All Of Monday’s Reasons - 7
7. Sleazy Brindisi
Map
One rule of overnight budget train travel is that whatever the compartment smells like, that’s what your mouth is going to taste like in the morning.
It is a maddening sensation to have a paste of cheap perfume, stale cigars and southern Italian body odour lining your mouth as the first rays of sunshine filter into the carriage through the acrylic curtains.
Leaving the station with a battalion of other backpackers, Robert, Pino, the Australian and I were descended on by swarms of ticket agents, each one claiming that their shipping lines offered the best deal to Greece. We walked straight through them and headed straight for the office by the dock.
I shunned a first class ticket with private cabin, opted not for a second class ticket with shared bunks, not even a third class ticket with reclining chairs, but a fourth class deck ticket. This entitled me to as much floor space as I needed. I thought that unless it rained, which seemed unlikely, I would want to be on deck anyway. I would be more comfortable stretching out with my mat and sleeping bag than spending a rough night in an airline-style seat next to people even half as dirty as me.
My last shower had been in Barcelona and since then I had been drunk, stoned, sunbaked and I had spent way too long in the same clothes.
I started dreaming out loud of paying for a shower once I got on the boat, which would have been two pounds well spent, but Robert told me not to as it was easy to slip into one at odd times. “Dude, what are they going to do, check your ticket as you go in?”
The port town was best described by Robert: “Brindisi sucks”. For the rest of the boring day, the industrial town in the heel of the boot of Italy was referred to as “sleazy Brindisi”.
It was my third day since a shower, a hot meal and a solid night’s sleep. We sat at a plastic table outside cheap-looking cafe and ordered beers and Marguerita pizzas, cheese and tomato being the cheapest kind. While we were eating, someone one a large motorcycle rode by our table on the pavement.
“Jesus,” said Robert, “check that out. That’s a Kawasaki Ninja. Fucking nice bike. I’ll get one sometime.”
“Yeah, I had one of them,” said Pino.
“A Ninja?” I said. It was a beautiful machine.
He nodded. “Sold it for a trip to the Bahamas.”
Here was a man who took his travelling seriously.
We started talking about the various places we had been.
“I’m a real nature person, myself. An outdoorsman, I guess,” I said.
“Dude, my brother used to work as a ranger in Yellowstone. You know the park with Old Faithful? The geyser? Well that blows on the dot every half hour or something like that. That’s how it got its name.
“When my brother was fired for smoking in a no flame zone, he swore to get even. He knew the times when Old Faithful would blow, so he stole two uniforms and a big wheel valve which he planted into the ground by the geyser. He got a friend also in ranger uniform to stand with all the tourists watching. Ten seconds before it sprays, his friend looks at his watch and shouts to my brother: ‘OK Harry! LET ‘ER GO!’ at which point my brother turns the wheel and the geyser blows.
“You should have seen all the tourists rush to the park headquarters with their video cameras.”
We finished the lunch went to an overpriced supermarket to buy some food for the boat trip. I bought some soap, shampoo, chocolate and a bottle of water which cost one pound but I was charged two. I asked if there was a toilet in the supermarket and I was directed through to the storage area. On my way out stole a beer from a large collection of cases. I didn’t feel guilty because I had just been ripped off for a bottle of water which was overpriced in the first place. I didn’t have the energy to argue in a language I couldn’t speak, and besides, I could use a beer. I wondered how much this town made each day from short-changing the tourists.
We sat by a fountain and Pino and the Australian fell asleep on two long concrete blocks. Robert and I, who had managed to get some sleep the night before, were getting seriously bored. He broke the long silence.
“Well Cliff, you know what they say:” he reached into his bag. “When the going gets tough, the tough get smoking. You with me?”
Finding a squalid back street in this town was simple, and Robert rolled another joint and we spent the next hour making up Brindisi jokes which would only have been hilarious to us.
We returned to the shipping office and they bought their tickets. Their rail ticket was different from mine, and it earned them a discount on a different ferry line, so we wouldn’t be sailing together. They were on the Adriatica line and I was booked on European Seaways.
“Bad luck, dude,” Robert said to me as he paid for his ticket.
“Why?”
“Well, last time I did this run, the Adriatica boat was this huge big white ship with all these lights and cabins and two dining rooms, and the European Seaways boat was a tiny little fucking dingy.”
“Shit, really?”
“No,” he laughed, “don’t take me so seriously.”
It was time for me to go. My boat left before theirs did, so I said goodbye, wished them well and headed for the dock.
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January 30th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
How low you have stooped- stealing a beer, smoking pot, tsk tsk. Then again, how high you have flown;)