The Algarve: Depredations and Delights

What's Gone Wrong with the Algarve, and Why We Keep Coming Back Anyway

September 2021

We have passed our 'fit to fly' Covid test, so very soon (barring unforeseen circumstances), we will be arriving in the Algarve for our 21st autumn visit this century (not to mention occasional spring visits in the 80s and 90s). This is, of course the 22nd autumn since January 2000, so we missed one. No prizes for guessing it was last year when our flight was cancelled just weeks before departure. We are fortunate, as this blog testifies, to have been able to visit many other countries, but we keep returning to the Algarve. This post was written 11 years ago to explain why we still find this over-exploited coast a place of delight - and it now also has to explain why we missed it so much last year.

October 2010

First published on the 6th of October 2010, this post now has several updates and many later pictures
Links are to other Algarve posts on this blog

The unhealthily pale old man and the sea, Algarve Oct 2010

We have just returned from our seventeenth trip to the Algarve. It was simply a holiday; unless you hail from Ulan Bator or the Kamchatka Peninsula it is impossible to pretend you are a traveller in southern Portugal, there are only locals, expatriates and tourists.

It was different thirty years ago when my father retired and bought a house by a golf course in the new development of Vale do Lobo. In 1982 we drove through the scruffy town of Almançil, skirted a sun blasted vineyard and passed several shepherds watching their grazing flocks before reaching the half finished ‘luxury resort’. There we left Portugal and entered never-never land. It is a long time now since that road has seen a shepherd. New villas, a dozen restaurants, an outbreak of tennis courts and a chic garden centre jostle for space where once there was only dust. Freshly painted Almançil is today packed with estate agents’ offices, banks and golf equipment shops. The N125 – the main road running the length of the Algarve - by-passed the town centre long ago and has itself been reduced to the status of a country road by the construction of the A22 motorway. Val do Lobo is no longer half finished, but runs into Dunas Douradas, which runs into Quinta de Lago, equally upmarket but becoming more and more characterless with each successive building phase.

That house on a golf course and a much younger me, Val do Lobo, April 1992

And it is not just this corner of the Algarve that has seen the developer’s bulldozers. Villas have sprouted from Vila Real on the Spanish border to Sagres in the west, leaving only windswept Cape St Vincent untouched. New resorts like Vilamoura and Praia de Rocha have sprung up, while old fishing towns like Albufeira and Quateira have blossomed into major holiday centres.

My parents’ house was sold years ago. In 2005 Lynne and I found a comfortable ground floor apartment with a pleasant garden in Carvoeiro, and we have returned to it year after year. [And returned again in 2021, our landlords are now long-standing friends]. Situated in a narrow ravine running down to a beach that is little more than a breach in the cliffs, Carvoeiro has managed to retain more of a village feel than its larger neighbours. But even here, in defiance of geography, villas have climbed the walls of the ravine and spread along the cliff tops. In the streets you hear more English and German than Portuguese and in the summer the locals, as in much of the Algarve, are a minority in their own town. Even in winter there is no relief as the extensive and largely grey-haired expatriate community – British, German, Dutch, Irish, Scandinavian – avoid the rigours of the Northern winter in a region where frost is virtually unknown and even in January temperatures reach 17°.

Carvoeiro Beach

It is not just their languages the tourists bring with them, it is also their food. Carvoeiro’s out of town supermarkets sell sliced white bread, baked beans, pastis and gouda cheese. The village boasts an ‘English Restaurant’ and other establishments offer ‘all day English breakfast’ or ‘traditional Sunday roasts.’ ‘Pubs’ sell beer to foreigners and entertain them with all the premiership football matches that Sky Sport can provide.

And do the locals complain? They must do, it is human nature, but they do so quietly and among themselves. Within a generation tourism has turned the Algarve from a forgotten backwater of Western Europe’s poorest country into a thriving, prosperous province with a quality of life outsiders envy.

In the 1980s old ladies wore black dresses and thick stockings with little black trilbies - always a size too small – perched on their heads and secured by a scarf tied beneath the chin. Picking one’s way through the potholes - a major feature of any road other than the N125 (and of that, too, west of Lagos) – the sight of horses pulling brightly painted traditional carts was commonplace. Back then, the carts were painted, but little else was. Buildings were usually grubby and dilapidated, chipped azulejo tiles and sagging roofs were normal. Now the black dresses, trilbies, potholes and carts have gone. Even the remotest village has a good road, and the houses are gleaming with white paint; tiled façades are grouted and washed, one wall often painted in a pastel blue or pink.

The old cuboid fishermans' cottages of Olhão, now all smart and clean (2010).

There are improvements every year. Loulé market, for many years our first port of call from the airport, was closed in 2006 and 2007. It reopened in a bright, clean and airy new building. Everything was back as it was, only its soul was missing. Between 2008 and 2009 the centre of Carvoeiro was extensively remodelled. In 2010, when Portugal had theoretically run out of money for public works, we arrived to find Loulé’s main thoroughfare closed and workmen busy laying the small grey cobbles that are Portugal’s favoured surface for pedestrian areas.

Carcoeiro's new centre (Oct 2009)

I preferred the old unimproved Algarve, the Algarve that did not pander to north European tastes, the Algarve where it was possible to feel like a traveller not merely a holidaymaker. I must not be unreasonable, deprivation may not have been abolished but you have to look harder to find it, and I cannot expect people to live in picturesque poverty to please me. But something has been lost in the process.

So if the Algarve has been comprehensively built over and ruined, why do we continue to visit? Why have we been there every year for the last eleven years? [now 21 out of 22 this century]

Because despite the depredations of the developers, despite the efforts of those tourists who arrive in a foreign country and try to make it exactly like the one they just left (except for the climate!), most of what made the Algarve great remains intact.

Maria’s restaurant, which has stood on the beach at Dunas Douradas for over thirty years, provides a fine example (well, it did until 2012). In the early nineties, as the picture shows, we approached the then isolated beach hut via a cliff top path. By 2000, erosion required us to take a route through woods behind. One year we arrived to find building plots staked out among the pines and a year later Maria’s had become fully integrated into the urbanizacão.

The path to Maria's in 1992

In 2008, we went there after our first visit to the newly reopened Loulé market. ‘I expect,’ I said, in jest while driving through Dunas Douradas, ‘we’ll find Maria’s has been knocked down and rebuilt, too.’ And, of course, it had. The old wooden hut had been replaced by a new structure, still wooden, but no longer a hut.

Until 2008 Maria's was a hut, then this happened

What had not changed, though, was the quality of the food. Maria’s grilled squid is so fresh it could almost swim, so perfectly cooked its flesh is firm, yet yielding. Served with boiled potatoes, a glass of white wine and a view of the sun sparkling on the sea, it is a simple yet deeply satisfying pleasure. [Sadly, Maria's changed hands and name in 2012. The magic went and we no longer go there].

Maria's same food in a smart new building, Oct 2011 - the year before Maria's sad demise

And then there is the climate. The Algarve enjoys more sunshine than anywhere else in Europe and in autumn, when we usually visit, the temperature reaches a pleasant 25° or more. A laze on the beach and a dip in the sea are quite possible well into November. Then, just as autumn becomes chilly, spring arrives; there is no winter. But it is not only temperatures. The gentle blueness of the sky and the extraordinary quality of the light lift the soul, while the white painted buildings shimmer in the sun, and bougainvillea trails a purple blaze across the walls.

Bougainvillea on a vila in Carvoeiro - its not all purple (2010)

The very air is a delight. I know of no other country where it is a pleasure simply to breath. The scented air is obvious from the moment you step from the plane, even over the jet fuel smells of the airport. Wafts of scent pass over you everywhere, and if you become habituated during the day, just walking into the early morning garden provides an instant reminder that you are living somewhere special.

Ferragudo 2007

To get away from the coastal strip and drive along a country road is a journey among delights. Nothing matches an orange orchard in spring, but the warm woods - eucalyptus, figs, olives, pines, and, higher up, the gnarled cork oaks - are a pleasure to the eye and nose in every season. Huge cactuses and prickly pears cling to old walls and villages bask in the sun.

Away from the coast and off the beaten track, October 2011

‘Traditional Sunday roast’ may be available, but the overwhelming majority of the Algarve’s many hundreds of restaurants are more tipico, specialising in fish as fresh as it can only be within minutes of the fishing port. After so many visits we have inevitably developed favourites. A visit to Dona Barca in in Portimão for sardines is a must. The décor is functional - they retain the once typical long communal tables - the fish are barbecued outside in the square and the prices are low enough to be reminiscent of the good old days.

Sardines at Dona Barca with Mike and Alison (Oct 2016) I am delighted to say that since we first ate here in 2003, the prices have risen (but not by much) and nothing else has changed. Why should it when they are packed on a Thursday lunchtime

At Dois Irmão in Faro, another venerable restaurant, I can recommend to the pork and clams, while Lynne has particularly enjoyed both grilled cuttlefish and goat cutlets. Somewhat exceptionally, these restaurants are frequented by locals as much as tourists.

Lynne and a cuttlefish Dois Irmão, Faro (Oct 2013)

Elsewhere the fish of the day – usually sea bass, or golden bream - is reliably excellent as are swordfish or tuna steaks. Fish stews and cataplanas using the wonderful Portuguese refogado are based on olive oil, tomatoes and garlic as is the delightfully messy seafood rice. Salt cod - the local staple - is always worth a try, and Portugsl, not Nando's, is the home of chicken piri-piri. I shudder at cafés offering ‘all day English breakfast’, but mainly I feel sorry for their customers. When it comes to the pleasures of the table, the Algarve ranks with the best in the world.

Fish Cataplana, Restaurant Vimar, Carvoeiro Oct 2011

You do not have to eat in restaurants to eat well. Every town and village has a market selling the freshest of fish. Chouriço (sausage) and presunto (air dried ham) are wonderful, the scrawny looking chickens have more meat than you could imagine and taste like chicken used to. There are olives and salted almonds which go down so well with a glass of port, as do the cheeses which range from the mildest, youngest goat curd, to curado cheeses matured to a rich stinkiness.

A light lunch of Chouriço, Cheese and salad

Portugal’s inexplicably underrated wines are available at all prices from negligible to eye-watering. Even the wines of the Algarve, long ignored (and with good reason), are improving. I am not a Cliff Richard fan, but his Quinta do Cantor started a trend that has benefiting producers and drinkers alike.

It may be grossly overdeveloped, but nothing can change the sunshine and the scented air and nothing has changed the quiet and unassuming people of the Algarve who the vast occupying army of tourists with good humour and courtesy. With rare exceptions, they deal honestly and fairly with all – which cannot be easy, given the profound ignorance and ingrained idiocy of some tourists. For all its imported faults, the heart of the Algarve still beats strongly. As long as there are squids at Marias in the sea we will return and return again. [OK, Maria's went 5 years ago but Martin's in Carvoeiro grills a pretty fair squid]

This post was (2010) featured on the Algarve Daily News

Algarve Posts

1: The Algarve: Delights and Depredations(2010)
2: The Algarve: Random Delights (2012)
3: Mexilhoeira Grande and a Long Lost Cousin (2013)
4: The West Coast (2013)
5: Lagos (2014)
6: Castro Marim and Vila Real do Santo António (2015)
7: The Boxes of Carvoeiro (2016)
8: Mertola and Alcoutim: Strongholds by the Guadiana River (2017) - Also under Alentejo
9: Silves, Former Capital of the Algarve (2018)
10: Eating the Algarve (2022)
11: Drinking the Algarve (2022)

A Remarkable Story of a Khartoum Taxi Driver

'Sudan ma kwaiyis, Sudani kwaiyis’ (Sudan bad, Sudanese good) was a phrase we heard many times during the months we lived in Khartoum. If the speaker was a taxi driver, the next phrase was usually ‘Sharia ma kwaiyis’ (Road not good) as his cab bumped into a pothole the size of a modest meteor strike.

In July 1987 Lynne and I had climbed out of a rut by taking jobs in an international school in Khartoum, dragging six-year-old Siân along with us. We intended to stay for two years, but contractual difficulties meant we were home in November.

In the late nineteen eighties Sudan enjoyed a brief flowering of parliamentary democracy between the Numeiri dictatorship and an Islamic fundamentalist military government. Sadly the continual fragmenting and rebuilding of coalitions and shuffling of ministers was more  rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic than governing, and everyone knew that a coup was on the way.

The Sudanese have been ill served by their governments for decades, but if the country is not good, the people really are. They cheerfully mock their own inefficiency and lamentable time keeping, but they are intensely proud of their reputation for hospitality, friendliness and honesty and they work hard at living up to it. Nowhere else have we been welcomed into the homes of so many local people, nowhere else have small acts of kindness by complete strangers been such a commonplace. But the events I will describe out-Sudanese the Sudanese. Such stories have people shaking their heads and saying: ‘you couldn’t make it up!’ Actually I could, but I didn’t. It happened exactly as I tell it.

In two months we had seen only one camel. Feeling this was less than our due, Lynne, Siân, and I, along with our friend Martin, decided to visit the Omdurman camel market.

On a warm September day (most September days top 40ºC) we walked out onto the sandy square behind our home in the southern suburbs of Khartoum and flagged down a taxi. Although we lived in a modern block surrounded by other new or partly finished residences we were half a mile from the tarmac road. Undeterred, taxi drivers criss-crossed the desert on invisible tracks.

We quickly found a ride, but not all the way to Omdurman; many Khartoum drivers dislike venturing west of the river. We negotiated a fare into the centre, where it would be easier to find a driver prepared to cross the White Nile.

Outside the main souk we found a cab heading west and drove out along the south bank of the Blue Nile. ‘El Khartum’ means ‘the elephant’s trunk’, a fanciful allusion to the shape of the land where the two Niles meet. At the tip of the trunk Khartoum ends and the White Nile Bridge begins.

The Blue Nile really is blue (well, it is bluer than the Danube). It is huge, clear and serene. The turbid waters of the White Nile are nowhere near white and it is a far less romantic river. Even a thousand miles from its delta, it is a substantial body of water and the bridge is long. Crossing it is a journey from one world to another; from bustling, cosmopolitan Khartoum to the sprawling overgrown village that embodies the heart of the Sudanese people. Khartoum had the presidential palace, office blocks, empty international hotels and the embassies of every country in the world. Omdurman had the Mahdi’s tomb, a small museum containing relics of the Gordon/Kitchener era and endless streets of hot sand, lined with single story dwellings and ramshackle workshops.

“Wen?” said our driver as we arrived in Omdurman. This means ‘where?’

“Souk jamal” I replied in my pidgin Arabic. Classical Arabic speakers despise Sudanese as being a pidgin language. If that is fair, and it is probably not, I spoke pidgin pidgin.

The driver was unsure of the camel market’s location, so we stopped him near the town centre and climbed out of the car. Feeling that he was failing in his duty of hospitality the cabbie accosted a passer-by. The passer-by was also unsure so he asked someone else. Minutes later we were surrounded by a crowd, all talking at once, all giving advice and all doing it in a language of which we had only a very rudimentary grasp.

With a coup in the offing, we had been advised (by the British Consul, no less), that Omdurman was safe to visit, but it would be wise to keep a low profile. That was exactly what we were not doing.

I fished a 20 Sudanese Pound note from my shirt pocket and gave it to the driver We thanked the crowd and walked off towards a distant television mast, which was, we had read, a marker for the camel market.

The official exchange rate was LS2.5 to £1 sterling, making 20 Sudanese pounds £8. At that rate the tiny chickens in Agami’s Supermarket (think corner shop, halve the space and remove nine tenths of the stock) were over a tenner. The street rate was LS13 to £1 so, realistically, I had paid about £1.50. Khartoum taxis are unmetered and although we usually negotiated a fare in advance we had not done so this time as we were unsure of how long the trip would be. I knew I had overpaid him, but not by much, and we wanted to get away from the crowd without fussing over small change.

We never did find the camel market but we did find a car parts market. Oil smeared blankets spread on the sand served as stalls. One had a stripped down diesel engine, the next a pair of well-used shock absorbers, a third a collection of nuts and bolts, some of which fitted each other. Poverty is a powerful incentive to inventive recycling. As if to emphasise that there was not a single working engine in the place, customers took their purchases away on donkey carts.

A week later, the four of us were walking along Jamariyah, Khartoum’s main drag. Behind us someone shouted “Hey, Khawaja!”

‘Khawaja’ literally means ‘foreigner’ but colloquially it means ‘white European foreigner’. Such people were thin on the ground, even in 'cosmopolitan' Khartoum, so there was little doubt who he was shouting at.

I turned and saw a soldier running towards us, waving. The Sudanese do not run. At 40º running is like wading through hot soup. Local people proceed with a languid, loose-limbed lope. Even us stiff North Europeans had loosened up since we had been there, and we had slowed down too. Not only was he running, he was running in army uniform. 1980s Sudanese army uniforms looked like they came second-hand from some Eastern European army where a cool climate had dictated the material. And not all Sudanese army boots had laces.

He arrived breathless and sweating. When he had composed himself he said:

“You take taxi Omdurman.”

We told him we did not want to go to Omdurman at that moment.

“No,” he said, “You take taxi this man.”

A figure emerged from the bustle of the street. He was some thirty years old, of medium height and slim build with a thin sensitive face. Like almost everyone else he wore a sun-bleached white robe and a small white turban.

“Taxi this man. Last week.”

Was he the driver who had taken us to Omdurman? Riding in taxis was a daily occurrence; I could not remember all the drivers.

“He say you pay more.”

“No.” I replied, trying to sound firm. “I paid twenty pounds - ishriin jineeh - it was enough.”

The soldier looked exasperated. Having tested his physical resources running after us, he now found his linguistic resources being stretched beyond breaking point.

“No, he say you pay too more.”

The taxi driver’s hand disappeared inside his robe and reappeared clutching his wallet. He extracted a brown LS10 note and tried to give it to me.

Lynne and Martin and I looked at each other. None of us wanted to be the first to voice our thoughts, what seemed to be happening was too unbelievable.

But we had to believe it. This man had been so troubled by the over payment that, seeing us in the street - and we must have been a distinctive little group - he had enlisted a friend as interpreter and chased after us to give us our change.

I was, until I retired, a teacher so although I am not poor, I do not consider myself a rich man. On the other hand, each month I was paid five times the annual earnings of an average Sudanese. He was offering me what I thought of as loose change; to him it represented a significant part of a day’s pay.

Of course, we did not take the money, but refusing without giving offence required diplomacy. Happily, the encounter ended with smiles and handshakes all round.

I hope the driver felt happy, keeping both the money and a clear conscience. I felt elated. A world in which people do such things was a better world than I had taken it for. I also felt humble, if fate had dealt the cards the other way round would I have acted in that way? I honestly doubt it. Would a London cabbie have acted that way? Probably not. What happened was extreme, even for Khartoum, but could it have happened anywhere else in the world? It is difficult to imagine.

Goldcliff, Redwick and Magor

Wales

Gwent (Monmouthshire)

Pottering back slowly from South Wales to Staffordshire we turned off the M4 west of Newport and followed the ring road south of the city. We passed the old transporter bridge and the docks before reaching Liswerry, where a minor road took us into the Caldicot Level, the alluvial wetland that lies between the M4 and the Severn estuary. This dank, flat marsh was the home of my paternal grandmother’s family until they moved into Newport at the start of the last century, and we were in search of family graves.

Where we Going?

When I was small my (maternal) grandmother taught me to recite the 13 counties of Wales. The local government re-organisation in 1974 reduced that to 8 while another in 1996 introduced 22 single-tier local authorities which now call themselves counties. A further suggested rearrangement in 2015 was overtaken by events. To avoid confusion (largely mine) I will stick to the 13 'historic counties' I learned at my grandmother's knee. These counties were created by Thomas Cromwell at the request of Henry VIII in 1530.

The Historic Counties of Wales

SE Wales with the approximate extent of the cities of Cardiff and Newport
and position of the relevant villages

I prefer the old counties, though, this map appends an inappropriate 'shire' to Glamorgan among others. My father, a native of Newport always claimed to be a citizen of the Autonomous State of Gwent, though he spent his last 45 years in Buckinghamshire. I am thus duty-bound to prefer 'Gwent' to 'Monmouthshire'.

Goldcliff

We drove through depressing territory all the way from the last urban and industrial gasp of Newport right out to where wet cows chew dispiritedly in meadows of long wet grass. Drizzle fell from a grey sky; it seemed the natural state of affairs.

Goldcliff has no gold and no cliff. The name originates from the siliceous limestone bank by the coast at Hill Farm; sadly quartz is not gold and an 18m high bank is neither a hill nor a cliff.  This world is flat and protected from the sea by a concrete wall. Drainage channels covered in green scum keep the land just about dry enough to be pasture. We found no centre to Goldcliff, though there is a church somewhere, but what we did find was a mile long dribble of houses lining the narrow road. There are well built farmhouses and a sprinkling of new buildings, many of them large, some of them very large. People with money have chosen this bleak place to build their homes. I have no idea why. I am forced to conclude that this landscape has charms I fail to see.

Redwick

We had to track a mile or two inland and then back out toward the estuary to find Redwick. The village is remoter and closer to the coast than Goldcliff, not that there is any sign of salt water. There is no harbour between Newport and Chepstow, the tidal mudflats being unable to shelter even the smallest fishing boats, and the villages have turned their back on the coast and made their living from agriculture - at least until the boom in commuter housing.

Around Redwick the land seems lusher and the atmosphere less desolate – though perhaps I was fooled by a pause in the drizzle. The village does at least have a centre - a pub facing a church across a bend in the road. The pub looks well kept and cheerful, festooned with colourful hanging baskets. It also boasts a ‘Piste de Boule’ suggesting the Bristol Channel is not the limit of its horizons.

St Thomas', Redwick

Outside the church a stone shelter houses a collection of artefacts from the agricultural past, most notably a cider mill and press. I had never thought of my Monmouthshire ancestors as cider drinkers despite the county bordering the English cider heartland.

Cider Mill and Press, Redwick

St Thomas’ church is an ambitious structure, big enough to accommodate the whole of Redwick and still squeeze in several bus loads of visitors. They are proud of their peal of bells and, helpfully, have a list of who is buried in the churchyard. None of them were the ancestors we sought.

St Thomas' Redwick

Outside, on the porch, a scratch shows the high water mark of the great flood of January 1607, though as New Year then started in March the scratch is dated 1606. On the 30th of that month a huge storm surge – or possibly a tsunami – rolled up the Bristol Channel. The Welsh coast was inundated from Laugharne in Carmarthenshire all the way up to Chepstow, while on the English side the water swept across the Somerset levels as far inland as Glastonbury Tor. 200 square miles were flooded, livestock and villages were swept away and over 2000 people died. And this was where my ancestors chose to live.

Flood marker, St Thomas', Redwick 

Barely a thousand people live in Goldcliff and Redwick put together but Magor is a much bigger village, maybe even a town. We parked by the ruins of the 13th century Procurator’s House and strolled into the central square. There are dignified old buildings, shops, pubs, restaurants and a profusion of hanging baskets and flowerbeds. The town looks smart, freshly painted and prosperous. It is also far enough inland to have grown a modern estate to the south, spreading up the side of the rise which protects Magor from the sea. To the north there is a little industry, the M4 and Magor’s very own motorway service station.

Magor

If Redwick church is too big for the village, the 13th century builders of St Mary's evidently expected Magor to grow into a city. 

St Mary's Magor

It is surrounded by a well-tended burial ground and we scanned a few gravestones searching for the ancestral Attewell family.

Magor churchyard

Lynne is openly scornful (but, I think, secretly impressed) that the graves of my mother’s family can usually be found by locating the largest monument in the cemetery. It worked at Trealaw where my great-great grandfather’s statue sits on a plinth even Nelson might envy while his son and much of the rest of the family lie under a substantial tangle of angels and cherubs in the more bucolic setting of Penderyn. The biggest monument in Magor churchyard is not huge or excessively showy, but it does tower over its rivals and yes, it is the resting place of the Attewells.

Me and the Attewell Monument, Magor

The spire-shaped monument was built to mark the grave of Mary Attewell, my great-great-great grandmother who died in May 1887. My great-great-great grandfather William Attewell joined her there in 1890, followed by an assortment of sons, daughters and in-laws though not my great-great grandfather Thomas Attewell who was born in Magor in 1833 but had moved to Newport before he died in 1917.

The grave of Mary Attewell, my three greats grandmother

Inside the church we met a friendly local engaged in writing a history of the church. Old photographs, she informed us, showed the now weathered Attewell monument to have once been shining white. Maybe they, too, enjoyed being just a little showy.

The Attewells had a farm near Magor and their sons and daughters married natives of Goldcliff and Redwick. They clearly made some money; William and Mary lived lives which were long and, I presume, comfortable by the standards of the day. I was surprised to find that all three villages were prosperous and remain so, though now for rather different reasons. Clearly there are those who do not find the landscape of the Caldicot Level desolate and depressing but I am not one of them. I am glad Thomas Attewell left, even if Newport is hardly the city of anybody’s dreams. They all went eventually, but even so the population of the coastal wetlands looks to be growing, not shrinking. And as for the people who live there now – well they’re welcome to it; this branch of the Attewell family is unlikely to want it back.

Manchester, Llantrisant and Beijing

A Chinese Visa, an 18th Century Landscape and a Medieval Welsh Castle

05-Aug-2010

To Manchester for a Chinese Visa

Greater Manchester

We popped up to Manchester to hand in our Chinese Visa applications. The comfortable, spacious offices of the new Visa Centre mean it is no longer necessary to queue – usually in the rain - outside a pokey little room at the Consulate in Didsbury; and as the Centre is in Manchester’s Chinatown, it seemed a good idea to book a morning appointment and follow it with lunch.

Arriving a tad early gave us time to look round a Chinese supermarket and make a few purchases before ringing the bell at the Visa Centre the approved ten minutes before our scheduled appointment. Perhaps because of the appointment system, perhaps because visas can now be obtained by post, not only was there no queue, but we were in and out in five minutes.

Manchester City Art Gallery, Valette and Ibbetson

With an hour and a half to kill, we were pleased to discover the city art gallery – a most un-oriental building – squatting on a Chinatown corner. It houses a large collection of mainly British paintings and we saw a couple of Lowrys and several memorable Manchester cityscapes by his onetime teacher Adolphe Valette. The Victorians are well represented with the obsessions of Rossetti and Holman Hunt, curly-haired ginges and God, respectively, fully explored. There is also John William Waterhouse’s uncomfortably sexy Hylas and the Nymphs, a copy of which I recently encountered in a Malvern B & B, where its prolonged contemplation was unavoidable by anyone taking a bath. Finally, there are as many eighteenth century portraits and landscapes as one could wish for.

Albert Square, Manchester by Alphonse Valette

Julius Caesar Ibbetson’s A Distant View of Llantrisant Castle is actually less remarkable than his name (he was born in 1759 by Caesarean section and was, allegedly, acutely embarrassed by his exotic monicker). In such small dark landscapes it is difficult to make out what is going on - I do not know if they were supposed to be like that, or are in need of a clean, or the paint is deteriorating. A view of Llantrisant from the south is well known to anyone who has driven along the M4; its church is clearly silhouetted on a hill, but we had never seen it from the west and never knew it had a castle. Maybe, we mused, it had existed in the 1790’s but was there no longer.

A Distant View of Llantrisant Castle, Julius Caesar Ibbetson

06-Aug-2010

Llantrisant and William Price

As fate, or luck, would have it, we were in South Wales the very next day visiting Lynne’s extensive but aging tribe of aunts and uncles. Our last visit was in Llantwit Fadre, after which we made our way to Peterston to spend the evening with a friend. Our route, inevitably, took us through Llantrisant, and yet again we had an hour to kill.

Rhondda-Cynon-Taff

Wales

Modern Llantrisant sits on the flat land below the hill and has dual carriageways, irritating road works and a huge Tescos. Turning off the main road and winding our way upwards we found an older, quieter Llantrisant centred on a small square at the summit of the hill.

The car park was free and offered us a suggested walk through the old town, including a visit to the castle. The coffee shop was less welcoming: “No, you can’t have a cappuccino, we close in forty five minutes.” We were graciously allowed a filter coffee, though it was not very good.

The square is still called the Bull Ring though the bull baiting that gave it its name was banned in 1827 - not for reasons of animal welfare, but because it attracted unruly crowds. It is home to a statue of William Price, surgeon, druid, chartist and eccentric. Price could hardly claim to have invented cremation, but it was not practiced in England or Wales between the Roman Empire and the death of his infant son, Jesus Christ Price in 1884. He was prosecuted for burning the body, but argued that as the law made no mention of cremation it could not be illegal. The judge agreed and within twenty years the practice had become established.

Me and William Price, Bull Ring, Llantrisant

Price had another son whom he named Jesus Christ II Price (he later changed his name to Nicholas). Although invariably described as an eccentric, Price was actually a 24-carat nutter. In his statue he wears his druid’s tunic and a fox skin hat and looks every inch a man marching gloriously to the beat of a drum only he can hear. This alone could have made him a hero in Wales, but he also gave freely of his medical expertise to help the less advantaged members of society, and espoused the Welsh language, and his own idiosyncratic version of Welsh culture, at a time when the professional classes were determinedly aping everything English. When the time came for his own cremation in 1893, a crowd of 20,000 turned out to pay their respects.

Llantrisant Castle

Twenty metres down the road, beside the old Weight House, is the entry to the castle fields. A shattered remnant of one tower is all that remains of the stone structure built in 1246 by the Norman Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, to replace an earlier wooden fort. The rebellious Welsh damaged the castle in 1294 and 1316, and it may finally have been destroyed by Owain Glyndwr in 1404. It was certainly in ruins shortly after that date, but has deteriorated little since Julius Caesar Ibbetson came here over two hundred years ago. Where he stood to get his ‘view from the west’ is a mystery, his angle apparently requiring him to hover fifty metres above the plain and be able to see right through Llantrisant’s substantial parish church. Such is artistic licence.

The remains of Llantrisant Castle

The positioning of Manchester Art Gallery on the edge of Chinatown is, doubtless, coincidental, but from the number of Chinese faces looking at the paintings, the coincidence is appreciated. Our subsequent arrival in the Little Yang Sing restaurant was less accidental, but we were equally appreciative. We went to Manchester for a visa and a lunch and discovered Julius Caesar Ibbetson and Llantrisant Castle. Ibbetson also visited China; in 1787 he was official draughtsman on the very first British embassy to Beijing, producing watercolours of the plants and animals encountered on the journey. Small world.

[and having acquired our visas we duly set off for China. Kunming and the Stone Forest, the first part of that story, is just a click away]

Abergavenny and The Walnut Tree

Over the Welsh Border to a Town of Charm and History and a Once Great Restaurant Recently Restored to Glory

Wedding anniversary dinners have become a tradition over the last few years, and this year we went to Abergavenny to celebrate our 35th. 35th? Surely that can’t be right - but it is. Where did all those years go?

Abergavenny Castle

It’s a pleasant, prosperous looking little town, Abergavenny. It has a castle and a museum, water meadows where we strolled in sunshine beside the tumbling River Usk, an ancient church and an 11th century Tithe Barn containing a 21st century café and exhibition. And it’s full of people who welcome you and tell you things you never knew you wanted to know but are actually quite interesting.



Abergavenney Tithe Barn

We visited on the wrong day for the market, but the town has long had a foodie reputation, and the first and foremost reason for that, and for our visit, is The Walnut Tree restaurant a few miles away in the hamlet of Llanddewi Skirrid.

Opened in 1963 by Franco and Ann Taruschio, The Walnut Tree was once a beacon in an era of gastronomic darkness. They maintained the highest of standards for over thirty years, but after their retirement the restaurant fell on hard times. It eventually closed in 2007 despite, or maybe because of, featuring in the first of Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant rescue series. It reopened in 2008 and Shaun Hill, who held a Michelin star at the Merchant House in Ludlow, has returned the restaurant to its former glory and to Michelin star status.


The Walnut Tree, Llandewi Skirrid near Abergavenney

Restaurant reviews traditionally start with the décor. That’s not my interest, but I did notice that we sat in a rustic style bar for our pre-prandial Pernod before going through to a restaurant which was much bigger inside than it appeared from the outside. Not all the twenty four tables were full on the day of our visit

Tinned tongue used to be a Saturday lunch regular in my youth, but I haven't seen it for years. Lynne’s starter of poached tongue bore only a slight resemblance to the Sixties stand-by. Thin slices of tongue surrounded a salad of rocket and green beans like the petals of a flower. Such soft and exquisite meat with a fine, delicate flavour required, and got, a salad with a gentle and unemphatic dressing. It seems a shame that tongue is so rarely available in supermarkets.

My monkfish sat on what the menu called a tomato, ginger and chilli sauce, though it was actually half way between a sauce and a salsa. If the tail was char grilled to perfection, the deceptively simple sauce was possessed of magical properties. At first it seemed merely tomato, then the ginger emerged, growing gently to dominance before finally the chilli ran a little dance round the edge. Another forkful was required to see if it happened again. I could quibble by saying a sauce should accompany the fish, not vice versa, but it was too good to bother with such trifles.

Sadly, Lynne's main course sole was also char grilled, and what may be appropriate for a robust monkfish was far less suitable for a delicate sole. It was over cooked and over-charred. A complaint brought an offer of an alternative main course (but by then it was already eaten and the human stomach is finite) but no apology and no visitation from the chef to discuss the issue.

I had rack of lamb on a casserole of spring vegetables. The tender, pink chops were from the youngest of lambs and provided texture, while the lamb breast in what was really a cawl beneath provided as much sheepy flavour as anyone could want. The spring vegetables, even the remarkably earthy potatoes, were packed with flavour and freshness.

We took a rest for digestion and to finish our wine. With the mix of fish and meat we had required two half bottles, thus effectively reducing the vast wine list to about a dozen choices. For the white we chose a Chardonnay from the Ste Michelle winery in Washington (the west coast state, not the east coast capital city), the red was a Gigondas from a well know producer. I ordered the Chardonnay with trepidation; during our time in Washington we learned that the locals had no great regard for their state's oldest and largest producer. But that was twenty five years ago, this unoaked chardonnay was light bodied but had varietal character, good acidity and a pleasing dryness. The Gigondas, though, was disappointing. I always look at the appellation and the bottler, but need to remember to check out the vintage; I am sure this will open up in a few years and be a fine wine, but it was too young, too dark and too closed to live up to expectations.

Lynne’s dessert involved intensely flavoured redcurrant and blackcurrant sorbets presented in a brandy snap basket. I had Bakewell tart with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream. When I was little and holidays meant two weeks with my grandmother in Porthcawl, a visit to Borza's ice-cream parlour was a special treat. Their ice-cream was like nothing else I had tasted and I used to spend weeks anticipating the visit. The secret, I know now, was real vanilla; while the rest of the world used vanilla as a synonym for 'plain', Borza's treated it with respect. Borza's is long gone from Porthcawl and many of the Borza clan now lie beneath a modest mausoleum in the municipal cemetery (just across the path from my grandmother). This scoop of vanilla ice-cream took me back to my childhood and was undoubtedly the best I have eaten for fifty years. The Bakewell tart became something of a sideshow, so its amazing lightness was almost unappreciated, and its lack of jammy/marzipanny flavours somewhat overlooked. I drank an Austrian Beerenauslese with the Bakewell tart which was, in its very different way, as sweet, subtle and wonderful as the ice-cream.

Overall, four and three quarter wonderful dishes out of six, is not bad, but the amuse-bouche were no more than a tiny cheesy biscuit and the limp cherry hiding in the petit fours was disappointingly slimy. The meal was touched with greatness, as it should be in any Michelin starred restaurant, but there were faults, too. Maybe we were unlucky on the day, but we have eaten better at this price elsewhere.

'Fine Dining' posts

Abergavenny and the Walnut Tree (2010)
Ludlow and La Bécasse (2011) (restaurant closed, post withdrawn)
Ilkley and The Box Tree(2012)
Pateley Bridge and the Yorke Arms (2013) (No longer a restaurant, post renamed Parceval Gardens and Pateley Br)
The Harrow at Little Bedwyn (2014)
The Slaughters and the Lords of the Manor (2015)
Loam, Fine Dining in Galway (2016)
Penarth and Restaurant James Sommerin (2017) (restaurant closed, post withdrawn. JS has a new restaurant in Penarth)
The Checkers, Montgomery (2017) (no longer a restaurant, post withdrawn. Now re-opened under new management)
Tyddyn Llan, Llandrillo, Denbighshire (2018)
Fischer's at Baslow Hall, Derbyshire (2019)
Hambleton Hall, Rutland (2021)
The Olive Tree, Queensberry Hotel, Bath (2022)
Dinner at Pensons near Tenbury Wells (2023) (restaurant closed Dec 2023, post withdrawn)

Alexandria

The new Library of Alexandria

One August evening in 1966 the SS Nevasa docked at Alexandria carrying over a thousand sixth formers on one of the then fashionable ‘educational cruises’. In the morning, the students embarked on a fleet of buses bound for Cairo.

Me aged 15 and the Sphynx, aged 4500
August 1966

I was one of the youngest of those students, a few weeks short of my sixteenth birthday and taking my first steps outside Western Europe. It changed my life. We drove through the delta and were then shown the pyramids, the Egyptian museum and the citadel. I still recall marvelling at the donkeys and the palm trees in the delta, at the heat and the honking traffic in the city and at the colours and the costumes everywhere. I particularly remember sitting in front of the Sphinx and telling myself ‘you are here, you are really here’ and slapping my leg to prove it was no dream. I had not believed it possible to actually stand beside something so fabulous and remote. I had seen the pyramids in books and until then I had assumed that in books they would remain.

To borrow a cliché, I thought it the ‘trip of a lifetime’. I had no idea how much easier and cheaper travel would become, and I was seriously underestimating the opportunities ‘a lifetime’ could throw up. I have been fortunate, and many more times, and in many more places, I have slapped my leg and told myself that yes, I was really there.

Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet had been on the reading list for the cruise – and I had diligently read the first book – but we had largely ignored the city in our rush to the pyramids, as thousands of cruise ship passengers still do today. Lynne and I have been to Cairo three times since then, but I had never been back to Alexandria and Lynne had never been there at all, so when we visited Cairo last month it seemed appropriate to rectify the omission.

One minor disappointment marred the Nevasa trip. Having driven south through the delta, we were scheduled to return by the desert road. I had never seen a desert and was excited by the prospect, but the road was closed and we had to return the way we came. This time there was no problem and although I have travelled through several deserts since, I still experienced a frisson of excitement as we set off in the relative quiet of a Cairo dawn.

The desert road might have been romatic in 1966, but today it is a six-lane highway. The poor maintenance and erratic traffic provided a little interest, but essentially the trip was as dull as a hundred motorway miles usually are. And we passed through scrubland on the edge of the cultivated delta rather than true desert.

Egypt’s Alexandria was one of several founded by Alexander the Great as he rampaged from Greece to India via North Africa. For defensive reasons he placed the city on the narrow strip of land dividing Lake Maryut (or Mareotis in Greek) from the sea. It thus became a long thin city and retained this shape even after outgrowing the confines of the lake. Today its 4 million people live in a 30 km strip along the Mediterranean coast, but the desert road from Cairo still arrives at the lake’s north shore before tracking round it.

Durrell describes a duck hunt on Mareotis. The well-healed participants were punted out to a pavilion on stilts where they spent the evening carousing. A short sleep and a hearty breakfast later they stealthily set out into the marshes for the dawn slaughter. With this in my head, I was unprepared for my first sight of the lake. We topped a slight rise to be confronted by a sheet of water, the far side lined with towering petro-chemical plants, their flares a dirty yellow against the clean morning sky. There are still ducks on the lake; sometimes they quack, sometimes they cough.

The Haramlik Palace, Alexandria

The pleasure grounds of Montazah lie at the city’s eastern end. For a small price, you can drive through well-tended gardens, around a few hotels and down to a series of private beaches. Ramadan was in August this year, the usual Cairene holiday month, so those who could took their holidays in July. The beaches, both private and public were full and Cairo was, allegedly, empty - though to me it looked as frenetic and crowded as ever. Also within Montazah, is the once royal palace of Haramlik, now a Presidental palace. In 1952, during the coup that would eventually bring the Alexandrian born Gamal Abdel Nasser to power, King Farouk fled from here into exile.

After leaving Montazah it became clear that nothing of interest is deemed to have happened in Alexandria between the burning of the Great Library in AD 293 and the opening of the new library in 2002.



The Roman Theatre
Alexandria

The Alexandria national museum is much newer than the Cairo museum. Many exhibits have a local and/or Ptolemaic provenance and are better displayed, but Cairo’s shear quantity of artefacts – never mind its ramshackle charm – makes this very much second best.



Pompey,s Column,
Alexandria

The Roman theatre is small, but beautifully preserved, while Pompey’s column is an impressive piece of masonry set on mound above a nilometer. It was actually erected by Diocletian rather than Pompey, but his name lacks the romantic cachet. Below the ground, lie a temple of Serapis and the Daughter Library. By 50 BC the Great Library of Alexandria contained over half a million manuscripts. As it continued to grow, it spawned this subsidiary ‘Daughter Library’. The Mother Library, stuffed with ‘pagan knowledge’ was torched by Christian mobs in 193 AD; her Daughter suffered a similar fate a century later.

The Catacombs of Kom es-Shoqfa are reputedly Alexandria’s most memorable monument. The largest Roman burial site in Egypt is entered by a spiral staircase seemingly screwed into the earth. There are family burial niches, a triclinium where relatives reclined on stone coaches to feast in honour memory of the dead, and an atmospheric central tomb guarded by bearded stone serpents and medusa-headed shields. There is also a ban on photography which is, I discovered, rigidly enforced.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, The Pharos, was partly dismantled in 700 AD then reduced to rubble by an earthquake in 1303. We had a look at the toytown citadel of Fort Quaitbey, which replaced the building that replaced the Pharos. Down by the beach with the bathers and trinket sellers I struggled to get a feel for the place as it once had been.



The Fish Market
Alexandria

Lunch was a relief after so much antiquity. The Fish Market is an upmarket restaurant aimed at foreigners rather than an actual market; it might have been better if it was. The ‘salads’, perhaps mezze would be a better word, were excellent. We enjoyed the tahini, hummus, baba ghanoush and other dips we could not name, scooped up with flat Egyptian bread, but the unidentified fish seemed tired and the strips of squid had far more chew than is desirable.

Across the curve of the Eastern Harbour we could see the new library, a squashed spiral of ever-so shiny granite, sparkling in the sun. We drove round the almost elegant corniche (Michael Palin described it as ‘like Cannes with acne’) to Alexandria’s newest jewel. With a cultural centre and art galleries, in addition to many, many books, the striking building is a fitting successor to the great library of antiquity.

We spent most of the day being driven from ancient site to ancient site, but the modern city surrounds them and would itself repay exploration. I had naively assumed that because Alexandria was on the Mediterranean, and was once a Greek city, it would be wealthier and more liberal than Cairo. It was quickly obvious that neither was the case. Many streets looked poor and the women were even more covered up. Sharifa, our guide, told us of a Christian friend who moved to Cairo when her husband died because it was too difficult walking round without a headscarf – not that this troubled Sharifa, though she had come with us from Cairo. In the 1950s several hundred thousand Greeks remained in Alexandria, now there are virtually none. ‘Where have they gone?’ I asked. Sharifa shrugged. ‘Assimilated,’ she suggested, but with no great confidence.

E M Forster produced a guidebook to Alexandria; Lawrence Durrell and Nobel Prize winning poet C P Cavafy, wrote about the city in their different ways, and all described a formerly cosmopolitan metropolis in terminal decline. Modern Alexandria would point to the library as a sign of its rebirth, but there remains a sense that this once great city has been by-passed by history and overtaken by brash upstarts like Cairo. Alexandria, though, is still worth much more than a day trip and it is a shame that cruise passengers will continue to merely pass through on their way to somewhere else.

See also: When Aunty Edith went to Alexandria

When Aunty Edith went to Alexandria

The event, or rather non-event, related below did actually happen. Over the intervening forty years my imagination has played fast and loose with my memory, resulting, I suspect, in more than several embellishments. I cannot vouch for the literal truth of every word that follows, but it remains, I believe, true in spirit. All names (except Alexandria) have been changed to protect the guilty.

My Aunty Edith never had a good word to say about anyone. I would hate that to be said of me, so I shall hastily say a good word about Aunty Edith. Aunty Edith was a respectable woman. More precisely, Aunty Edith was a very respectable woman. Even more precisely, a teeth-clenchingly, eye-wateringly respectable lady. Unfortunately, she rarely showed others the respect she took as her due.

She once requested investment advice, and her bank duly sent an advisor to see her. ‘My dear,’ I heard her tell my grandmother afterwards, ‘he was the most peculiar looking person.’ This could have meant his hair was too long, or too short; his tie was too bright, or too drab; his lapels were too wide, or too thin. Maybe he had used a ball-point instead of a fountain pen, written with his left hand, or had sat in the wrong chair. Good forbid that he had a beard or his eyes were too close together or (whisper it quietly) he wore brown shoes. There were many ways to transgress against Aunty Edith’s largely arbitrary, and not entirely consistent, code of behaviour.

We can probably be sure that in a small town on the South Wales coast in the 1960’s the advisor was not from an ethnic minority. Aunty Edith would have had difficulty understanding the concept of racism; everybody was inferior to her and it was thus axiomatic that the more different a person was, the more inferior they must be. Having brown skin was, without doubt, several degrees worse then wearing brown shoes, but to Aunty Edith it was all part of a continuum.

Like many unconscious racists, her racism started at home. She often spoke disparagingly of the ‘Welshies’ – a word I have never heard anyone else use. That she herself was Welsh; born in the Valleys with the maiden name Thomas, and speaking with an accent that could come from nowhere else, never seemed to cross her mind. The Welshies were the ‘working classes’, the ‘great unwashed’, the little people whose existence she regretted but without whom life would have been impossible.

Aunty Edith was not, I am happy to say, actually a relation. She was married to one of my grandmother’s many cousins. Godfrey Bevan was a mild mannered man and a banker by profession (think Captain Mainwearing, not million pound bonuses). He and Edith had no children and, for some reason, he spent as much time out of the house as possible. He spent a lot of that time at the ‘Corsairs,’ a drinking club down by the harbour. Godfrey died in the mid 1960’s. I will not say that he drank himself to death to get away from his wife, but I cannot deny that the thought has crossed my mind.

A year or so later Aunty Edith took a Mediterranean cruise, maybe to cheer herself up after the death of her husband, though I suspect she had largely forgotten who he was.

In Alexandria she was met by expatriate acquaintances living in that once cosmopolitan city. She visited their house and then, for some now forgotten reason, had to return to the ship on her own.

A taxi was found, the destination communicated and the fare agreed. Even today, Egyptian taxis rarely have meters, and even more rarely use them. Locals instinctively know what to pay; foreigners are well advised to negotiate a price before starting out. It will be several times the local fare, but it is your duty, as a representative of a rich country, to pay up cheerfully.

I heard her tell the story several times and though I was a teenage boy and would rather have been anywhere than trapped in a room listening to Aunty Edith, I can still hear the indignation and near panic in her voice as she remembered the events.

No one tells a story twice using exactly the same words, but she had certain stock phrases:

‘He drove me for miles and miles...’ Well, Alexandria is a very long thin city.

‘He drove me up hill and down dale...’ Unlikely, Alexandria is a very flat city.

‘My dear, he was the most villainous looking man you can imagine.’ That probably only meant he was, like every other Alexandrian taxi driver, an Arab.

'At one time he seemed to be driving me round in circles.’ I would not trust Aunty Edith’s sense of direction; in an unmetered cab taking the shortest route is in everybody’s interest.

‘I had visions of him stealing me away and selling me into the white slave trade.’ Given Aunty Edith’s notorious prudery in matters sexual (perhaps another reason Godfrey took solace in the bottle) I am not sure she knew what ‘white slave trade’ meant. She was a chunky woman in her mid sixties with a disapproving glare that could wilt an iron bar, anyone hoping to make a living from renting out her body was either an incurable optimist or knew something about niche markets I neither know, nor wish to know.

‘Eventually we arrived at the dock. I have never been so relieved to see a ship in my whole life.’

To summarise: a taxi driver took a woman to the agreed destination for the agreed fare - hardly a story worth telling, let alone retelling. What Aunty Edith never realised was that the tale tells us nothing about Alexandria, or Alexandrian taxi drivers, but a great deal about her. As such, it is a warning to anybody who tries to write anything about their travels: I will endeavour to take heed.

See also our trip to Alexandria