Splattered and Robbed in Malaga! My Letter to Linh Dinh

And to my Substack subscribers

With Alexander Wolfheze and Palestine info-activists at Dam Square

Yo, Linh! You keep telling me to do some descriptive travel writing…in other words, spend my life traveling around the world, sitting in cafés, preferably lowlife dives, describing the human circus around me, not sparing myself when embarrassing things happen, and interspersing it with acerbic comments on world events in general, and those who must not be named in particular. But that’s your job, Linh! I have a house! A family! A cat, for goodness sake! And a wife I cherish and mostly get along with (and whose mother I got along with fine when she was alive, Allah yerhamha).

So what am I doing in a breakfast-cereal-themed cafe in Malaga, Spain, with 90 minutes before I have to leave to board a trans-Mediterranean ferry, setting out to write about LinhDinhesque experiences? Blame it on the parrot. The disgusting, shitty parrot that welcomed me to Malaga.

Vegan cafe near the Malaga ferry terminal. For some reason the walls are covered with boxes of breakfast cereal.

But first, a word about why I’m on the road. Or more precisely, on the Grand Taxi, the plane, the train, the boat…and, often, my aching feet.

I was invited to Brussels for an interview. The people who interviewed me don’t want me to spoil their surprise, so I won’t. I spent a couple of days there, unfortunately missing my favorite Bruxellois, Dr. Eric Beeth, who was traveling, but meeting some other great people connected to the interview that you’ll hear more about when it gets released. While in Brussels I wrote a piece for the Al-Andalus Tribune headlined “If "Bonjour" Is Bad in Belgium...How about as-salaamu alaikum?” It’s really pissing off the Angry White Pussies (AWPs) at the Unz Review. And by the way, Linh, thank you for coining the AWP acronym. If you’d trademarked it I’d have to pay you a nickel every time I use it.

Instead of flying home from Brussels like a normal person, I took a train to Amsterdam. Why? Reason #1: I was dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous airline tickets. I would have had to pay 700 Euros for a roundtrip between Morocco and Brussels. But there was a 30 Euro oneway from Morocco to Brussels, and a 170 Euro return from Amsterdam to…Malaga, Spain, which hosts a ferry that goes to Melilla, from whence one can return to Saidia for less than ten dollars using city busses and a grand taxi.

What made that plan even more intriguing was the presence of Alexander Wolfheze within striking distance of Amsterdam. Alexander is a contender for the title “Europe’s leading alt-right thinker” as well as a congenial guy. Meeting him turned out to be well worth the trip.

Alexander and I spent last Sunday doing a Politically Incorrect Tour of Amsterdam, which I will be posting about soon. We also visited a pro-Palestine protest in Dam Square, as pictured above.

Monday evening I was scheduled to fly to Malaga. But when you buy Ryan Air tickets in the summer travel season, anything can happen. In this case, my flight was delayed more than three hours—they pleaded bad weather, French air controllers on strike, and to top it all off a defective jet engine starter motor—so I arrived in Malaga after 1 a.m. I had been supposed to land at 10 p.m. and walk to the nearby Holiday Inn. But it was a weird, tricky walk through an airport-neighborhood wasteland, said to take about 30 minutes if everything goes right and you don’t get lost. So I forked over 25 Euros for a grossly overpriced Airport Zone taxi. The next morning, though, after inadequate sleep tempered by plenty of coffee, I retraced the steps of the walk I would have walked had I walked it, because the only public transit to downtown Malaga leaves from the airport, not the Holiday Inn. And that’s where the parrot comes in.

I had to keep stopping to ask directions in bad Spanish. (No, I didn’t ask a parrot: “Donde está el aeropuerto?” “Awk! Donde está el aeropuerto?”) Instead I asked people at the rent-a-car shacks in the near-airport industrial zone. They kept me headed in roughly the right direction.

One of them even gave me some baraka. A working guy in coveralls, he was holding a big spring of Moroccan mint, the kind they use to make the tea famous as the national hospitality beverage. The whiff was powerful, and reminded me of the Moroccan home I would soon revisit. “Es bon holor…huele bien,” I fumbled trying to say “it smells good.” He smiled and handed me the sprig. A good sign…or so I thought.

I followed a guy with a backpack who seemed to know where he was going, along the edge of a ten-lane heavily-trafficked freeway-cum-boulevard that nobody in their right mind would try to cross, but that needed to be somehow crossed if one wished to reach the airport. Catching up to the guy, it turned out he was German and spoke not a word of Spanish. So from then on, it was me who asked directions for both of us.

After several wrong turns and corrections, we finally found the narrow, obscure, totally signage-free pedestrian bridge behind the gas station that was the only way to cross the roadway to the airport. A huge fruit tree of some sort provided shade at the entrance to the bridge. And at just the moment we reached that blessed shade, the German screamed and unleashed a torrent of earsplitting noises expressing gutteral disgust. His shirt, backpack, and trousers were splattered with parrot poop. A Spanish guy happened along, evincing exaggerated sympathy that may have concealed a desperate desire to burst out laughing. He handed us a packet of tissues and pointed out that I, too, had been contaminated, though not nearly as thoroughly as my German companion.

I told the German, who was not amused, that I was a professional conspiracy theorist, and that were I a paranoid one I might suspect that parrot to have been on assignment for the Mossad. He seemed even less amused.

[Ornithological aside: I am not 100% sure that the culprit was a parrot. The Spanish guy might have said perico (parakeet) rather than loro (parrot) and I might have forgotten the difference. Neither my bird identification credentials, nor my Spanish, nor my memory for such things is first-rate. Anyway, I didn’t see the damn bird, only what it left behind. Sorry, officer, for having to give such a crappy police report!)

And then I really got shat on.

After changing my shirt right there on the pedestrian bridge and wiping off the several splats of parrot(?) excrement from my backpack, I continued to the airport and sat to wait for the bus to downtown Malaga. An older lady, mid-60s-ish like me if not more, sat beside me. We struck up a conversation in Spanish. Since I welcome the opportunity to improve my lamentable Spanish, I dove right in, then sat across the aisle from her on the bus, continuing the conversation. The lady went on and on about her relatives in Paris and Latin America. She offered me directions about where to get off the bus—directions that left me a bit disoriented, since they didn’t quite jibe with what I had understood from looking at maps. She used her phone to look up my hotel, but didn’t get it right. There was something off about her. I figured she was just old and lonely and a little bit crazy, the way she kept up her spiel and offered so much confusing information.

Meanwhile, sitting beside me, on my left (while I spent the bus ride conversing with the older lady across the aisle on my right) was a hot-looking 20-ish girl in black fishnet stockings. I didn’t look too closely at her, because I’m married, and not rude, and besides, I was engrossed in conversation with the vieja senora—conversation that required all of my sleep-deprived attention and limited Spanish ability to engage in.

After saying goodbye, I got off the bus, hung around downtown Malaga for perhaps an hour (it was before official check-in time) and eventually found my way to my hotel—at which point, while checking in, I discovered that my wallet was missing its cash. I instantly flashed on the obvious: the two women had been gypsies working a pickpocket scam. One distracts, the other has the nimble fingers.

I should have looked a lot harder at the hot chick with the nimble fingers. As it turned out, I would have to describe her to the police. But all I could remember was those black fishnet stockings.

I hadn’t intended to bother reporting the theft. The odds of getting the cash back seemed minimal, and I had only a little over 24 hours in Malaga—time that could be employed in better ways than hanging around a police station in service of total futility. But later that day, I ducked into the tourist information station to ask how to find the ferry terminal, and stupidly mentioned the theft. (I often talk too much while practicing my Spanish.) The tourist info guy insisted I report it to the police, who, as it turned out, had an office right there, at the back of the tourist information building.

I spent an hour waiting (watched like a hawk by the tourist info guy) to make an appointment to come back the next morning and spend another hour waiting. By the time I wound up filling out the police report and giving the suspects’ descriptions, about all I could remember about those gypsies was the fishnet stockings. The policía pulled out a cell phone and showed me pictures of a few dozen dicy-looking women. But none of them were hot-looking, and none were wearing fishnet stockings, so I failed to identify the culprits. (I didn’t bother to report the parrot assault, so I didn’t have to try to identify any parrots.)

So Linh, that’s the straight poop on Malaga. My robbed-by-gypsies story (which weirdly echoes a robbed-by-gypsies dream I had and wrote down in 2020) isn’t as exciting as your story about getting drugged and robbed in…where was it…Bangkok? And you’ve offered plenty of descriptions far more vividly disgusting than my account of being splattered by parrot shit. But hey, we can’t all be travel writers. You have a unique talent for the obscene, the grotesque, the quotidian, and the obscene grotesque quotidian. You should keep traveling around and hanging out in lowlife dives and Substacking about it. Me, I’m about to exit this breakfast-cereal-infested vegan cafe where I somehow accidentally wound up with soy milk in my cappuccino, a true abomination, and boarding the boat to Morocco, where I will be posting more writings and videos about this trip—including some person-on-the-street convivencia interviews I recorded yesterday at the Alcazaba here in Malaga—at the Al-Andalus Tribune Substack.

Looking forward to recording that podcast we postponed…maybe next week insha’allah.

Kevin