Overland to Greece: Bologna to Bari

My suitcase and guitar are in a left luggage office straight out of the 1970s at Bari port. I'm drinking coffee in a cafe at Bari airport having just dropped off the hire car that's ferried me around Apulia for the last five days. Thus officially ends a completely mad whirlwind of a time in Bari which defies summary and some of which is not for the family-friendly pages of this blog.

I arrived from Bologna and Florence, having decided that the weather was just too rainy and cold to stay in the North. Bologna is stunning, and I made good friends in the hostel I was in, and in Florence I visited D & T who I hadn't seen since London days and who made me an excellent welcome. But the kind of pacing the streets that freeform tourism requires is just that much harder when it's pouring with rain and 7 degrees. So I got on the earliest possible train South to Bari where my ferry was due to leave in just under a week.

I booked myself a room in a suspiciously cheap accommodation which turned out to be perfectly pleasant albeit in a ropey part of town, with young Russian influencer-types always occupying the bathroom. But I was sad to be in a room for one, rather than in a hostel. I thought what a mistake I'd made and set about glumly pacing the streets of Bari looking for someone to talk to. Bari was warm but also drizzly so unlimited strolling meant wet shoes.

My first discovery was Alessandro, owner of a vinyl records bar just round the corner from my accommodation and certainly the coolest bar and the coolest guy in that grotty suburb. He'd lived in Leeds and we chatted and drank beers, and he rolled me a cigarette and even offered me something stronger.

But it was my second discovery that was to kick everything into outer space. On the first full day, I strolled so far out of town that I ended up at a suburban railway station on the outskirts of Bari. I decided to get a train to a seaside town nearby for a late lunch by the sea. I stood and waited on the platform for 20 minutes, only to realise as the train rolled in that I was on the wrong platform and only a dash across the tracks would allow me to catch the only train that hour. Defeated and deflated, I waited for the train in my direction back to Bari Centrale.

My head was full of thoughts about sliding doors moments and about how I'd missed my chance for something exciting to happen and instead was heading back to the town I'd already seen. It turns out I was right about that missed train being a sliding doors moment, but that missing it had actually put me on the right side of history. At Bari Centrale, the rain was now coming down quite hard and the afternoon was by now well advanced. A large group of people stood at the exit to the station looking at the rain and hoping it would slow. I joined them, and stood in a corner looking out at a rainy carpark.

"It's not dry where you're standing," someone said to me. I looked round and saw a smiling young woman. "I was just standing there and I got dripped on. You should move along a bit." I assumed she was crazy, but even a conversation with a crazy person is better than no conversation. "Looks alright to me," I said, "I'll take my chances." She said that it didn't look like it was going to stop any time soon, and I told her that that was OK with me because I had no plans. "I've also got no plans," she said. "I'm just waiting until evening so I can go to my accommodation." When I asked her if she wanted a beer, she said "always!" and the evening was afoot.

She gave me her umbrella to hold and went to get her rain coat from her luggage which was in storage at the station, then we set off into the gloom together under her umbrella. She turned out to be Bulgarian by birth, went to school in Germany, and had been living in the US for 11 years where she'd married and divorced two different Americans, and had just hitch-hiked from Sofia in Bulgaria to Bari where she'd spent the last two years caring for her dad who had had a long illness and recently died. She was working on a budget of very little money indeed and was trying to hitch hike to Tunisia where she had a work placement sanding boats.

We bought beers, bread and tomatoes from a supermarket and went and stood on a street corner to drink the beers and share the bread. We talked animatedly about our lives and she told me a series of astonishing adventures she'd been on, including living in her car after her first divorce, and leading white-water rafting groups in Greece after sleeping with a rafter she'd met in the beer queue at a festival. After a few beers she said that she needed to get some Wifi so she could text this guy she'd met on a couchsurfing website who had offered her to share his single bed for the night. She wasn't feeling that keen on the idea, so I felt it only gentlemanly to point out that I at least had a double bed we could share. The deal was sealed.

The next few days are too wild and various to go into in complete detail but, as a sketch, I'll say that we shared an electric scooter round town with her urging me to go faster, drove all over the region in my hire car, broke into a building being renovated and ended up hopping from rooftop to rooftop in an ancient stone city, befriended an old jewellery maker who lived in a cave, swam naked in the glittering and cold Adriatic, ran up a mountain side as the sun set and we realised we were in the wrong part of the valley, drank free Prosecco in an Italian restaurant where she'd charmed the owner, ate, drank, sang and danced and were generally incredibly merry and in love for four days. We exchanged music, talked about our lives and backgrounds and generally learned about one another in every possible way. We ate focaccia from an ancient bakery, the like of which I literally didn't know existed (nothing like the focaccia I've had in the UK) and saw ancient cities on hillsides that, old and jaded as I am, I couldn't take my eyes off. We stole kisses among the ruins at dusk. Her energy, thirst for fun and loving nature had a magic which transformed things. With her presence, she transformed my lonely room in a dodgy part of town into a little home which it was always a delight to come back to.

She left the night before last at five in the morning to get a bus to Rome where she would be getting a boat to Africa. As she left, she wrote my number on her arm and we agreed that one day we'd see each other again. I'm glad I missed that train, and instead got to spend a few days riding on this metaphorical one. A much more rewarding journey.

An old jewellery maker who lived in a cave

A very poor attempt to mirror some street art

Some entrancingly beautiful tourist opportunities, among whose winding ruins kisses were stolen

Overland to Greece: the cold and rainy first leg

 Only four days into my latest travels, and time is already doing that thing where it feels like a thousand years ago since I arrived at Victoria coach station in the freezing dark of a Monday morning, wrangling through the London Underground my giant wheelie suitcase and the too-tall-for-doorways guitar on my back.

The coach from London to Paris is a very odd mix of people. It's wildly cheap and takes a very long time indeed, which clearly attracts a certain section of the market, that section seemingly being Latin Americans, immigrant families with lots of luggage and the occasional London teenager keen to get started ASAP with the TikTok and tunes out of their phones' speakers.

The coach was so cheap that I bought the seat next to mine too (something they actively offer you at less than double the price of one seat) so it was actually a very tranquil and meditative 11 hours of London traffic, white cliffs of Dover and, eventually, long after the sun had set on Monday evening, the chaos of the Paris périphérique.

As has been the theme of these travels so far, it was pouring with rain and extremely cold in Paris that evening, but I managed to stroll around a bit, have a beer while staring into space and pretending not to be listening to the French conversations all around me, then found myself at a punk rock gig in a little sticky-floored venue just off the Bastille. There's something dream-like about these solo wanderings where, as a man, your existence goes completely unacknowledged and you can float on the edge of various societies in an almost documentary film kind of way. The soaking wet shoes and socks on my return to the hotel were all too tangible though.

It's much quicker to get from Victoria coach station to a grotty Paris music venue in photo-montage form than to do it in real life

Absurdly early the following morning I got the train to Milan, which covered the boring sections of central France in the hours of darkness and had arrived in more scenic climes by the time the sun rose. It's Very Fast Indeed from Paris to somewhere South of Lyon, then the same train becomes a kind of winding alpine cattle-herd of a thing, with stops every twenty minutes at which no one gets on or off, and the snow on the platform is increasingly menacing-looking. Eventually we crossed into Italy and the Alps quickly eased off, replaced by rain.

The sound made by a wheelie suitcase coming upon sharp rocks hidden beneath the snow

One more slog up and down Metro stairs with my giant suitcase and, before you know it, you're breezing along a canal in the Milanese rain looking for a place to have a beer and some free Italian crunchy snacks. The rain was unrelenting and the cold somehow more intense than Paris, but the strolling was second-to-none. I chatted to some American Winter Olympics people on a tram (not team members sadly, but marketing and events drones but, being Americans, were still fun to chat to) then wandered around an art gallery called Pinacoteca di Brera which left you in no doubt as to what they thought Jesus and Mary looked like in 16th Century Europe. You could probably get a BTEC in crucifixion if you were really concentrating.

My Milan hostel was of the co-working-space, everyone's doing something important-looking variety. This included the reception staff and the bar staff and the people in my dorm who were all very concentratedly scrolling Instagram, so no fun was had. I left early the following morning to get the train to Bologna.

Joy and merriment of the good old-fashioned variety

"No I'm not in London, Droitwich. DROITWICH!"

The one thing I've always liked about hippie philosophising is the idea that "The Universe Provides" in response to a request or a need. It's a kind of Karmic mumbo-jumbo version of "fortune favours the brave" which seems to be the uniting force behind much of the antics in this blog/life.

And sometimes to fully realise the truth of this mantra, you've got to pay £500 for a week of Buddhist retreat in the beautiful Devon countryside, eat nourishing home-cooked and -foraged vegan food, sit for long periods of meditation, spend hours in sombre, sober silence, get bored, glum and claustrophobic and leave in a mad hurry after less than two days.

Yes, it's true. The promised new birth of an enlightened new Rob has ended in ignominious running away, dodging the morning's silent porridge breakfast, staircase hoovering, sharing circle and generally mindful drudgery. I just couldn't face it. It wasn't the Qi Gong in the drizzle, or the tears in the sharing circle about lives gone awry in as many ways as there were "retreatants". It wasn't even the narrow bedsprung single mattress, the pins and needles of the penis during a 40-minute meditation on a cushion (this is real and not at all as fun as it sounds), the bowing, the hands-to-heart-centre or the constant ringing of bells, gongs and singing bowls that seem to be the requisite accompaniments to a simple philosophy of impermanence, being in the now and breathing nicely.

No, it was just the po-faced mock-solemnity of the whole thing, and the complete absence of a twinkle in the eye of anyone, facilitators or retreatants, during the long periods of silence which were scheduled only to get worse during the week. I could have done it, I really could. I kind of like the idea of communal, silent task-doing. But it's got to feel light, fizzy and full of merriment and gratitude, otherwise it just reminds me too much of the glum, eyes-down church-of-england style processions I had to participant in as a member of "serious" chamber choirs my whole life.

There are several, separate funny stories to tell about the other participants but I'll leave those for in-person, but picture the scene Tuesday morning as I hid in my room, packing up my stuff while my course-pals ate a silent breakfast and presumably wondered where I was and why the stairs hadn't been vacuumed. I called H, the face of sanity among any level of new-age hogwash, and within an hour and a half I was safely in a cafe in Taunton, a convenient halfway point between the two of us.

We decided to make a holiday of this unexpected time together and went to a gorgeous swimming lake near her, whereupon I discovered than in my hurried departure I had not only had time for the bread to leaven, but I'd also left my swimming trunks and all my pants and socks in the bedside table back in the world of the deeply and spiritually relaxed. So I had to swim in my underwear, which was fine until we got out and had to go to a nearby Tesco where H bought me some new underwear while I sat in the car in only my towel. I was struck by the speed at which the sublime can become the ridiculous as I ate my Gregg's and pondered the comings and goings of the supermarket car park.

I spent the night at H's and decided to do a tour of The West, seeing all the people I know who live in the delightful and utterly inaccessible places around these parts. I'm now sitting on a train at Shrewsbury station on a train to Machynlleth in mid-Wales, having broken up the journey with a night outside Worcester in a small country hotel straight out of a bleak 1970s sitcom.

The Pear Tree Inn, not even "in" Droitwich

Worcester to Shrewsbury. Who knew where any of these places even are?

The Ale Hub Droitwich (see pin at bottom right). One of two places in this story which isn't even"in" Droitwich.

The choice of Worcester as an overnight stop started with a search for "open mic nights near Birmingham". I had my guitar with me so I thought I turn up somewhere and sing a few songs an make a few friends. It turns out that the last Wednesday of the month you're spoiled for choice round here and I had to decide between a full-band karaoke at a rock venue in Worcester, or an open mic in a tiny place called "The Ale Hub" surrounded by miles of new-build estate in the nearby non-place of Droitwich Spa. When I asked the guy in the pizza parlour in Worcester what he thought of Droitwich, he was most un-encouraging about the prospects for night life. But I made the call that even though the Worcester option would be livelier, I was far more likely to get chatting to people in an out-of-the-way open mic night than in an actual rock venue.

It so it proved to be. The venue was tiny, with about ten tables, many of which were filled with old dudes and their guitar cases. But the atmosphere was good and the standard not too bad. I immediately got chatting to some friendly Brummies next to me and later ended up sitting with a man and his daughter who'd come in from Worcester for an evening out. It transpired that he'd done some performing in the past, but was resistant to my suggestion that he try something with me accompanying him on the guitar. But later on his daughter came over saying that she wanted to take me up on the offer, and did I know Elastic Heart by Sia. I didn't but a quick listen off my phone in the car park and I found out it only had four chords, so we had a little practice then did it live, with me on the guitar and trying to put in some harmonies where I could remember the melody line.

I announced that "Rob" was now "Rob and Nicole", did my little set (Pray by Take That, Nothing Compares 2 U) then Nicole joined me and we busked our way through the Sia belter. It all went very well, and the 20 people in the room were all very impressed, with the dad beaming with pride right at the front.

This cemented us as firm friends and after the show was over, we decided to go together back to Worcester to see if the rock karaoke was still going on. The dad had had a serious car accident 9 months ago and was on crutches but was getting free taxi rides as part of the legal settlement, so I got a free ride with them into town. The rock venue was pretty busy and very much in full swing when we arrived, and long story short I ended up closing the show (purely by coincidence of how late we arrived and signed up) with a version of Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel which I'd been belting out in the car for the last month or so, so knew well enough to really do with some energy. The band were extremely nice about it (straight after the last chord, the keyboard player shouted "where the fuck did YOU come from?" and they all wanted to know if I lived in Worcester and would I be coming again.

We ended the night saying goodbye to our new best friends in the band, and going to a kebab shop with my father and daughter pals being sweet with one another, and generally excellent company. Numbers were exchanged and there were repeated cries of "If you're ever in Worcester again..." etc. etc. It was the universe answering my call for spontaneous joy and merriment of the good old-fashioned beer, music and friendship fuelled variety, with not a singing bowl or a lowered gaze in sight.

 

Back for good

 So that's that then. I'm back in the land of the ice and snow, and swimming in the sea and empty Shabbat streets are already turning into memory.

I have so psychologically prepared myself for the despair that was sure to accompany my return home that I think I've overshot, and I'm actually feeling pleasantly happy to be here. I've had that magical thing you get when you talk to a stranger in English for the first time and it's as easy as pie to understand and be understood. The weather is also playing its part in easing me back in: it's been relentlessly sunny, still and the kind of wild cold that's impossible to ignore, and which makes you feel like an explorer every time you leave the house. I'm writing this from a pub in North East London where I'm eating Monster Munch and drinking proper tea with milk and all suddenly feels familiar and sort of wonderful.

So this is the last blog entry until the next one. Thanks for reading along with me and my latest mid-life crisis. The picking up of the pieces can now begin in earnest. I've got choices to make, a new job to start, choirs to either join or create and a good Jewish woman to find and marry. I'd better get on with it.

Tea and Monster Munch prompt deep musings and sensations of belonging. As per usual...

A life sentence in Tiberias bears fruit

It can now be announced officially as a finding of science: love really is all around.

My decision to stay at the world's oddest hostel in the world's oddest town seemed scientifically designed to test the theory that something worthwhile can come from anything, if you just make yourself available. Surely here, in this barren and often rainy dead end town, with it's poorly-lit hostel populated with religious nutcases and non-denominational plain old nutcases, the conditions were perfect for a pure science experiment of the hypothesis the good things came to those who hung around long enough.

And I really did think I'd found the counterexample, that all the fun had already been squeezed out of my roommates Vlad and Nikolai by experiences in the Russian and Belorussian armed forces. But after 10 days of low-octane routine, breakfast at 7.30am, painting rooms with Israeli radio blasting, coffee and snickers at 11am, sporadically trying and failing to persuade the beautiful receptionist to go for a drink with me, and going to bed with my Steinbeck at 8pm, a certain peace settled over me which was either acceptance in the prison-for-life sense, or acceptance in the fat merry Buddha sense, I couldn't tell which.

And then suddenly everything changed in two subsequent arrivals. A couple arrived from Haifa, he British of the Oxford PPE then Sandhurst variety, and she Aussie of the "I haven't really got much time for ya bullshit t'be honest mate" variety, and they were very much looking for many beers on the rooftop which is exactly what transpired. We were joined by a totally insane Israeli, who'd just come from 8 months living on the beach, and who's liberally shared joints were of psychosis-inducing strength, and we had an evening of energetic talk and total hilarity which kind of broke the ice of the entire hostel in a way that seems pretty hard for me now to quantify, justify or explain.

But suffice it to say that when that evening a new volunteer suddenly arrived as if from nowhere, a young American man with a mandolin and a sharp dry sense of humour, it no longer seemed like such an impossible place to find such a person.

When the couple was leaving, after a further night of rooftop beers, guitar renditions from the new American, and laughing about the previous night's nonsense, the British trainee-officer asked me if I'd leave with him to have a final night of debauchery in Tel Aviv at the dubiously named "Roger's House," and the Aussie insisted I give her my Instagram because I was "a very special person," which left me wondering how she'd be telling this same anecdote to her friends.

I ruminated on the offer of a final night out in Tel Aviv and eventually told Fleur, the Dutch 20 year-old volunteer, that I'd decided that it would only be laziness if I decided not to go, and that that was no reason for making a decision and that I would therefore be leaving that afternoon. She seemed genuinely devastated at this news and said such nice things about how they'd all miss me and how much fun we'd had that I changed my mind again and decided to stay for another night, and cook a farewell dinner for all the volunteers who now suddenly seemed transformed from fellow inmates, into my crew from whom I was about to take a sad departure.

So I bought food, cake and Challah and we had a Shabbat dinner. Fleur miraculously found candles from nowhere and made cookies and I did the blessings on the candles, bread and wine. Sean, the new American, played songs on the guitar after dinner which we all sang along with. We then retired to the pool table for more beers and music and good fellow-feeling, to such an extent that Vlad surprised us all by saying, as it was finally time for bed, that it had been an "unexpected and unforgettable evening".

With these words ringing in my ears, today was finally time to leave Tiberias for real and I went up to the roof where Sean and Fleur were smoking cigarettes in the rain. I asked for my guitar back and Sean said "before you go, let me just play you something I've been working on" and proceeded to play a fully formed and wonderfully fond song he'd written about me, called "The biggest fool in Gallilee."

As I sit here on the bus, speeding away from the purgatorial ending to my time in Israel and towards an unknown future back in frozen England, I still can't quite believe it happened. Love really is all around.

My life in Tiberias perfectly summarised in a single bedside table

Suddenly a crew

Shabbat dinner

Late night at the pool table

I am unexpectedly serenaded as I leave 

Finding fun in the holy land of boredom

 It's a real problem with decision making in the world as we know it: you never know how the alternative would have looked. By definition, you don't get to experience what economists boringly call "the counterfactual."

So it is that I find myself in the rainy North in a very odd hikers' motel, in an equally extremely odd religiosity-on-sea, a run down and mostly empty seaside town where Jesus made the trip from up the road in Nazareth to preach, walk on water and generally piss people off.

His famous water-into-wine trick must have gone down a storm here, because the place is almost entirely without nightlife. There are two giant hotels which cater to religious Jewish families whose business here is a mystery to me, and they are both all-inclusive so the masses are fed with loaves and fishes without gracing the local bars, of which there is exactly one. So the small lakeside town of Tiberias sits mostly empty and glum after sundown while the hulking hotels glow cosily. (As a side note, the Hebrew name Tiveria is much prettier and sounds much less like a disease somehow.)

I ended up here after some cross-country mucking about after my guest from London left. Having left the airport late, I stayed one night on my own in an extremely weird guest house above a dismal shop in a very poor Arab village which had me scurrying for the hire car first thing in the morning. Having a dorm room, and indeed a whole guest house, to yourself is a lot less glamorous and a lot more creepy than you might imagine.

So first thing, I headed to Haifa aiming to spend the weekend there before returning the hire car. I reminded myself to trust in the phenomenon whereby something to do will always turn up if you walk around enough and make yourself available to enough chitchat. And so it proved to be. I was very unsure about what to do with my last two weeks of my time in Israel and I paced the now-familiar streets of Haifa listening in to people's conversations and wondering about getting a job in a coffee shop or something. I even spent $50 to join Workaway, the volunteering site I used when I was in Spain all those years ago (see blog posts of old.) Nothing came of this meandering, and I was feeling a bit heavy hearted and directionless, but when I got back to the hostel I sat down with my guitar and immediately got talking to someone who turned out to be volunteering there and who spoke highly of the experience.

She introduced me to the owner who was a kind and vaguely hippyish guy who said that what they really needed was someone good at DIY to help renovate their sister hostel in Tiberias, a small town on the shores of Lake Galilee, site of much holy mucking about in biblical times. He freely admitted that the once respectable seaside town had gone downhill, but argued persuasively that all the best connections he'd seen people make over the years had been there rather than somewhere more fun, precisely because there was nothing else to do.

So I decided to act while I still had the hire car and I drove that very night through foggy uplands from Haifa to Tiveria and back, around 70 minutes each way, dropping off my giant suitcase and dust-gathering laptop so I could make the bus trip the following morning unencumbered. All was well although the hostel in Tiveria was as weird and Bates-Motel-ish a place as you could imagine. There was no one there except a very stoned middle-aged night watchman guy who seemed thoroughly confused to see me and who let me into the luggage room then quickly returned back to his room to continue his nocturnal activities.

On my return to Haifa I saw I'd had a message on Workaway from an eco-village hippy desert paradise place at the opposite end of the country, in the desert South. I just had to go and check it out. So I paid £100 to extend my car hire for two days, spent the night in Haifa then set out after breakfast on the 4 hour journey south to Mitzpe Ramon. The drive went on forever and when I arrived I somehow immediately knew I didn't want to stay. The place was basically a hotel, run by a couple and assisted by two young Israeli lads. It was very beautiful and the people were friendly but somehow the weird sinister motel was calling me. I actually really don't understand why.

So I left after a cup of sweet tea and half and hour of sitting around awkwardly, and did what turned into a five hour drive back to Tiveria, including getting lost in the centre of Ber Sheva and a torrential thunderstorm outside Tel Aviv which slowed traffic to a crawl for about 80 kilometres.

So I'm here, for reasons I don't really understand, and having left behind an unexperienced "counterfactual" in the desert. There is well and truly nothing to do. I spent the day painting one of the rooms which, with the radio blasting, was kind of fun. Then me and one of the other volunteers, a Russian man with a seemingly unending appetite for hard work, went swimming in the lake. A definite highlight in this town. Determined to have a good time this evening I went out to look at the hotel bar of one of the swanky hotels but it was totally empty so I went instead to the one real pub in town, the Big Ben, and sat and nursed a beer for an hour. On the plus side, I picked up a newspaper from the bar and, with the help of two very sweet but very grumpy bar girls, who spoke not a word of English, attempted the crossword of which I miraculously solved two clues. I then wandered home and spotted a dingy first floor snooker hall where I went to watch a camp young Arab man roundly defeat an elderly Hebrew-speaking Chinese man at snooker.

I can honestly say this is not something I've ever done before.

Le Crossword de Triomphe

Tourism revisited

I'm back in the land of the lounging, lazing on my bed in our swanky hotel trying to come down from the crazy high of the World Cup final and the first night of Channukah coinciding. Needless to say I'm exhausted from doughnuts and penalties.

The last couple of days in the farm were both spent as a waiter in the restaurant but they weren't without incident.

I was due to leave on Friday to get to civilisation in time to collect A from the airport the following night (once Shabbat begins you can basically forget it until Saturday night.) Dalia was upset at the idea of having to do a restaurant Saturday on her own without me but I couldn't see anther way out.

Until inspiration hit me. It was Friday morning around 10.30am. If I could get to a hire car place before the Shabbat curtain was drawn across the country I would be free to stay on Friday night, help Dalia in the restaurant on Saturday, then depart Saturday afternoon free from the constraints of holy relaxation. The car hire place in Nazareth, our nearest big city, closed at noon. The place in Haifa, significantly further but an actual metropolis, closed at 1pm. It was stretching it. It also meant I would miss most, if not all, of Friday's work. But I decided to take the gamble.

Amnon was not feeling well so I set off to one big city or another on foot, quickly breaking a sweat as I trudged up and down the long, rocky dirt road to Yodfat. A seemingly interminable amount of time passed with no one but a lost-looking cow to mark my progress. This was exactly the kind of futile effort that ended with me coming back to the farm after dark having missed the day's restauranteering and the closure of the car hire places. I began to lose hope.

But then a huge pickup passed and stopped and I jumped into the back, carefully avoiding lying on the instruments that were inexplicable loaded there. I held on tight and lay down and was jerked and jolted the 300m to the first junction where the truck and I parted ways. I quickly flagged down a swish-looking city car that took me down the mountain to the highway which leads to Nazareth and Haifa. It was already 11.20. Thoughts of getting to Nazareth on time began to seem absurd so I decided to concentrate on Haifa.

Miraculously the second car who stopped was going all the way and I gladly got off the hot highway roadside and into the car. The young driver was on his way to a rock climbing competition, having just aced a try-out for the army to become a parachute instructor. Little wonder the Israelis you meet when you're traveling all seem so incredibly hard and cool.

I made it in easy time to hire the car, get back to help Dalia with both Friday and Saturday service and left after an exhausting two shifts to meet A at the airport in Tel Aviv and whisk him to our luxury spa experience hotel from whose pampered luxury I'm writing this now.

More physically exhausted and smelling of goats I have never been than I was last night, but as I swam in the clear warm water of the sea off Netanya, and ate room service pizza in my complimentary robe, it all seemed a thousand years ago already.

An exhausted me after finishing farm work for the last time

City Rob takes over (although note that the sandals haven't changed)

Take me to civilisation

 Last night was the last night.

The rain finally came yesterday and it rained steadily all day. In the evening, we found ourselves huddled in the farm kitchen while the electricity variously went on and off. The one tiny tea light we had wasn't really enough to light our evening meal so we were glad when the lights popped back on.
In the scarcely converted barn that's been my room here, I discovered that the roof isn't totally waterproof. Perhaps no surprise when you consider that it hasn't rained seriously here for maybe 10 months. The buckets I use to feed the animals came into my service in a whole new way.
With the rain also came the first insects I've really seen here. My room is full of flies this morning, and there were two fat luscious millipedes worming their way along the wall in the room I brush my teeth in.

But last night was also the last night for Daphne, our resident Greek language expert and my partner in evenings of speaking English and playing the guitar. She's off to other parts of the country for activities too exotic for me to even get my head around (a week-long festival of a special type of contemporary dancing) and I'm leaving myself tomorrow to receive visitors from England. So we celebrated by getting into Daphne's car and driving to Yodfat, the nearest community, where we were surprised to discover a that not only was the cafe/bar/restaurant open but people were in there dining and drinking as if heating, lighting, normal height tables and debit card machines were the most normal things in the world.

We had two beers, tried to work out the paths of our lives as the farm-themed part of the adventure ends, then we drove a little way up the mountain to sing the songs we've been practising for one last time.
She's considering giving up her flat in Tel Aviv for a return to the Greek island of her childhood, where they bring the water in on ships, and I'm considering how to make a return to London and full-time work not feel like this whole crazy adventure never happened.

Snap!

Snap! And just like that I'm back in the 21st Century. Sleek clean cars, road signs and kerbside litter.

Amnon and Dalia have just dropped me off at Yodfat Junction, less than 10 minutes' drive from the farm and I'm on my way to my first weekend since I arrived nine days ago.

I've got two nights and three days of freedom before I return, by which time the crucial date at which some other volunteers arrive will have drawn nearer. A German girl is spoken of. Daphne might even grace us once again.

Since I've bought nothing but a single pack of AA batteries in nine days, I reckon I've got the budget to splash out on an actual hotel once I get to Haifa. My trunks are optimistically in my bag. But for now, all the budget in the world can't save me from a 27 minute wait at the cold roadside waiting for the 265 which will take me to comfortable cosseted glory.

A corner is turned with Dalia

Today for the first time Dalia, uncompromising and severe owner of the goat farm and associated restaurant, smiled at me properly. An actual human connection was formed.

***

It's been a day of unlocking and possible corner-turning in my Israeli agricultural labourer's life. The catalyst for this has come from a most unlikely source. An actual agricultural labourer, rather than a tourist temporarily posing as one, has arrived from the North of Thailand, near Cheng Mai.

There seems to be some kind of agreement between the governments of Israel and Thailand that labourers can come here for five years and send money home to their families. It's the same story as we have in Britain: apparently there are some jobs that Israelis just no longer want to do. (Having done seven days of such a job, I think I can say "fair enough".)

Our Thai labourer arrived lost and alone and utterly confused, speaking not a word of English, never mind Hebrew. (This actually turns out to not quite be true: he knows about a dozen words, and seems to know most of the numbers up to ten.) To make matters worse his brand new Israeli SIM card, purchased very wisely by him at the airport (I don't know how this transaction took place), will give him calls and texts but no internet which means no Google Translate and god knows what he will find to do in his room in the evenings with no books, no music and no internet.

But the arrival of this 26-year-old has instantly transformed my existence. It was clear from the first morning, when I showed him the routine, that he was already much better than me at wielding a pitch fork, pushing a wheelbarrow and filling giant sacks with hay. In an idle moment, we chatted via typing into Google Translate, and it turned out that his previous job had been working with goats and horses in a Thai military camp. (Both Amnon and Dalia, when I told them this, separately asked the very good question I hadn't thought to ask: why does the army need goats? I asked him later and he didn't know.)

Now I'm no expert on the Thai army, but I would guess that they run a tight ship and that there's not much lazing around or skiving from the workers. It's a pretty safe bet that what I'd found to be back-breaking toil will appear to him to be the most comedically easy job of his adult life. He's a fast learner, a quick and attentive worker and basically he already kicks my ass in all the things I've been doing since I got here. Excellent news.

***

This, and the departure of Daphne, the Greek goddess of the Hebrew language, means that I have now been put into the role of the female volunteer and am helping out in the restaurant. This is extremely welcome news to me, and meant that today Dalia and I have been in cahoots. At around 11am, a never-before-heard-of coffee break took place in the kitchen while the labourers continued their toil. During this break, I spoke to Dalia properly for the first time as a fellow human, not as someone who is doling out the next task, or assessing the quality of the previous one.

I asked why she's not making more of an effort to get more volunteers, and she described to me how exhausting it's been, over the last 30 years, to constantly have to tell a never-ending stream of newbies how to do the same small number of tasks and to watch them get in wrong in every imaginable fashion.
She told me of a volunteer who, having been told to weed a vegetable patch, dug up every plant in the garden, apparently including a sage plant that had been established for decades. She told me of flooded pathways, spilt milk, garden tools in the cutlery drawer and every manner of mistake that, to someone who knows how things should look, seem like the most idiotic things in the world but to someone who has no idea of what good or bad are supposed to look like, might seem completely understandable.

So she's tired. Tired of explaining every last tiny detail of every last job, for fear that a misunderstanding or a misalignment of vision might lead to some new catastrophe. She needs an assistant; someone to look after the volunteers and make sure they're not making things worse.

She's also set the bar very high in hospitality terms because she makes two or three excellent meals a day from scratch for the volunteers so if the numbers swell this becomes a serious undertaking (and doesn't actually bring in any more money because more volunteers just means that the existing volunteers work less.)
So I can totally understand her manner. Her tone of utter exhaustion when a tool you've never seen before ends up in the wrong one of six rusty containers full of things you don't recognise. She's had enough.

I described to her how she comes across and she said "it's not you, it's everyone for thirty years."

It's impossible to argue with that.

Just one of the incredible and delicious meals Dalia has been serving up to her volunteers day in and day out for 30 years. This was breakfast a few days ago. Wow.