Author: albarclay

The culture shock is still quite frequent as I drive around this far flung Kingdom. This morning on the way in to work I saw three men in full Bedouin robes riding camels through the desert by the roadside. Having never been in a desert until about a week ago, it still surprises me to be surrounded by sand most of the time, and seeing things that are so ancient still happening. Opening up the Geocaching app out of curiosity as I drove home I saw that there are some petroglyphs in a cave off the road to Tabuk that are perhaps 12000 years old. You need a 4×4 or a death wish to drive 5 kilometres into the desert when the sun is going down and you’re tired. I am just happy to know they are there.

Today it was cold despite the bright sun. Tonight it’ll be freezing. The wind was blowing sharp through our clothes on site, although not hard enough to start deconstructing the place again. We were avoiding the outside where possible though. I tended to work in my car with the door open for air when I was there.

At my feet, constantly seeking in the sand, the distinctive and unusual long legged tok-tok beetles roamed. They shoot out a nasty smell if you mess with them. They look like bad drawings of spiders.

In the air I saw the occasional bird of prey – perhaps carrion birds. Not so many small carrion birds by the road but pickings are good. People whip down them despite the cameras. I saw a dead cat first thing yesterday and a dead dog first thing today. The beetles will get what the kites don’t want and the desert will crumble the rest to dust.

I went to scout a local petrol station. Coming from Tabuk the nearest station is about 60 kilometers from site. I thought it worth seeing if a closer desert station I saw on the map a little deeper into Bedouin territory and away from town was open. 18km down a dusty straight road and it turned out to be a good one, with decent prices, frequented by the local cops who rumble up and down the desert roads all day. Some Google translate and sign language eventually led to them agreeing to accept my visa card so long as I bribed them 20 riyals and walked next door to where there’s wireless internet. I followed the guy and stopped for a moment fascinated by a van full of camels. I took a photograph and was immediately jumped by two small boys in traditional brown robes. They clearly wanted me to pay if I was taking photographs of their father’s camel. I stopped snapping and told the guy to bump it up another 5 for the kids. Free enterprise. Here’s my 5 riyal shot … 5 riyals is about 10p. I like camels. This one has a cute little knitted mask.

The exchange rate is favourable here, from pounds. Dominos charges 29 for two pizzas. That’s about six quid. You can barely get anything for that in the UK. We have habitually been overpaying horribly for our dough.

All the cars here are white or silver, which makes it very easy to forget where you parked. I’m going to go and find my wheels. I’ve got to pick up some guy from the airport in half an hour at 1am, and then another guy at 6. Fun.

This city of Tabuk lies to the west of the vast Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To get to work in the morning it is about an hour’s drive for me, with just twenty minutes in the city. After that the buildings start to tail off until the desert begins in earnest.

First of all we drive across a border. “Toll road,” says Google Maps, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong about a lot around here but no surprises – this afternoon I was driving on a road when it just… ceased to be entirely and I was looking at a mesa and an improvised turning circle.

“Neom,” says the border. A compound word. “Neo” for “New”. “M” from “Mustaqbal” – “future”. Neom: A new future.

We are in this huge “Neom” area that has been allocated for one of the most ambitious projects I have ever heard of. An alleged $500 billion earmarked to build the sustainable automated city that those 1980’s picture books promised us we’d be living in by now. “Would you like your shirt pressed?” says robot Jeeves. “No thank you robot Jeeves, I shall be wearing this fluorescent pvc onesie.” Flying self driving cars. Big tall robot buildings. An artificial moon? Everything powered by renewable energy. A vision of clean sharp newtopia…?

By 2025 they aim to have a line of this incredible projected city built in this area, starting at the Red Sea and pulling into the desert, a new city – a new state – a new country perhaps? 26,500 square kilometres. Mountains and seas. Renewable energy purifying sea water. Maybe 1 million citizens? An airport, of course. Somewhere to park your flying car. And coral. The coral of The Red Sea bordering Neom has displayed unique resilience in the face of warming seawater. It has developed biological defences that have so far saved vast tracts of it in conditions that would bleach it anywhere else. Can we teach other corals…? Either way, look after it…

The Neom project – they are sponsoring football and other sports to get people to put it on their radar. They are working hard with the PR, as one must in this modern world. This race is all part of awareness raising – because as with so many huge projects, controversy is always on the heels. Gotta keep it spinning the right way. The sustainable angle of the Neom project – and with this desert wind and sun I can see why they thought of it – it aligns with the guys I’m working with here and what they’re doing.

The race is electric. Spec silhouette electric SUVs racing in remote parts of the world. All teams have one male and one female driver. This is racing in the now. They try to raise awareness of climate change as part of their brief. They are doing good and doing races at the same time. Big fast fun events in incredible places with an eye to the environment… The team I’m on the edge of is highly skilled in this sort of thing. They did it in Greenland for crying out loud. I was doing Willows or I could’ve made it out there. I wish I had. As it is I get to be in the sun in February, plugging into something unique and bizarre and interesting for the future of speed. It feels like a continuation of the legacy in some way. One of dad’s obituaries called him “the Godfather of speed”. I’m glad to be in a weird place surrounded by fast things. I feel closer to his memory.

Out there in the desert I found a perfectly round stone underfoot. A reminder of how time shifts everything. This desert was underwater in the late Cretaceous. Until maybe about 60 million years ago the oceans rolled and smoothed this round stone that I stood on. Then it lay there in the sand until just now when I put it in my pocket. There have been ice ages in the life of this stone. There have been times we have been cooked and burnt and poisoned. Our perspective is too shallow to really ever properly understand geological time, planetary time, time that is longer than our miniscule three score years and ten. There are inevitable shifts that our sustained neglect and selfish behaviours are catalysing. I’ve pocketed this sea forged desert stone to help me remember to be less of a selfish tit on a personal level. And to switch the fecking lights off…

Dust storm. It gets everywhere. Everywhere. This will be the last journey of my Camino boots. I’ve clung onto them for ages now. I made a pair of Brashers last a decade, but these boots are pretty much the only footwear I ever put on these days. I can hear them screaming right now. They are caked in dust. Stones are burrowing into all the seals. Add to that they’re getting a bit ripe. They’re not gonna improve. I logged way too many steps on the Fitbit today, trying to redress wind damage.

The gale was up in the desert. My fingers and my face feel tacky with sandblow. Room service gave me a towel yesterday but they took it back this morning when I was at work. I can’t even have a shower. I want a bath and beer. They’re being weird about giving me another towel.. I’m going out for food.

If they would let me in the shops I’d buy a towel. And a bedside lamp. This hotel is shit.

They have a terrible contact tracing app in Saudi that doesn’t work for me, so if they ask to see the app I can’t go into the shop. And they always ask to see the app and often they’re very bolshy if I try to pretend that I think they are saying hello, or any of the other many tactics I have attempted.

I’ll likely have to buy something through the door of some place. I was lucky with the yemeni food yesterday.

—

Pizza without tomato. Damn. Still, it’s edible. And filling. Just boring. I didn’t really know what I was ordering once again.

I’m not thinking very coherently right now. I’m absolutely exhausted. That desert wind…

I have never been happier about the fact that masks are everywhere at the moment. They would probably have been issued at site entrance even before Covid. You can see the sheets of flying sand coming before they engulf you. Putting a mask on makes it a bit less of a “duck and cover” situation, but if the zephyr is shifting you’ll want as little of that sand in contact with your face as possible.

My lips are very chapped and my eyes are sunglasses panda. I look like I’ve been in an oven. I kind of have been. A fan assisted oven full of sand.

I spent way too long trying to stop things from blowing away into the desert. Big bits of cardboard, lumps of polystyrene, surprised elephants, flags, speed limit signs, bin bags, sand bags, cars, horses, me. I’d gather them up and try to secure them or return them or roll them or tie them down. The emergency assembly point flag was never gonna stay up unless I could find some cables and guys and a mallet, but I was too tired to think by the time that started happening. Every time I disposed of a big bit of rubbish another one would blow across from somewhere else and I’d put my foot on it and then something else would jump up and start scudding across site. Most people there have a sort of base. I don’t, apart from my car, and I prefer not to sit in it with the engine running, so I just pounded the ground… On the plus side, a fortnight like that and I’ll lose a stone. And what an absolute joy to be tanned in February. Problem is I sent a self tape just before I flew out. Best get the lotion out and some chapstick. If only they would fucking let me go into a fucking shop. These casting decisions can be arbitrary and I don’t want to look too different from how I looked when I recorded the scene… Hey ho.. It’s not like I have a great deal of choice in a desert dust storm.

At least I got a towel and had a shower.

Bed.

I wake up too early, too early, too early, but actually it’s late. I was never gonna get on site before noon after that late night and jumpy rest.

I eject into my shiny white hyundai and hit the road. The road is hot. The road is lawless. This is what happens when you don’t let women drive! Everybody is just honking and overtaking and pulling out suddenly and stopping. If somebody is in the fast lane and you want to overtake, it’s ok – just make a new lane!! You can fit. It’s fine! It’s totally fine. Just be honk and be lucky yeah?

As I pull onto the 88, the police and military are working together to pull apart a recent messy eight car pileup. Everybody drives around and through it as opportunities arise, joyfully tooting their horns. This is clearly just a normal Tuesday morning here. “Only 8 cars? Just 2 dead people? Great. Less paperwork than usual. Are the cars salvageable?”

This is despite the roads being monitored to a level I’ve never seen before. “We got £6000 worth of traffic fines in one day here once,” I am told. Cameras are everywhere and if you can’t read Arabic numbers you’re guessing the speed limit as often as not – and be sure that the speed of other cars is no benchmark. If they know the camera is there they are still likely to do something ridiculous like accelerate hard at the camera and then slam the brake last minute.

Occasionally there’s a harsh speedbump just hanging out in the middle of a stretch of 120kph road as well. I’m taking it easy as I head out into the desert this first morning. I’m driving with motorbike principles. “You’re invisible and everybody is trying to kill you.” The cameras face the car and they are hard to see. Google maps hasn’t got them marked. Gotta be careful even without the homicidal driving culture.

Still, a long straight glorious desert road. There’s a sign with a picture of a camel and suddenly there’s about twenty wild camels just wandering around near the road. I don’t stop, even though I’ve never seen a wild camel before. I’m smiling about it still as I arrive on site while it’s still morning. Wristband on. Into the unknown.

We are building a racetrack.

The desert is a great big pile of sand. There’s life. Stray dogs. Beetles. Flies. Some birds. And camels of course. But many humans can’t cope with the freedom to just go anywhere. So the most active part of the day today is spent partitioning bits of desert into car parking areas by hauling around great big bits of fencing. A good day for suntan and Fitbit. A bad day for jetlag.

As I drive off site I stop a moment in a roadside parking bay in order to just … catch the sun setting over my first day in the desert.

Then it’s back into the mess of Tabuk traffic.

This evening I wandered by random into a Yemeni restaurant and ordered something with sign language. It turned out to be lamb chops and prawns with rice.

Duolingo Arabic is still trying to teach me the alphabet by phonetically breaking down Western names like “George”. It’s useless. Of all the Duolingo courses I’ve dipped into this is by far the least practical. By now I should be able to say “Hello woman, the boy cat eats the girl’s ball thank you. Drink?@” I can say that in about six European languages now and bits of it are useful. For Arabic I can just about recognise writing that sounds like “duur”. They didn’t even bother telling me it reads from right to left which made it incomprehensible at first. And I have no meaning for “duur”. And I don’t need to write Arabic.

Even reading numbers would have been a more useful starting point. I still can’t properly understand the speed limit. I’ve learnt greetings now and thank you. But I still can’t say eat or drink…

First thing in the morning, in the short stay car park at Heathrow, I gave the keys to Bergman to a complete stranger by the name of Jabil – I took a selfie with him and then watched him drive away.

He didn’t have me on his job sheet. He took the car though. “Is there anything you can show me to put my mind at rest? This feels a little bit like I’m just … giving my car to a stranger…” He showed me some numbers on his mobile screen… I had a plane to catch. If Bergman has been put into a container and shipped off for a respray, the trail will be three weeks cold by the time I get back from here. Fingers crossed he’s honest.

A long flight to Riyadh. I passed the time watching atrocious movies that I’d never normally be able to justify watching. Justice League, anyone? Mister Magorium? We flew over Tabuk a good hour before we landed. I watched it go by on the map. That’s my destination. Now I’m flying back the way I came in a smaller plane. Not the most efficient but hey it’s the only option I was given.

Riyadh was a carpet of lights out the window.

That’s all I got of it. Huge and flat and in grids, and brightly organised and flowing. I didn’t have any time to leave the airport and take in the sights though. I had to get out through international security. First a stern man with a temperature monitor for fever. Then a succession of inscrutable faces, mostly with heads covered in that familiar red and white headdress. Eventually I am fingerprinted and stamped and I’m through. Then I have to walk past men with dogs and x-ray all my bags for exit. Then through customs and nothing to declare. Finally the automatic doors open and there’s a crowd of men in front of me squashing to the barrier.

I try to travel in a suit when I’m traveling internationally. It raises my chances of an upgrade. Plus it’s easier than packing the thing. I also have a trilby on. This get-up makes me something of a target. The first word somebody addresses to me, less than a second after I emerge from the secure door, is “taxi?”. I decline. Three seconds later I get another offer. This is like Thailand. The second guy follows me. Asks where I’m going. I tell him I’m ok. I am trying to orient myself though and he can see it. “Domestic departures? Come in taxi.” I assure him I’m ok. Even though I haven’t a clue where I’m going. I’ve got hours before my connecting flight leaves. I shake him off firmly but politely and walk in completely the wrong direction with purpose.

Eventually I go back on myself and find a sign that says “shuttle bus”. I wait by it. “You want taxi?” I am asked. “I take bus,” I respond hopefully. “Good luck…” He shakes his head. But I persist and five minutes later the bus fights through the lines of taxis and picks up myself, a woman in her seventies with a red head covering and a mild looking young man with glasses. “Zug???” The woman shouts at me as soon as I sit down. I think she’s a bit deaf. “Zug???” I shrug helplessly. Is she using the only European word for train she can think of to try and ask if this bus goes to the train station? I can’t help her anyway. “ZUG???” She’s going by the principle of “say it loudly and the foreigner will understand”. The man with glasses speaks softly to her in Arabic. I pretend to look out the window. She shakes her head at him contemptuously and toddles off the the bus driver to shout “ZUG” at him for a while. Eventually she sits down muttering.

The moon is upside down. The bus honks its way out onto the open road and I’m just hoping it goes to the domestic terminal. There’s no way to walk there, according to Google maps. But it does. I get off. The other two remain. I hope she finds her zug.

I get a couple of free lounge accesses with my bank account travel pack and I haven’t used any for ages so I use one now and settle down for some free meatballs and soggy veg and an orange juice. Time passes quickly. My flight is called. I go to the gate and try to board the plane last as is my way. But… my policy of boarding last and then ignoring my seat if I don’t like the look of it falls flat because nobody in this country gives a fuck what it says on their ticket. It’s a free for all. Both flights there has already been somebody in my allocated seat when I’ve got on the plane. Nobody is sitting where they’re supposed to. If this plane goes down they’ll have to do it all by dental records.

I’ve got a guy sitting next to me because, he tells the steward, “I like this guy – he’s English.” We have exchanged about 8 words and he has glommed onto me. He’ll be hard to shake the other end. Thankfully my car hire is sorted. He’s just friendly I think, but I can never overlook the chance he’s selling something. He is devout as well. Mohamed is his name. Currently he’s singing softly to a long (about twenty minutes so far) devotional prayer that he has brought up on his mobile phone screen. His voice is a melodious and very soft tenor. It’s surprisingly beautiful.

Prayer is everywhere. Young men by travelators in the airport lay down their mats towards Mecca. The plane took off to a beautiful travel prayer from Mohammed. I often find faith attractive, perhaps because of my polytheistic approach. This strange devout country will do a lot to keep me curious. I suspect I’ll be too busy for out and out tourism. But I’ll find time to plug into this unfamiliar vibe, and work out how to go about unseen. Italian woollen three piece and trilby ain’t gonna cut it. I stick out like a sore thumb, but that’s my usual disguise in stress or unfamiliar situations. I become big and visible and clumsy and stupid and friendly and nobody thinks I’m a threat.

I wish I spoke some Arabic though. I’m only just making sense of the alphabet. Duolingo and I are gonna have to spend some special time together.

Meantime I’m just learning numbers so I know the speed limit. I’m gonna have to drive to the hotel in an hour or so and I’m shattered and it’ll be dark. Fun fun fun.

A spin through London. I paid £99 to have somebody in a smock shove something up my nose so I can get a piece of paper by midnight telling me I officially don’t have Covid. I had to do one at home this morning as well because I’ve just arrived back in June country. Now I’m waiting up despite the fact I have to leave the flat early tomorrow morning. It’s the last piece of admin I need to be able to relax into the odd reality of going somewhere completely unfamiliar for a few weeks.

I’m planning on driving to Heathrow tomorrow early and putting my car into a long stay car park for three weeks. It’s another ton to do it but then I can get to Heathrow in half an hour and I don’t have to worry about getting impounded if they change the bloody parking restrictions outside my flat again. They do it all the time and you only get 24 hours to move the car. I hate it.

Travel is harder than it used to be, and more expensive with all the extra stuff. When the Eurostar was new they had brilliant deals for people under twenty five and I would occasionally wake up in the morning and just decide to go to Paris. That kind of thing feels much harder, not least because I’m not 22 and idle anymore. Saudi is going to be hard work.

I’ve had to be really organised in a way that I’m not used to at all on this turnaround. I’ve thought through my wardrobe as best I can. I’ve charged up enough of my devices to sustain me through the 8 hours or so I’ll be in the air. I stopped at Waterstones for a new book. I think I’m going to be ok out there despite the quick turnaround.

But now I’m stymied because this little rip off clinic place in Putney is leaving it to the wire in order to analyse my snot and tell me what I already know – that I don’t have Covid right now.

… and the email came through. I don’t have Covid. £99 for less than 5 minutes of attention. They are paying rental on a little cubicle in the Putney Exchange. They have a nurse and a receptionist and then somebody with a qualification who writes the thing you have to show them before you get on the plane. But when I arrived ten minutes before I was due there were two people waiting outside and another one in there getting tested. This Covid testing lark is big money however you look at it.

Well at least I’m certain now. I’m gonna book this parking and go to bed and I’m really not looking forward to tomorrow morning. Hopefully I’ll set enough alarms. Zoom.

Sad to be back in the UK but my visa came through just now so there’s another adventure a little tiny bit too close for comfort. I’m on the bus from Stansted right now with Lou. It is cold and slow and Lou has to get a million trains to get back to Brighton tonight because of engineering or whatever. My head hurts.

As soon as I get home I’m gonna order something stodgy from Deliveroo and chuck all my clothes in the washing machine. I don’t really know what to bring to Saudi so I’m just gonna turn over the contents of my case, repack it, go to sleep and wake up for a Covid test and a bit of time making sure the fish won’t die while I’m off gallivanting.

The thing to keep hold of will be the week that Lou and I have just had. What a privilege. That distant volcanic rock, shrouded with rings of cloud round fertile mountains boiling with life and warmth. How has it never been on my radar before? In the summer you can commission boats to take you out and give you the best shot you’ll ever have at a selfie with a blue whale. It’s no surprise that every day my phone buzzed in the evening like an electric toothbrush as Lou was sending me the millions of photos she took. All those photos you’ve seen in my blog? Pretty much every one of them was by her. She’s got an eye and a habit. It means that this incredible week has a handy little recall tool. If I’m in the desert feeling sad because there’s been nothing but flies sun and sand, I can open up my phone if it hasn’t overheated and I can look at gorgeous photographs of blown out mountains and seascapes. The one thing I might not have so much of is photographs of Lou herself. There are tons of me. She had to remind me, and the last few days, to take some of her. I got uncharacteristically snap happy in order to try and tip the scales slightly back the other way. So at least I’ll have them.

It’s cold here. It’s dark and it’s cold and windy and I’m thirsty and I’ve got no water and I need the loo. Only one more hour on this packed bus though. We are coming into the suburbs of London.

I do wish the turnaround wasn’t so bloody quick. I’ve barely got time to settle and I could sleep for a week. Still. I’ll be busy and I’ll be somewhere new. And it won’t be cold and windy.

I also wish there was that jolly hostess serving cakes and tea on this National Express bus. We had to throw away our water at security and I’m so damn thirsty.

This morning we woke up in Villa Varzea, The Garden Nest. This is an old manor house owned by a doctor who helped put this little village on the Azorean map by expounding the delights of the hot springs and by generally being a decent and philanthropic fellow. It’s still in the family and Monique has converted it into a number of beautifully appointed “nests”.

Ten minutes drive from here is Ponta da Ferraria. There, if you pick your way across the pumice, you will find ladders in the sharp stone leading down into the water of a small natural bay in the rocky Atlantic shore. At the landward side of this little cleft, boiling hot water flows right out of the magmatic rocks and into the sea. At the seaward side, the cold hard waves of the atlantic crash in, but the shape of it offers some degree of protection to bathers from the hard waves of this ocean. Ropes are secured across the cleft as additional handholds. It’s hard to describe. At low tide it is a little pocket of vigorous and hot sea. “It’s like being in a washing machine,” our hostess remarks.

I come out feeling invigorated and beaten up. Low tide was early morning so it was my wake-up. I shunned the ropes and found my way into a crevice with hot water at my back and the crashing waves at my front. Apart from the very real danger of having my head wanged against the pumice, it was a brilliant start to the day.

Water was the theme today. Water IS the theme here. We went up to caldera lakes and stood beside them in the cold. We went down to caldera lakes and sunbathed beside them in the heat. It is every season simultaneously here. Today is our last full day. We made the most of it.

I’ve been avoiding the local speciality but it’s my last day. I couldn’t go any longer without a plate of grilled limpets. I am never going to eat grilled limpets again. But it’s always worth a try. Like snails, they taste of what they are prepared with. Unlike snails they also taste of the sea and have bits of sand in them.

The end of the day found us watching the sun set over the ocean from one of the rare black sand beaches – this one at Mosteiros. We just sat and absorbed it all. The darkness falling on our last night here in the middle of the deep ocean, surrounded by all these mystic waters – hot and cold, red and blue and green, hard and soft, old and new. This is an extraordinary place and feels ancient even if it’s young.

“In six years it will be much more crowded,” predicts our hostess. Perhaps. It’ll help their economy. But we seem to have caught it at a powerful time. People are pleased to see us and there aren’t too many of us. Granted we never spent time in the city but I don’t think it’s going to be Chicago down there.

I’ll be sad to leave tomorrow but I’m rested and warm and happy and calm. I’ll miss all of that and more next week if I’m going to be running around like a maniac in the Arabian desert.

If you have been reading the last few days worth of my exploration of São Miguel in winter, you might have noticed how changeable the weather is here in the middle of the Atlantic.

This morning we went to look at the place where perhaps it all began for this island – up on the edge of the blown out crater of the Sete Cidades volcano. It’s a huge double crater filled with water. It must have spewed out much of the surrounding land in a vast sustained eruption many millennia ago. Now it sits in beauty and fertility, and it hasn’t blown its top for 142 years.

In the late 1980’s a group of mostly French investors built a luxury hotel here, at Miradouro Vista do Rei – The King’s Viewpoint. They called it the Monte Palace Hotel. It’s incredibly well located for beauty, the Monte Palace. It looks over the fabled twin lakes of the caldera. It is just downhill from an even more spectacular viewpoint – the Boca do Inferno. It is a wonderfully well placed building, or… well … it would be if the weather wasn’t so changeable and it was more accessible. We beat the car up the long slope in the sunshine. About an hour later this is my photo of the view from the nearby Miradouro.

Clouds coalesce around these peaks. There’s nothing else to attract the moisture of the oceans. The local joke in the eighties when the hotel was being built is that it was commissioned by somebody who had been to The Azores once, on a sunny day. Nobody ever expected it to succeed apart from perhaps some of the investors. There’s nothing up there but the view and if you’re in the clouds then you’re just stuck in an expensive bar.

Lou and I came to this island on the only direct flight from London this week. It was incredibly cheap but there were only 73 passengers of which a good 50% were returning locals who had been visiting London. There are 88 bedrooms in the hotel. Back in the late eighties it was more expensive to fly to the Azores from the UK than to North America. None of my friends have said “oh yes I’ve been there” yet. 27 years after this hotel venture collapsed, there still isn’t enough tourism to maintain it really.

The hotel was in debt when it opened. It was open for just over a year, 89 – 90 and the investors pulled strings to get it to win one of those “best whatever” awards that we all secretly know are mostly about money changing hands and just occasionally about merit – (so long as money has also changed hands). Then it closed and one local guy with dogs was employed to keep it secure. He lived there and fought the damp and the failing electrics. Slowly and steadily this huge opulent folly began to crust with squelchy mold. The elevators failed. The water crept in and what can one security guard do about lifts broken by damp? He did his best. Then they stopped paying him. It was never going to reopen. I’d love to talk to him. He was there for years before the money stopped, and he stopped, and the building became a folly full of valuable things.

First the thieves. Perhaps they told themselves they were hunting souvenirs. But they took the lifts. All the electrics. All the furniture. Everything they could take. Everything. Then the angry kids broke all the things that were left until the Azorean government mobilised to deliberately get rid of all the windows for safety. Then fires, smashing things, graffiti. The place is a total complete and utter ruin.

Somebody finally bought the place. It was supposed to reopen in 2021 after a refurb. They must have bought it sight unseen at the wrong time. Covid stopped any plan they might have had. But it was fucked before they started. The only new thing is an impotent wall of breeze blocks, to which somebody has, in no uncertain terms, taken a sledgehammer.

When we were there we saw more people than we have seen anywhere else on the island. Wandering through the gutted rooms, taking selfies on the ruined balconies, sitting on the roof looking dazedly across the caldera below. It’s a mess. It’s a total mess. It’s incredible. Humanity. Greed. Pride. Filth. Time.

It is evening in our little stone house amongst the waterfalls. The sun sank into the Atlantic like a fierce white ball about half an hour past. At the time we were returning from a tiny local shop named after the proprietress – the Mini Mercado Helena Tavavares. She sold us some tuna and passata and a spot of pasta. Enough to throw together sustenance for the evening. No parrotfish tonight.

We went to as many waterfalls as we could today, and to springs and lakes. Here on this remote island surrounded by the salt deep, the land is forcing up water constantly, belching heat and minerals with it.

Late morning we stood by a clear but sulphurous hot spring too hot to safely put your foot into, fenced off at Caldeira Velha. Bubbling water was pushing up with the stench of inferno, and then running through pipes into a colder pool arranged by clever humans for safe but expensive wallowing. Eight euros. We got in, wallowed our money’s worth, and met Gustav. He flies drones over golf courses and then puts the footage on to YouTube. He was relaxing happily despite having lost his wallet full of cash yesterday. “People here are honest,” I remark. “You’ll probably get it back somehow and it’ll still be full.” “I’m not sure. Most of the South American drug trade comes through here.”

Maybe so. I’m nothing if not naïve but I haven’t seen much evidence of that sort of behaviour. This place feels for all the world like a sleepy and uncomplicated little Portuguese village that just happens to be on a long thin strand of basalt extruding multiple volcanoes and boiling with greenery and steam. “It’s a cross between Scotland and Hawaii,” says Gustav. “I haven’t been to Scotland,” he qualifies. And on that basis, I can see where he’s going. It’s not the deep fat fried Mars Bar plus punch in the face Scotland he means. It’s the Gavin Maxwell books with otters and somebody trying to sell you membership of a golf course Scotland. And yes, there’s a viewpoint on every corner. And virtually no pubs. The viewpoints have stone tables and barbeque areas. “Grill and relax,” they say on Google Maps, and I can imagine that the youth of São Miguel go and hang out on promontories overlooking the ocean and feed one another tasty wholesome grilled food before carefully clearing up after themselves and going home. It hasn’t been fully blighted here yet by the Mac and co. Things have their own character, and options are personal and varied – not yet squeezed into conformity. It’s hard to get good coffee but at least it’s not all made by the same worldeating fucker when you do find it.

This morning I followed a precarious metal walkway up some pipes that were built around a waterfall as part of a hydroelectric plant. There were moments so vertiginous my legs were shaking. Lou waited as I struck on up and forward through the cataract and out the other end. Just as I was thinking “surely I shouldn’t actually be here” I saw one of the footpath markers just placed on the metal of the walkway. There’s a freedom in being given the opportunity to go somewhere very slightly dangerous if you choose to. We’ve mostly lost that freedom entirely in the UK.

I like it here. I’m exhausted though. So much air. So much green. So much water. I’m going to make a cheap and tasty meal and then wash the road off. Tomorrow we go west.