Cherry tomatoes and getting picked off by the cops!

THERE ARE TIMES when I think that the toughest thing about trips like this isn’t the acutal trip itself; it’s getting your butt out the door in the first place. It’s lugging your bike down the stairs as you try not to wake the neighbours, try not to smudge tire marks on the wall, get down to the street and not get paranoid that people are staring at you from their cars (which, let’s be honest, they probably are. Especially if you’re lugging yellow-and-black panniers that make you look like a Barcelona taxi.) And once you’re on and actually riding, then it’s not quite so bad. It’s just that the initial push to get yourself going really, really sucks.

************

I FORGOT the cherry tomatoes, the red pepper and the big bag of M&Ms in the fridge. Well, at least one thing won’t be green and fuzzy when I get back from Galicia.

************

ONE EMBARRASSING episode on the train between Ávila and Arévalo: I was sitting in my seat, minding my own business, when a young-ish looking couple, claiming to be members of the Policía Nacional, came up to the two tourists beside me and asked the couple for their passports.
Now, I should mention that nothing, nothing angers me more than people who try to screw tourists. It seems craven, at best, to rip people off when they’re making an honest effort to see and know a country, so I found the behaviour of this couple very, very strange. Both of them were in their early 20s; she wore hiking pants and a white t-shirt; he had long hair and an Adidas backpack. They spent about ten minutes going through his and her passports, and the whole time I kept wanting to shout over, in English, “Be careful – you don’t know for sure that they’re cops!”

Once they’d left, several of us went over to the couple and asked them if they were all right. The guy who was sitting behind me talked to the girl, who turned out to be from Bolivia, and asked her what had happened. I think he went to find the conductor to explain what happened. I told them that they should go right to the police station located within Valladolid’s Campo Grande station – all in all, everybody seemed to agree that the entire episode was more than a little weird.

Well, with a couple of strange people wandering around the train, I decided to give my seat up and go up to the front, where the bike was stored. Generally speaking, very few people want to get that close to a fully loaded touring bike, but at a moment like that, you never know. The couple came up to me about ten minutes later, and I gave them a very surprised look – not a dirty look, just more of a visual “Yyyesssssssss?” that had a clear undertone of: “Back off.” They decided not to approach me and went back to where they were sitting.

Five minutes later, the revisor (ticket collector) came up. I’d had enough.

“Excuse me, sir?” I said in Spanish. “I’m not sure if anyone has mentioned this but there’s a couple of young people in the other car who are going around, claiming to be police officers and I thought you should be aware of the situation.”

The revisor looked at me kindly and said, “Don’t worry, they are cops.”

Excuse me?

“The police got word that some of the human-trafficking mafias were taking prostitutes all through Spain through the trains, so they put plainclothes police officers on board the trains to check suspicious couples.”

Oh.

[SFX: Deep blushing; mad scurrying under bike in embarrassment.]

I wonder what the Belgian-Bolivian couple thought of that when they talked to the cops in Valladolid?