Europe @ 2.4 km/h (54 page)

‘Europe’ is popular here. Portugal may still be overlooked by Spain, for whom it is ‘not very important’, but the Union allows it to regard its fellow European nations as equals — except that, on this day, Portugal itself becomes the first among equals. And the politicians? No-shows, the lot of them. Having said they signed the treaty for the good of the European people, they’re exhibiting a curious reluctance to mingle with their masters.

1580-1582 km

These mid-December days, the weather continues crisp. But tonight, as I overlook Lisbon from the heights, the heavens open. I shelter till the storm has abated before descending the cobbled streets of the Castelo quarter and the narrower lanes of Alfama. The cloudburst has emptied these old thoroughfares, so traffic is no problem. But it is late, and unless I make it to the railway station soon I risk missing the last train and not arriving back at the hostel till dawn. I abruptly call a halt to such pessimistic thoughts. Watch yourself, Ken, you’re becoming Portuguese.

1584-1588 km

With help, I board a ‘non-accessible’ tram from central Lisbon out to Belém (I really am living dangerously now). The joys of this dormitory suburb of Lisbon are bundled together, close enough to enjoy them all in one afternoon and evening.

Mosteiro dos Jerónimos is Portugal’s most sacred space, the ‘home church’ of the nation. To the left, as you enter, is the tomb of Portugal’s Shakespeare and Dante combined, Luís Vaz de Camões (1524/5-1580). Keeping him company is Vasco da Gama, not just a shopping mall but, all in all, ‘the Portuguese navigator who established the sea link between Portugal and India (1497-1498), thus setting a new trade route which, for over a century, would grant the Portuguese supremacy in the Indian Ocean’.

Less than 200 metres separates this august church from the home of Belém’s contribution to Portuguese snack heaven. For here are bakery-restaurants the size of churches where the
pastéis de
Belém
— a crusty-topped custard tart guaranteed to make your eyes water — has been made since the 1830s. Hundreds of people occupy gilded dining rooms in the most popular of these institutions, the Confeitaria de Belém. Sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, the tarts are every bit as addictive as everyone told me they would be.

My European journey has been long on culture but short on sport, and this will not do in the continent where the world game first flourished. Tonight Belém is at home to the most successful and famous Portuguese football club of all, Benfica — and it appears everyone who follows the game here is expecting a walkover. I, on the other hand, am expecting an uphill push, and wondering if it will all prove a waste of time. For one thing, it’s chilly and I’m not wearing a jacket. What could I have been thinking? Outside the ground a public thermometer says it’s 9 ºC, but I know 4 ºC when I feel it.

Stopping by a merchandise barrow that would be familiar to any footy fan back home, I ignore the mascots and assorted literature in favour of a wiser purchase, a scarf. But which scarf would that be? Belém the underdogs and whipping boys, or Benfica the league’s success story? ‘Oh, it doesn’t really matter,’ I tell the barrow lady whose quizzical look reminds me she can’t possibly understand what I’m saying — and then, recollecting whose home turf I’m on, I point to a blue-and-white scarf and choose. ‘Belém,
obrigado
.’

Beside me at the barrow, a Dutchman a long way from
his
home turf asks if I’d like help to complete the climb. ‘Sure,’ I say, in the knowledge that watching the game in company will be twice as much fun. Spectating in Europe — even in ‘poor’ Portugal — is a costly business these days. A ticket seller at the members’ kiosk says as non-members we must pay €40 (A$67) each and, just as we’re digesting this kick in the guts, a Belem club official marches up and asks if he can help. This official must have clout. He talks a couple of duty police officers into lifting me up a dozen steps, and gets us both a balcony spot in one of the grandstands.

Jos says the pre-match expectation round town has been of a 5-1 whitewash. But, for whatever reason, Belem has more of the ball in the first half and conventional wisdom no longer seems so wise. Twenty-five minutes into the second session, Belém’s No. 7 — Weldon — boots the ball into the net from a wicked angle and the stand erupts. A beer-gutted drunken slob (but one of ours) tosses a plastic chair over the boundary fence and has no idea how lucky he is that the police react with self-restraint. The whole side lifts, and Benfica proceed to play like the losers they are. Leaving the ground after the match, Jos and I congratulate each other on our foresight in backing the winning team, and I wear my scarf proudly home — no fear.

1592-1601 km

Mario, one of the receptionists at my Lisbon hostel, looks a lugubrious Portuguese, but he’s really a deep thinker, or what the French call
un
homme seriéux
. So it’s a great relief when his first response to my desperate request of him to drive me to the end of Europe is to smile. Otherwise, the last 40 km of my transcontinental voyage could only be bridged by a budget-busting taxi ride or sticking out my thumb and trusting to luck. No public transport goes there. I cannot believe my good fortune when Mario says that not only does he have Sunday morning and early afternoon off but he is a former tour guide at the hilltop resort of Sintra and would be pleased to take me there en route.

Sintra is a Portuguese Katoomba, with holiday houses, mansions and manors dotted throughout. But nothing can compare with the
folie de grandeur
known as Quinta da Regaleira. Quinta’s centrepiece is an 18th-century palace in the Manueline style (named after a Portuguese king). Just over 100 years ago, a new owner with an unlimited interior and exterior design budget ordered a set of grandiose new structures, including a ‘mini-cathedral’, and lined the garden walks with his choice of classical statuary. I could have spent twice as long at Quinta but Mario understood my impatience to be off, with the end of my long road beckoning. So, after bidding a former colleague goodbye, Mario retook the wheel and aimed his car at the coast.

Having checked my speedometer before we hit the road, I now consulted my travel diary as the car headed west, and essayed some final computations. In seven-and-a-half months I had pushed 1600.8 km, half the distance from Sydney to Perth. My initial daily range of 4.5 km (in Russia) had surpassed 7 km a day by early December but the cobbled ways of Évora and old-town Lisbon ultimately brought this back to 6.97 km a day. Including the distance pushed, I had covered more than 26,000 km, or five-eighths the circumference of the globe. (That my pushing accounts for just one-sixteenth of this may sound puny, but my biceps beg to differ.) Turning to my accounts, I now saw that the French restaurants (and others) forgone had allowed me to come in 21 eurocents (a mere 35 Australian cents) a day under budget.

Calculations done, I looked up. My inner child wanted to yell,
When do we get there?
Sure, I set out to cross Europe the long way, but there shouldn’t be as much of it as this. Europe is the smallest continent after all! And then, just when I was sure we must have taken a wrong turn, the bushes parted. We entered a gravel drive and parked. Since our destination was one of Europe’s extremities, you’d expect a lighthouse — and so there was. From our car seats we could hear the pounding of waves, like the roar of distant cannon. A few ‘steps’ more and I’d have made it.

Directly I am back in the chair, we crunch our way across a stone path fringed by Hottentot fig — a South African gorse that has proliferated here without natural competitors (reverse colonisation, it occurs to me) — and the realisation dawns that we, too, are planted by the vast Atlantic. My eyes are drawn to a cairn that looks for all the world as if it’s been waiting for me. Chiselled into it are the first two lines of the poem that has been tugging at my memory ever since Tarifa. By Camões, the poet whose tomb I saw less than 24 hours ago, it reads:

Here is where the land ends

And the sea begins.

This much leads on to words that have slumbered in memory for years beyond recall:

The land says to the sea

There is no more of me.

At some level I was always heading for this point, this resolution at the end of my long road. You may think it mystical if I say it was my Fate. But then you know, as we Portuguese say, there are no coincidences.

On 16 December 2007, my 230th day out of Tallinn, I sit on a slate fence at Cabo da Roca, Portugal, the
Ponta Mais Ocidentale
do Continente Europeu
— the westernmost point of Europe (latitude 38º 47' N, longitude 9º 30' W). East to west, from Archangelsk, I’ve come almost one-seventh of the way around the globe. For ten minutes I survey the wild surf beaches north and south, and, in my mind’s eye, the vast hinterland behind me which somehow I’ve managed to cross from another, even wilder sea. And gazing out at the Atlantic, visited by the ultimate epiphany, I become aware in an instant — and only after the voyage has ended — what its purpose, what my quest, has been.

It was a year — a journey — anyone could have had. The year I disappeared into the Russian Outback, snorted snuff in Murmansk, cruised the fjords and fished in one too, confronted a polar bear armed only with a sword (the bear, that is: I was defenceless), became a house guest to a family of bank robbers, tracked the Loch Ness monster down to a Swedish lake, and the Swedish sense of humour to its lair; missed out on all the Nobel Prizes (again); wrestled tigers;
⁵²
rode the Vertical Death Drop; saw fireworks at Copenhagen’s Tivoli (and more of them in Lisbon); went up the Rhine, down the Elbe and up the Eiffel Tower; was homeless in Paris when not at the Louvre; wheeled
sur
le pont d’Avignon
but left the dancing to others; tried my luck at Monte Carlo; pushed it everywhere else; slept in a monastery on the Med and a nunnery at Lourdes; promenaded at Biarritz; drank cider with the Basques; scaled the Rock; was the man in the arena, no bull; and
Ode to Joy
was the soundtrack to it all.