By Michael QuinMonths had passed since those initial beer-fuelled discussions in Melbourne pubs, in which time plans had taken on a life of their own, burgeoning to epic proportions. Between the four of us, not one dared to back down now from destinies joined, whether in sobriety or in the loose talk of drink. With our beloved surfboards we'd hauled half way around the world, only to hear snide remarks on the London Subway of whether we were planning to surf the Thames, we were to surf Europe’s finest beaches. Spain, Portugal and France were ours for the taking, from Brittany to Biarritz, La Caruna to Faro. There was even talk of covering the Mediterranean coast up to Italy, checking if Italians surfed or just lay in rows of sunbeds, then heading northwards to end in Holland and Belgium where we'd heard tales of surfable canals stirred by passing barge traffic. From my backpack spilled maps of all the surf breaks along the way with names like Playa Santa Comba, Rio Siera, and Los Locos, complete with seasonal water temperature and average wave size. Organized as they were, in folders, they gave a sense that every angle had been covered. I for one, let myself be drunk on maps - those intoxicating pictures that speak of endless possibility to those wanting to listen.
And so it came to be that we found ourselves, four old friends, arriving in London to a questionable ‘summer’. Each with our own stories to tell, or not to tell, we had barely escaped our month in Thailand alive. However it was no time to relax yet, as we watched our savings being devoured by a greedy pound sterling, alarm drove us into a frantic van hunt. Fabled car markets, frustratingly, turned out to be merely fables. In front of Australia House were plenty of pigeons wandering aimlessly, and busy Londoners racing by, but not a van for sale as far as I could see. We followed other leads out to ????? Station where apparently a Mecca for used car trading was to be found, yet standing in vacant streets we found nothing but a lone station wagon for sale, almost brand new, and offered a few hundred quid to a couple who laughingly wished us better luck.
Our first exclusive viewing was a Leyland DAF for £400 from an old Englishman who insisted he was the Queen's plumber, and later in a much graver tone, that he was 'old school'. I was dying to know which part of an age passed he clung onto when calling himself ‘old school’, and smiled civilly as he explained how he wouldn’t stuff anyone around in business, and we weren't to stuff him around. It wouldn’t have been old school of us. But then we didn’t want any further ‘stuff arounds’ either, after an expensive train ride to Windsor for the inspection. Apparently in London, Australians are too common to allow one to play the innocent foreigner act when caught several zones past the tickets we held. And so we were fined accordingly.
In the brief inspection, we weren’t so much interrogating the car’s condition as attaching our plans to it, which till then had been no more concrete than the maps we'd studied, or the station wagon we would never touch. It wasn't much to look at really, with fresh paint unsuccessfully masking its flaking panels. Yet, as we reassured each other, rust was friend not foe when looking for a short term car on a tight budget. Apart from this, it was a clumsy and embarrassingly awkward looking van, vaguely recognizable as a British mail van, but it could be 'our' van. Over a beer at the pub we voted unanimously to close the deal, and at once 'DAF!' became the mantra for our road trip. In moments of triumph, despair, or often for no reason at all, ‘DAF!’ was our shout. Eventually this would be incorporated into a German line we’d picked up in Thailand, and then our shout was 'DAF is da hammer!'. We were bound to it, with nothing left to do but celebrate it as one of our own. As far as we were concerned it was our chariot to conquer Europe, and with our centurion soldier figurine standing proud on the dash, we set off full of excitement the next day for the white cliffs of Dover and beyond.
From the opening leg Jerem manned the helm with Luke to his left as co-pilot, while Chris and I lounged, like Romans of old with food and drink, in the back space designed for bags of mail. We arrived in pleasant Dover just after sunset to the news that we couldn’t cross the English Channel till booking a ferry for the following day. The four of us disagreed, for we could smell Paris already, and so sallied forth onto the nearest ferry with no problem at all and minutes to spare before it launched off with a rumble of the turbines. The four of us, with our box of duty-free French wine, stood together on a windy deck, while Chris inquired whether Paris was a coastal city. Gazing into the darkness, I listened to the frightening black waves below, letting my imagination fill the space with dreams of adventures about to unfold.
We docked under the high orange lights of the Calais ferry terminal, rolled off the gangway in an eerie late night procession, and then we were driving on the unfamiliar side of the road towards sunrise in Paris. Our weary souls had been made lighter by the adrenalin of adventure's momentum, and for the first few minutes until realizing the futility, we all looked into the darkness from our foggy windows, expecting to see France.
After driving through the night, the blue haze of dawn allowed Jerem and I our first views of France, as the other two slumbered noisily in the back. We were making good time, and Paris was drawing excitingly close. Jerem and I made a good team, and he already felt as familiar with the car as I did with the blanket-sized road map unfurled over my lap. But despite this, I couldn’t help noticing that Jerem looked unsettled.
The DAF had been giving it a good shot through the night, but was now losing a little power, and sending out faint clouds of smoke, and Jerem was shaking his head without saying a word. Traffic, which had been slowly passing us all through the night, was now rocketing by at an embarrassing pace. ‘It’s an old van’, we reassured ourselves, ‘She’ll get through it’, and we continued on, now to a symphony of hooting freight carriers. While the other two dreamt of Paris, Jerem and I suppressed the first pangs of panic for this unplanned state of affairs. We crept along the highway for another tense hour, the DAF now coughing black smoke and reeling with less and less force, until at last we reached Paris.
Thick black smoke swept along the promenades of Paris at walking pace, and now smartly dressed Parisians on their way to work were being engulfed in our sinister trail. We watched them run in panic, in our rear view mirrors, others veiling their faces, waiting for us to pass. Heads were being shaken in disgust, accusatory fingers were being pointed, and road rage was rampant. Our arrival in Paris was not unfolding as the victory march we’d imagined.
At an unassuming service station we stopped to check out the car, with no idea of what to look for, or what to tell the two who’d just awoken from the back seat, for put into words it didn’t seem real. Beneath the bonnet, DAF’s engine steamed furiously. As we tried in vain to calm her with water, the true gravity of our situation began to make itself clear but were too afraid to say it, like in films when dying soldiers are consoled with kind words by those who know they’re doomed. Finally admitting to each other that this called for professional help we drove, now at elderly persons walking pace, in search of kind Parisians who could find it in their heart to fix our English van.
Between us we spoke English, two lines of German which made us all giggle, my basic Spanish, and nothing else. French class, years earlier, was the only class I ever failed and the others had only scraped through and since forgotten. We didn’t have a useful word of French between us, only ‘ma petit French fleur!’, which Chris was now using to woo the Parisian girls in the street from the window of our smoldering van. While as I remembered old high school days when Jerem and I would swing on our chairs and tease the French teacher, in a class who seemed bent on driving her insane, cramps of regret mocked from somewhere deep in my gut.
We had no obvious candidate for spokesman, but thanks to my forethought in packing a phrase book, I was sent in to the first garage we found. After taking a few deep breaths the others wished me luck, then I marched inside, as prepared as I would ever be, with a salutation and a follow up practical line. As I put into words my first French line in eight years, the rounded Parisian mechanic reeled in horror, his face contorted with disgust. I felt like the Elephant Man. Again I tried, now with a slightly different emphasis, but he replied in French words I didn’t understand, before my line was complete. As he backed away, shaking his head whilst shoeing me off with his grease covered hands, I understood perfectly. His wide-eyed stare said it all. Dejected, I returned to the car and told Jerem to drive. The others suggested that perhaps it wasn’t a garage for repairs after all, but I didn’t want to talk about it. We tried another place across the road, again with no luck at all, and then became lost. Eventually Jerem just parked down a small side street for no particular reason, in who knows which part of Paris.
The DAF was sicker than ever by this point, and we just wanted to sleep. We had no insurance for this, nobody to call, and our only map of Paris was a mere thumbnail on our blanket sized map of France. It was all proving too much to deal with at this sleepless hour of the morning. Anyway it was clear, even if we weren’t yet feeling guilty about fumigating innocent Parisians in the streets, that our van couldn’t carry on in this way for much longer. There we sat, the silence of that early morning suburban street intensifying our feelings of despair at being all alone in Paris, with no ideas of how to save our road trip, in its opening day.
After staring vacantly down the street for half an hour in the intermittent silence of the dashboard clock, I suddenly felt the need to walk. I had no ideas, but I couldn’t sit still any longer. Walking up the hill then turning down one of the quaint alleyways, I couldn’t help thinking how in other circumstances these streets would seem so beautiful. These streets were quiet, but how envious I was of the morning joggers I saw who would soon return home to their warm showers and freshly brewed coffee. In the face of an older man walking two small dogs on long leather leashes, I saw a look of calm so distant from the faces of my friends back in the van, and it filled me with melancholy.
On my way back to the van, at the bottom of the street, I came across a man of about 30 who seemed troubled. His car would not start, and immediately I was comforted to see a Parisian sharing similar misfortunes, and moreover a Parisian with no means to escape me! The ensuing conversation wasn’t understood by either of us, but we had managed to establish that he needed assistance pushing his car, and that I needed help with the van up the street. Fate had placed us in a mutual need situation, I saw light on the horizon, and my feeling of deflation gave way to a new wind.
Up that hill we pushed his car; down the hill I pushed his car, up the next, then down another, as I sweated profusely. All the while he was shouting ‘alle! Alle!’ with such gusto I understood it meant ‘go! go!’. Still the engine would not turn over, but it sounded reassuringly close. I was panting heavily, but the man insisted on another try with motions I understood to mean we were only a rattle away from our solution, so up the hill we went again. This time he was also out of the car, with the door open ready to leap behind the wheel, as we both pushed with all our combined might. We were gathering momentum, more than any of the other attempts, and as we reached full running pace he was now shouting ‘alle! Alle!’ like a madman. The car’s trajectory wasn’t exactly straight, but I was sure he’d noticed. I was wrong. The split second before I veered clear of the car I glanced over to see him, pushing the car onwards with his head down. It hit the embankment with that distinctive crashing sound. Pieces of the car flew like shrapnel from an exploding bomb and the tyre burst dramatically. As the car rolled awkwardly to a standstill, the man shouted ‘merde!!’
Stunned, I made an obligatory inspection of the damaged car, whilst the man I had found mildly troubled 10 minutes earlier, now held his head in his hands. Our lack of common words had not bothered me before, but now it was painfully uncomfortable. As he walked away from his now damaged car, cursing under his breath, I saw our light on the horizon fade.
Back at the van I retold the story to the others, who didn’t wholly understand why I had been pushing a stranger’s car around while ours lay close to death. Beyond frustration, we rallied once more for professional assistance. I had spotted a garage two blocks away on my earlier walk, so we fired up the DAF and headed there. The mechanic looked under the bonnet to placate our pleas, but after a few token taps on the engine, let us know he couldn’t do anything, and stubbornly pointed to the Peugeot badge on his overalls by way of an excuse. We tried to make a point of taking our business across the road to a competing garage, but there the mechanic wouldn’t even humor us past our initial ‘bounjour’. And so our welcome to Paris dragged painfully on in this way for several hours, from garage to garage, ‘non’ to ‘non’, as we bought our sanity along the way in exquisite pastries.
The large-scale rejection was threatening to break us all. I asked myself whether it was our English van and plates, our deficient French language skills, or the utter desperation we oozed in each human contact we attempted, and concluded glumly that it was probably all three. Our disenchantment was growing and we were stuck with the van we had, if only we could find an English speaker we may still have a chance to save our trip.
From one garage where we waited for mechanics that would never show, we spotted a Holiday Inn across the intersection, and went to investigate. Inside, a polite receptionist greeted me in French and then, after seeing my blankness, with fluent English. It was as refreshing as the perfectly regulated foyer temperature. After hearing our situation with sympathetic nods, he searched his dog-eared directory, only to conclude that not a single mechanic in Paris spoke English. I queried if perhaps one could be found who spoke Spanish, and so again he scrutinized the hefty directory. His only suggestion was far-fetched, but it was the best we had. At a distance about equal to that which we estimated the DAF could crawl before dying, was an old Portuguese mechanic he knew of, who roughly spoke Spanish. He gave us directions with patience, whilst others in the foyer repeatedly interrupted to offer us their advice too, albeit in French. Eventually we had ourselves a hand-drawn map, and with our emergency lights warning all that we were on the move again, off we set, fumigating several more streets along the way to what would surely be our last hope, and then we became lost. After going over the directions again we set a new course and puttered on, the DAF lurching and smoking absurdly every bit of the way. Finally we were on the correct street, and like starving sailors searching for land we scoped the street for our savior. With a cheer we arrived, and at that very moment DAF gave a final moan, only to die in the driveway. A group of grinning mechanics stood in wait, for our friendly French receptionist had called ahead, and they laughed at our van’s dramatically scripted end.
Buoyed with the confidence of my basic Spanish, which I hadn’t expected to use for another few weeks, I strode ahead of our steaming van towards the men, proclaiming ‘Hola, senors. Tenemos problemas!’, to which they all laughed once more. And in that moment I felt the relief of a problem shared, so that all that remained was their professional verdict, and the mercy of their quote. After some initial confusion as to whether they would fix it then or later on, they wheeled our van into their crowded garage and started work almost immediately, with the other three still lying in the back.
As the only Spanish speaker, I had to stay awake, once more to play the spokesman role we’d all tried without luck throughout the day. Yet this time I wasn’t so bothered, for our man Mr. Amado, as typically olive and relaxed as the Portuguese come, was a good man. Patiently he explained every step of the repairs with me. With my limited knowledge of cars, in English, I soon found myself involved in discussions about the van’s engine, in Spanish. For the parts I still didn’t understand, I employed my seasoned nod of agreement I’d practiced many a time during similar conversations with mechanics in Australia. One hour lead to the next, and part after part of clogged, worn, and broken engine was being exhumed from within the DAF. Each ‘muerto’ and ‘kaput’ was accompanied by a barmy grin from Mr. Amado as he dismissively threw the parts to grease puddles on the ground. Some components leaked, while others were flooded with unidentified substances, and some parts were even missing. And with each discovery of a new defect in the DAF’s engine, Luke was getting madder and madder, sticking his head out the window to catch the latest update, then shaking his head with reddened cheeks and exclaiming, ‘He sold us a lemon! That old bastard sold us a bloody lemon!’ The back of the DAF was thus becoming a boiler room for heated plans of revenge on our ‘old school’ friend across the Channel, spun on and on in more vivid and violent detail until there was talk of leaving the DAF flaming in his driveway, just close enough to his house to bring it all coming down around him.
More than anything else, however, we all felt quite foolish. Even if we wanted to carry out our heated plans for revenge it would have been impossible, for we had been shown the car not at the owner’s house, but in a suburban parking lot. Even at this detail none of us had smelt a rat. As we witnessed mechanics hammering away at the nose of our van to fit in a radiator from some other model minibus, we also felt regret at ignoring our parents’ advice to buy a car which was common in continental Europe, rather than one exclusive to the UK.
After several hours the repairs were complete, so Mr. Amado offered a bill with tax by card or without tax in cash which we gladly accepted, and asked us where we were headed now. I told him proudly we were headed for his mother country on our way surfing around the Iberian Peninsula, and when he replied ‘Ay, muchos kilometros!!’, we understood this to mean that he doubted our van was capable of such a journey. After telling him ‘Muchisimas gracias’, we all made a point of shaking his hand and took up our positions in the DAF to head for the coast. Jerem was tooting in celebration as we left, and the group of mechanics had all put down their tools, and were now standing in a group, sending us off with waves, still laughing at us like when we had arrived.
On the opening day of our grand tour, in one of the world’s greatest cities, we’d had the most miserable day of our trip. All we felt was disillusionment and the urge to leave. We wanted to surf more than anything else. We needed everything that Paris could not give us in that moment, and so we watched it slip away in our rear view mirrors with a kind of bitter satisfaction. No longer did we dream of Paris, only of the sun, and to feel the sand between our toes, to feel waves beneath us, and to dive beneath them as they rolled smoothly over us. We heeded Mr. Amado’s advice and downsized our itinerary, so that our next stop was Bordeaux. There we discovered an amazing city which put a spell on us all, but most importantly the gateway to the southern surf coast.
In the weeks to follow we surfed Lacanau and Moliets, sleeping in hammocks in coastal pine forests, or in the back of the DAF which began to emit bittersweet odors of red wine, men, and surf wax. The sun invariably smiled and the people we met along the way too. In Bordeaux, a chance meeting with a Dutch surfer, who returned to his van whilst we were admiring the paint job, lead to a dreamy week of pure paradise. The deal was simple enough; help him and his fellow Dutch and Belgian surfers to construct a surf camp in return for as much beer and food as we wanted, and obligatory morning surfs, swell permitting. In this interlude the DAF was decorated for the adventures ahead with a graffiti mural from Chris, complete with splashes of water, and on the other side a raging bull with furious eyes, and the line ‘running of the fools!’. In San Sebastian I realized my dream of seeing Spain for the first time, and later through winding mountain roads to Pamplona’s San Fermin ‘running of the bulls’ the DAF carried us. Once again we were all shouting ‘DAF is da hammer’ like in the good old days, and those who had just joined the trip noticed the mixture of pride and irony with which we said it. What a sight it was too, nine Australians all wearing white and red festival outfits crammed into the van with seats for two, bottles of vino tinto and Sangria rolling around between the bodies. What a sight also when I had to explain this to Spanish highway patrolmen, barefoot and wine-stained myself when DAF had broken down on the side of the road back from Pamplona, with the paper thin excuse that in England a van full of drunks with no seats or belts wasn’t a problem.
The breakdowns became a common occurrence – Mr. Amado had been right in doubting the DAF’s ability to cover so many kilometers. The back of the car was beginning to resemble a cellar with countless bottles stacked in corners for emergency water. Yet each time we refilled the radiator it would shoot back out various holes in fountain-like streams more spectacular every time, whilst the engine would start with a cough sicklier than the last. We were buying her more time day by day, but had lost all faith in her for further travels. Eventually one day in San Sebastian we made the decision not to resuscitate DAF, and left her where she would have wanted, with a prime park on Paseo Nuevo where all the other bigger and better vans liked to sleep. There she laid; overlooking Playa de la Zurriola, that picturesque surf beach of friendly waves where I’d had two of the best surfs of my life.
With the passing of the DAF there was nothing else binding the destinies of us four old friends for now. Chris left for Bilbao and then to London to find work, while Jerem stayed in San Sebastian at the service of a demented old lady. He brought guests to her hostel from the train station, where he’d fight his way through mobs of old ladies scrambling over newly arrived tourists. He never visited the DAF after we left. Luke and I set off by train with our surfboards, to Portugal to surf Praia Grande, and then journeyed onwards together through Andalucia, completing the original plan as best we could. We all left with our memories mixed like a collage, not quite sure if it had been a success or a failure, an experience of growth or just a sour chapter. For me, picking from the smorgasbord of tapas around me and sipping my wine, I only had to think of those sour mechanics destined to be covered in grease day in day out for years to come, to know who the lucky ones were. And then I chatted with Luke about whether to spend the next day lounging on the sunny Cabo de Gata, or to head for the Andalucian gem of Granada.
