The only poster to have survived Salema’s sea winds clings to the Plexiglass of the bus stop wall in shreds. It’s a picture of Beyoncé, who seems to be getting a kick out of grabbing a handful of her own (well-conditioned?) hair; in fact, she looks so happy that she could be in pain. And someone has written, in a crude ballpoint speech bubble:
¿Sabe alguien a que hora viene el autobús?
(does anyone know when the bus comes?)
Beyoncé’s question gave us a good chuckle, standing in the noontime heat of a new day in Salema. Another morning on the beach had left us slaphappy with sun, and I was content to wait for the world to end. Ridiculous picture aside, it seemed amusing that anyone would stress so much about bus schedules; we thought of buses as a curious second option to trains. But Beyoncé had a point: the Andalusian people, a colorful tribe of rebels and misfits, decided sometime ago that they weren't okay with a train system. That is to say: by the time the bus to Lagos chugged around the corner of the Saleman cliffs, it was beginning to dawn on us how many buses were in our future.
We planned to attack the Costa del Sol from Seville, a classically crafted city famed for its bullfighting school and its lingering, pervasive scent of orange blossom. With my eye over his shoulder, Carl plotted our campaign: from Salema, we would swoop out of Portugal, ducking inland to Seville. Seville ran buses to Algeciras, which ran ferries to Morocco, which would return us to Spain through Tarifa. And from there, we had heard tell of the azure skies and warm sands of Spain's coast: we planned to indulge in a resort town, Nerja, just east of Málaga. It was ambitious; it was king-making; it was doomed from the start.
Ten hours later, cramped and irritable, Carl and I prowled Seville at dusk. A short dinner of croquetas (Iberian chicken fingers) did something to smooth the mood over, as did the walk we took through Santa Cruz, the old quarter of the city. But even as we planned our trip to Morocco the next day, tensions simmered: the long bus rides and curt treatment we had been receiving Spaniards was beginning to wear on us.
By the time we passed out on the stiff beds of our hostel in Seville, it seemed unimaginable that only that morning we had been wading in the clear waters of the Mediterranean. It seemed as though our day in Salema had been a dream I had stolen from a happier week; ahead, the skies seemed darker, gloomier, and inexplicably ominous. I slept fitfully, hobbled by bus-naps and the sinking-stomach feeling of a bet gone wrong.
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