August 2005, Barcelona, Spain

By Gary Bullard

We arrived from Valencia around 9 p.m. that night, Skye and I did. After phoning various hostels and sleeping establishments and finding nothing available, we decided to hike through Barcelona with our packs and find a spot on the beach to crash.

We consulted our city-plan – it didn’t look like a bad little jaunt. However, the mile-and-a-half or so trek down La Rambla through the city to the beach was total mule’s work. Sweat set my eyes ablaze as hot pain tore through my neck and into my lumbar. We were really getting a brutal workout.

Upon arrival at the beach we found a nice embankment, got cozy, and chilled out for a while, listening to the Mediterranean laugh softly against the shore.

But I couldn’t get comfortable. I tossed and turned well into the night, always careful that my daypack was attached to me somehow to deter potential thievery. Somehow sleep came.

I awoke confused, around 5 a.m., sensing a strange air of the inevitable. To my immediate right, and by immediate I mean way too close, was a half slumbering man who looked to be of Moroccan descent. I noticed also that my daypack was lying in the sand between the two of us. Strewn carelessly next to my pack lay the remnants of my now ruined Ray Bans. To my horror, the pocket on my daypack where I stashed my wallet and travel documents was gaping open, almost in a grin of mockery.

In a whirlwind of sleepy terror I jumped quickly to my feet, kicked at the drowsy Moroccan, and interrogated him about my wallet. As I angrily and nervously frisked his pockets he seemed to recoil in a state of terror equal to mine. He soon found that he too was the victim of a nighttime seaside jacking. He returned the frantic frisking, while shouting at me in a Franco-Arabic patois.

With my adrenaline surging at an all-time high I cocked my arm back and prepared my fist for a slugging. Stumbling backward, the Moroccan put his hand up in surrender. I advanced towards him with the relentless ire of an angry gorilla. “Arretez s’il vous plait!” he begged. Reaching beneath him he produced something small and dark from the chunky sand.

I lowered my fist.

Someone had gone through my wallet, apparently looking only for cash and finding none (sometimes it pays to be broke). The considerate thief must have stuffed the contents of my billfold, including my three credit cards, neatly back into place and tossed it in the sand. A similar fortune did not befall my Moorish fellow jackee. He got for his shoes, his wallet and his passport. (And I had jumped, literally, to the conclusion that he robbed me!) I sat there in disbelief as he cursed the sand and ran for the policía.

Awestruck by my terrific fortune to get my wallet back in one piece, I sank into the sand in rumination.

Adrenaline still rushing, I woke Skye to make sure he hadn’t been robbed. Everything of his was intact, although he did recount to me a strange feeling of having been surrounded during the night. Hours later I noticed that someone had scribbled illegibles in purple magic marker all over his neck and ear.

Weary, dirty, delirious and starving, we stumbled back toward Barcelona and away from the beach. Incidentally, the beach looked like an OK place at night, but in the morning we learned the Playa Sant Sebastian in the Barcelonetta quarter of the city is not the place to be. The sun’s warm rays revealed less of a paradise and more of a Detroit-by-the-Sea.

Upon our return to La Rambla we phoned every hostel, pension and sleazy hotel we could find. We didn’t even bother trying to articulate our request for lodging in any semblance of Español. Nothing. U2 was playing a double-bill in Barcelona that weekend and everything affordable within 30 kilometers was booked.

Because we were both leaving town the next day, I by night train to Paris, Skye by bus to his girlfriend in Lyon, we resigned ourselves to another night of creatively miserable outdoor slumber. Heaving our heavy packs back on our travel-worn backs, we began ambling back down La Rambla when, lo and behold, an angel of fortune visited us for the second time in half as many days. She grabbed me with unbelievable strength for such a small woman. She had a room for 20 Euro if we followed her. Sketchy. Perfect.

It was a boiling hot room with no windows, dirty sheets on the foam mattress, and a shower that was no more than an icy spit bath. But, there was a lock on the door and a pillow on the bed. We celebrated with a meal of horrible Chinese food and slept like babies. It was paradise found.

Gary Bullard is an aspiring travel writer and novelist living in Washington, DC. This is his first published story.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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