred modes of transport were bicycle, skateboard and - for those who'd made some progress in life -a grunting V-8 pick-up.

One facility not to be found in Whistler is a laundry. The information centre told us that there was one 10 minutes down the road at Creekside. By sheer luck we filled up at a service station opposite a hostel in which the laundry was based. The bottom floor of the hostel was a diner. It was noisy and busy Waitresses scuttled up and down the tables with huge plates of eggs and fries. On the weekend, they told us, the lines stretched way back from the door. Jones and I shared a blueberry pancake. It was our introduction to this great American institution.

An hour north of Whistler lies the agricultural town of Pemberton, where Niki Madigan runs the old museum. Visitors are free to stroll around unescorted.

I was fascinated by the old machinery in the yard, especially the ancient McCormick tractor. Gold miners had once passed through the town on their way to the fabled riches further north. In one room was a giant carving of a mosquito, an insect that had tormented the miners. And there were plenty of the little bloodsuckers in the museum, anxious to feed on us.


We visited the Nairn falls, just south of the town, walking the two kilometres along a dusty trail to the river. Indians (now known as the First Nations) and miners had followed the same route, according to the information boards.

The falls themselves were thunderous rather than high. Huge volumes of water tumbled through a narrow gorge, swirling and frothing into the river below. A cloud of spray drifted across the cliffs above the falls.

After three days in Whistler, we drove south again, this time to the large ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, just north of Vancouver. Our destination was an hotel in Gibson's Landing, across the bay on a stretch known as Canada's Sunshine Coast. There's no road access from greater Vancouver to this area. To travel north, you have to take a ferry (or two, depending on how far you want to go).

The terminal was an impressive affair. Two or three ferries could berth simultaneously. The bigger ones, serving Vancouver Island, were boats of several thousand tons, taking hundreds of vehicles into their cavernous maws. Vehicles were loaded (and unloaded) simultaneously from upper and lower decks, cars above and heavier traffic below.

Our ferry shed its load in ten minutes and reloaded in another ten. The voyage across the bay took 40 minutes. At the opposite terminal, the performance was repeated just as quickly. Most remarkably, the ferries had bridges and prows at either end, so that they never needed to turn around.

The Sunshine Coast is a summer playground, an area of beaches, bays, lakes, coves, rivers, trails and forests. The most beautiful houses are semi-hidden in the trees in little villages all along the coast. We spent a day travelling north as far as we could, short of taking another ferry.


One of the sights to behold is the Skookumchuk tidal bore - where narrowing straits force the tidal flows into a riptide wave. It's one of nature's minor wonders but well worth the effort nonetheless.

There's a coffee and bun house, built of wood and run by a Dutch couple at the start of the trail - and well worth a stop. The man of the house told us how he'd built the place with his own hands, a dream come true, as he put it. The coffee was excellent and the muffins even better.

To get to the straits, one has to trek an hour along a forest trail, hoping that the recently-sighted bear in the vicinity has taken itself off. We didn't see any bears, just a few other hikers.

The following morning, we were up early to catch the first ferry back to Horseshoe Bay and to return our rental car to the depot in Vancouver. From there we flew to Calgary for the last part of our holiday.