International Mooching: An Ode to Simon Lovering

We recently went to Gran Canaria on holiday and stayed in a lovely apartment complex in Puerto Rico that my wife had visited before with her sisters. It was just the job for someone that likes spending all day lying in the sun. I don't mind that, but I also don't really like travelling on planes to just spend a week or two lying down doing nothing. I hate flying after I once had an absolutely horrendous flight back from Bucharest where my dad lives. It was bumping all over the place for the whole journey then we had an aborted landing because the pilot didn't know there was another plane on the runway. Not much fun. I wouldn't let that get in the way of travelling, but if I'm going to get on a plane I want to make sure I've at least had some new experiences. 

I had a look at what options there were for mooching about in Gran Canaria while we were there. We didn't really want to hire a car so I looked at public transport options. There were some mountains and canyons in the middle of the island which we could reach by bus, then get another bus down to Maspalomas which had some mentally big sand dunes. That would do the job.

We had a pretty scary bus journey up towards the island's centre, which lots of steep drops on the side of the winding road. We got off the bus in what felt like the Grand Canyon. I try to wear my Tuffley Rovers bobble hat at as many random locations as possible. So far it has been to Stuttgart, Bucharest, Dublin, Belfast, Tenerife, Brno, Bratislava, Vienna, Milan and the summit of Ben Nevis. I was now adding Gran Canaria to the list on a blistering hot day that made anyone wearing a bobble hat look like the village idiot. I was almost certainly the only man that had ever worn a Tuffley Rovers bobble hat in the Canary Islands and definitely the only man that had worn a Tuffley Rovers bobble hat combined with an Alien Nosejob t shirt. Australian punk music and Hellenic League football isn't a common combination. What a place we'd visited though. Absolutely incredible views.

We couldn't get a bus back from where got off, so had to walk down through the valley for about a mile and a half which was pretty cool in terms of the scenery and going off the beaten track, but not cool in the literal sense as it was absolutely baking hot on this dusty trail in the arse end of nowhere. After a sweaty but enjoyable ramble between the hills, we made it to the bus stop. 

We took the bus back down the road of terror to Maspalomas to find the dunes. They aren't that hard to find as they are next to the main town and are absolutely massive. One thing you notice when you get to the dunes is that there are a number of random naked people walking about. It's pretty weird and I don't really want to see it again so I'm not going to Google the reasons for it, but it's something that's worth bearing in mind if you visit. We started walking across the dunes, trying to follow a route that we were permitted to walk along. Then we got a bit distracted by how amazing the place was and found ourselves a bit lost in the middle of them. We wanted to get to the town the other side and hadn't seen any more signs warning us of areas to avoid, so we just got to the top of a bank to get a view of where we needed to go and headed that way. 

That walk was absolutely gruelling. We were running a bit low on water and the heat in those dunes was next level. We found ourselves having to scale walls of sand over and over again until we eventually made it to the other side. We then realised we'd walked through an area we weren't really supposed to walk through and I felt like a right dickhead. It had been an innocent mistake and we hadn't done any damage or left any litter, but I felt bad about it because they protect it to keep the dunes as undisturbed as possible for natural habitats and to prevent a loss of sand into the sea because of human disturbance. If you visit, don't be idiots like us. Stay on the main routes. You'll definitely see some old naked people but you'll still get some special views of these incredible dunes. 

As soon as we got back to civilisation, we found a pub to firstly get some water in and then to enjoy some cold beers and cocktails. It had been a great day of mooching about so we made our way back to Puerto Rico on the bus and I at least felt like I'd had a bit of adventure on an otherwise dossy holiday. 

We'd had our share of other mini adventures on holiday before. We've been to Thailand a few times and with my mum and stepdad. They like making friends with the locals and trying to do things away from the typical tourist bus trail. We'd talk to locals in bars and asked if any of them had a boat so we could try and arrange a trip out away from the usual planned routes. The first time we did that was in Koh Samui with a massive bloke with a speedboat. He took us out for the day with his young son. We went to some completely empty beaches, backed by dense forests full of howling monkeys. He took the opportunity to get a load of bananas to sell when we returned back to base. We went snorkeling in waters with no other people around, let alone tourists. Just us and the young lad attempting to catch fish with spears. 

The next time we visited Thailand we went to Phi Phi where the movie The Beach was filmed. I've heard it has become a bit too commercial nowadays but when we went it was basically a few hotels and a load of bars aimed at backpackers. Again, we found a local bloke with a boat to take us out for the day. All of the places to stay are on the larger island Phi Phi Don and the island with "the beach" is the much smaller Phi Phi Lee. Because of the film showing off the beauty of the place, it is incredibly popular. The tours typically leave Phi Phi Don after sunrise, but our new local mate was happy to take us over there before the sun came up. That gave us a good half hour or so with this world famous beach to ourselves before it became infested with other tourists. We moved on and spend the rest of the morning exploring other parts of the islands with the local man and his two sons. Like before, these lads were also spear fishing but also didn't manage to catch anything. 

One of my other favourite international mooches was in Tallinn back in 2012. It was a suprise trip for my stepdad's 50th birthday and seven of us travelled there with him; my mum, my wife, my brother and his wife and his/our friends Helen and Griff. One of his old friends Michael "Beef" Park was a rally co-driver for Estonian legend Markko Martin. Beef had tragically been killed in a crash in 2005 in Wales Rally Great Britain. Because he was the co-driver for an Estonian hero, Beef was also an Estonian hero and there is a memorial in his honour on the seafront 3 miles from the centre of Tallinn. My stepdad had wanted to visit the memorial since it had been erected, so it was the perfect trip for his birthday.

At the time, the early 2012 cold wave had hit Eastern Europe with temperatures in Tallinn dropping as low as -26°C. When we arrived, the sea was frozen and it was so cold that if you took your gloves off to take a photo, your hands started to sting within seconds. When you blinked, you'd feel your eyelids freezing together and you could throw the contents of a boiling mug of water into the air and watch it immediately turn to frozen dust. It was insanely cold. The 3 mile walk to the memorial had been turned into an expedition. We bought little bottles of whisky to add to our hot drinks as we walked the icy coast path. I've never felt cold like that before, which made making it to the amazing memorial even more of a special moment. It was an incredible gesture from the people of Estonia to a man from Herefordshire. The Estonian prime minister unveiled the sculpture in 2006 and said "Michael Park was honoured and loved here in Estonia. For us he wasn't a foreigner, he was our co-driver, our own hero. He was a member of the Estonian team".

Tallinn is a wonderful city. I've heard it gets pretty busy with stag parties in the warmer months, but when we were there it was just a beautiful, interesting place to explore and to shelter from the cold in some decent, warm pubs. We often talk about it as one of the best trips we've ever done and how we'd love to go back. I think we'd struggle to replicate the conditions and sense of adventure though. 

As mentioned earlier, my dad lives in Bucharest and I've had a fair few trips out to spend time with him in Romania. In Britain, too many people view Romania as a crumbling Eastern European shithole that wouldn't be an appealing place to visit. The reality is that it's an incredibly beautiful country, with a rich history and some amazing scenery. As a visitor, the benefit of the misguided opinions about Romania is that it is unspoiled by other foreign tourists and when you travel around Romania, it feels like proper travelling. On my longer trips to Bucharest, we've always tried to spend time outside the city in the glorious countryside and other towns. 

I've driven the Transfagarasan Highway which Jeremy Clarkson described as the best road in the world and immediately became royalty in Romania. I've been to Dracula's Castles, both the tourist one in Bran that is a basically a creepy looking house and also Poenari Castle, the proper home of Vlad the Impaler. I've spent time in beautiful Transylvanian towns and next to lakes between some of the highest peaks of the Carpathians, twice the height of Ben Nevis.

My most treasured memory of Romania though is our road trip from Bucharest to Brasov with my late uncle Simon. We stopped in Sinai along the way where there is a cable car up the Bucegi Mountains. My wife Stace had decided she wasn't going to go on it as it looked really old and the cable just disappeared up into the clouds. She wasn't keen at all. Then my dad walked up and said "I've got the cable car tickets. They were pretty expensive but hopefully it'll be good up there". Oh dear. We went on it and it was pretty scary. It didn't fill us with confidence that the door wouldn't shut properly and then once you got over the clouds it looked like some sort of zip wire to Hell. 

I didn't enjoy that journey at all. Stace was covering her eyes. When we got to the top though it was amazing. It added a bit to the sense of adventure that there were signs warning of bears in the area, but the landscape was unbelievable. We felt on top of the world. 

We lost my uncle Simon after a short battle with motor neurone disease in 2016. It was devastating for his family and pretty much everyone that knew him well. He was kind, funny, down-to-earth and a true gentleman. He had an obsession with seeing as much of the world as possible and had travelled to over 100 countries. He and his lovely wife Karen never had any children, but he'd have made a wonderful father. I know how much he loved me and my brother and I wish I'd had the opportunity to tell him how much of a role model he was to me. He encouraged me to want to see new places, do daft things and most of all to just be a good person that doesn't take life too seriously. We all miss him a great deal, but he lives on by inspiring us to seek adventure and to enjoy life to the full, because it is far too short.