"We've gone on holiday by mistake". One of the more memorable examples plucked from the salvo of quotes that comprise 'Withnail and I', and one that I've not felt captured a situation so acutely as on a recent trip to the island of Gran Canaria.
As the first morning rose, I found myself sitting in an al fresco greasy spoon in Puerto Rico, nursing a coffee and wondering what exactly to do with the day. At the table along sat a fridge of a woman, recently washed hair dangling like seaweed above shoulders burnt gammon-pink by several days of submissiveness before the sun.
A waitress approached and plonked down a full English breakfast, an easel of grease to brush up the veins and arteries. With aplomb the woman began wolfing down the sweaty grub, pausing only to suck on a lit cigarette, building up pace before her momentum ran aground on a bank of rasping throaty coughs. Squinting through my veil of mild revulsion, the sun glistened like a Fata Morgana haze across the streaky surface of the bacon rashers.
What kind of deranged reasoning had brought me to this place?, I couldn't help but wonder.
After some cursory investigating, I had learnt that the traditional instrument of the Canary Islands is a timple, a rather attractive 5-string ukulele. Owing to my penchant for 'collecting' indigenous musical instruments - a collection abounding in its breadth, spanning a small djembe and a sanza from South Africa and a cheap tin flute from Dublin - I made it my quest to track down a Timple.
The resort town of Puerto Rico on Gran Canaria's southern coast is alarming in its stultifying banality. The modest town lies as the tongue within the jaws of the dual rising headlands, wedged with stumpy white apartment blocks that snarl up together along the contours of the topography like rows of teeth. Overlooking the beach, an assortment of hotels build up upon the incline like favelas of repose.
Surveying the landscape, I was instantly brought to mind of J.G. Ballard's late-career novels 'Cocaine Nights' and 'Super Cannes', which dealt with the idea that as technological advances in the labour markets elevate leisure over work, civilians would be rendered physically docile and emotionally necrotic by the sedating potency of endless free time; little more than wilful tenants of the 'billion balconies facing the sun'.
The Europa Shopping Centre I came to recognise as one of Dante's circles of Hell that he must have overlooked. An accumulation of souvenir shops hawking the most asinine of tourist tat; drab restaurants displaying the bog-standard English fare on photographic menu boards as though orders would come served in the form of a sci-fi paste substitute; and bars promoting singers performing the songs of Neil Diamond and Tom Jones; all perfectly targeted for the discerning 'Brit abroad'. UKIP don't do package holidays but if they did, they'd probably look something like this.
By late morning, the poolside teemed with crapulent couples lobstering themselves; by afternoon, they sat drinking beer and watching football in bars plastered with plasma screens. By evenings, most it seemed would converge on the Blarney Stone, the ubiquitous Irish pub, that played host to a troupe of squalid minstrels night after night as though they were being forced to comply with some bizarre visa stipulations.
Everything about Puerto Rico, like the Costas as a whole, has been sanitised and bleached of any cultural identity by the UV rays of British homogenisation; a tourist imperialism in which the natural hegemonic urge to assimilate has claimed the victory over any semblance of native autonomy.
As a means of leaving such hideousness aside (I'd hate to besmirch the whole of Gran Canaria solely on the merits of Puerto Rico), my companions and I hired a car in a desperate attempt to escape this shit citadel and headed up into the foreboding mountains. (I believe it a necessary cleansing agent from odious bouts of mindless lethargy to seek out high-risk pursuits. The best thing to do after coming out of a coma would probably be to find a bungee jump.)
Certainly, the spaghetti strand roads draped across the mountain ranges were sufficiently perilous, maybe not on the white-knuckle scale of the Bolivian 'death roads', but certainly enough to make you feel you were taking your life in your hands on the approach to each blind corner, and certainly enough to incite us to tailgate behind our own, very apt, 'canary' - a car probably driven by tourists as terrified as we were.
Continuing the ascent, we headed towards the peak of Roque Nublo ('Cloud Rock'), protruding from the terra firma like an upturned thumb of approval to all those who'd escaped the horrendous trappings of the Europa Shopping Centre.
The geographic diversity of the region was considerable; the arid South with its wave-crest dunes of Maspalomas contrasting sharply with the verdancy and silviculture of the inland terrain. As the afternoon wore on, the mist began rolling down the mountains like a mystical avalanche poised outside the conventional laws of gravity and time.
Firmly outside the conventional laws of public decency was the drunken misbehaviour of one of my companions later that night in the Blarney Stone. With gusto he applied himself to a spasmodic ballet in the 'no-man's land' between performer and audience before engaging in a disturbing slow dance with a tall grizzled Scotsman as those assembled watched on with awkward bemusement.
In a recent BBC documentary about his relationship with England, Martin Amis described the English predilection to public inebriation as being soused with a tangible sense of desperation constructed, when the 'package holiday' to sunnier climes was in its infancy, out of a psychological complex of cultural confusion and inferiority when faced with our more sophisticated and debonair Continental neighbours.
Becoming incensed by the crassness of our surroundings and my lack of success in finding a timple, I ranted to another more lucid companion about how few of the people in attendance had likely made the effort to adventure into the mountains to witness such stunning rural scenery. He asseverated that I should recognise these people as being "the working class you're always going on about", and that these were the kind of holidays that less affluent people could afford and actually enjoyed going on, therefore I was wrong to unduly direct my scorn at them.
I conceded the point that many have alternate designs on what makes for a fulfilling vacation, however, I argued that my friend was equally guilty of being patronising by judging such people incapable of wanting or deserving more. Travel frees up the possibility of exploring foreign cultures, allowing the unfamiliar and vast world to seem a little more familiar and a little bit smaller, rather than simply seeking to transpose a stale replication of what is already known. Travel is about enlightenment and discovery through the immersion of the self into new surroundings and experiences which wealth need not necessarily prohibit.
This kind of resort, marrying ample sunshine with the dubious 'comforts of home', marinaded in sheer relaxation without the often bitter taste of local culture or history spoiling the palate, two or three decades ago would have been seen as the very height of modernity. Now however, in the digital age and the 'glocal' community, just about any kind of information on any travel experience abounds obliterating ignorance, and with commercial flights waiting to catapult you anywhere at all smoothening logistics, it strikes me as all being rather quaint and outdated.
But who was I to cast my aspersions? Looking around people seemed to be having a good enough time, certainly making the best of the fact that a drunken fool and an increasingly irate Scotsman were getting in the way of another rendition of 'Sweet Home Alabama'.
The next day I left my companions to their hangovers and took the bus to the capital Las Palmas where I explored the pretty Old District, marvelling at the fact that it was from here in 1936 that a shunned General Franco launched an uprising that instigated the Spanish Civil War.
All I had on my mind though was a Timple. It seemed no where stocked one. Until I discovered a charming little shop where the friendly owner ushered me in, eager to show me the range of traditional Spanish costumes. I bypassed such items and saw that indeed here was a Timple; it looked and sounded glorious. "It costs 130 euros", the man said with a smile. Sadly I couldn't bring myself to part with such an amount but, keen not to disappoint him, bought a few bottles of the local mojo sauce instead. Hardly a satisfying alternative, but it would have to do.
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