The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy by Sudha Mahalingam

Author:Sudha Mahalingam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353055134
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Toasting in Toledo

In 2007, it was still early days. There was no Trivago or TripAdvisor back then. Having blundered through several destinations as a backpacker, I was confident I could enlist the Internet to manage all bookings for our month-long trip through Spain, Portugal and Morocco. R, my friend and travel companion on this trip, bowed to my perceived superior wisdom and let me handle the entire itinerary. It was thus we found ourselves at the Plaza de Zocodover, Toledo’s splendid city square, on the hottest day of the year. The plaza itself was impressive, and the fortress perched on the hilltop magnificently sepia-tinted and venerable. The town was somewhere in-between.

Craning our necks to locate our destination for the day, we braced ourselves for the climb up very narrow, very winding and very cobbled streets, crowded with camera-toting tourists and annoyed resident cyclists. Not only did we have to heave ourselves up, but also lug our suitcases stuffed with clothes to last us a month and weighing a ton. After a few minutes of tugging away like a mischievous dog on a leash, the wheels of my suitcase turned recalcitrant; after all, they were designed for the polished floors of airports, not medieval cobbles. Promptly, one broke loose and committed suicide, hurling itself over the cliff. Even as I manoeuvred the disabled luggage with some unsightly acrobatics up the steep hill, the handle pulled ominously to one side, threatening to come off. This was going to take time.

‘Eureka!’ shouted R, pointing to a signboard which said Santo Tomé—that indeed was the name of our hotel. We huffed and puffed some more and dragged ourselves along, secure in the knowledge that we were almost there. When we finally got up there, the board seemed to be that of a patisserie. We plodded on. The next Santo Tomé was a churreria selling churros, a sort of tasteless Spanish pretzel. The third Santo Tomé was a souvenir shop selling picture postcards and keychains to suckers like us, and the fourth a street cafe. And the next one, to be sure, was the church itself, which must have bewitched or browbeaten every business establishment in its extended vicinity, including our budget hotel, to adopt its name.

Cursing the Toledanos for their lack of imagination, I stopped to fish out the map from the cavernous depths of my handbag where I had shoved it. It was only when I opened it that I realized I had picked up the Spanish version. And to add to my agony, the print was so tiny that I had to grope for my spectacles as well. Clutching the map in one hand and dragging the mangled suitcase with the other, I plodded on some more, ignoring several other Santo Tomés until we finally chanced upon the real one, our budget pad for the next two nights.

It was a family-run place in an old Spanish mansion, with a shop on the ground floor and the reception on the first. I told R to wait on the ground floor and skipped up the carpeted staircase unencumbered by luggage.

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