The Famous Guadiana Groin Ploy
There was a time when grass in your underpants was a tactic
It is almost a year since my mother died. After leaving home I spent little time with my parents until they moved about eighteen years ago to the town where I now live. But through all my years of traveling, they would visit where I found myself — from Crete to Singapore — or would holiday in ‘neutral’ territory that I could reach quite easily.
While I was living in Granada with G in 1979 my parents took a holiday in Portugal. Somehow, we manage to arrange that G and I would visit them for a couple of days. G had time off from the university and it was a chance for us to take a trip. We were to hitch, of course, because we had no spare cash. It felt like an adventure.
We set out from Granada early in the morning and caught our first lift quite easily. It was a delivery truck that was going all the way to Seville. This hitching lark in Spain seemed easy. I sat G next to the driver on the bench seat in the cab. The driver pumped G for information — especially about our relationship — and then seemed content to play tapes of Sevillanas for the rest of the 150 miles. The repetitive patterns of the music and the relatively featureless landscape beside the road made for a sleepy journey. I had the door to rest my head against. G was less fortunate and was required from time to time to make conversation. My lack of Spanish freed me from this burden.
We caught a local bus from the centre of Seville to the outskirts and then waited a little longer this time for a lift. It was past noon and hot enough that standing without shade was unpleasant. When a car came finally, it was a teacher in an old Citroen 2CV with holes in the floor. I sat in the back this time and watched the road pass under the car.
Our teacher friend dropped us off near the port of Huelva. Although he was heading into Huelva itself, he drove past the town to make sure we were on the road heading towards Ayamonte, where the ferry crossed the Guadiana and was the only possible border crossing this far south.
The teacher’s good intentions actually cost us time and a close call with heat stroke. It was the afternoon now but the temperature felt as if it was still rising. And the area around Huelva was even more barren than that to the immediate west of Seville. It was the perfect landscape for basking lizards. It was also siesta time, which meant no traffic was on the road.
Inevitably, the heat and hunger and the fact that we had not brought enough water made us irritable. By the time our next lift pulled up, we were standing almost one hundred metres apart on the road. Given that the car’s occupants were two young guys, I think they stopped for G rather than me. I had to jog sweatily along the road to catch up. G was not so angry with me that she was going to climb into the car until I made it to her side.
No Sevillanas in this car. We had moved to Elvis Costello territory. And Van Morrison was with us. The Pretenders. The Ramones joined us. The thirty or so mile ride to Ayamonte seemed to be full of songs I had loved before I arrived in Granada a few months earlier. Our new companions were friendly and Portuguese. They had been across in Morocco. G and I were in the back seat with our bags and the passenger up front passed us a beer each. He had a cooler between his feet. After the heat of the roadside that was a welcome beer. After a few swigs G and I were friends again. Until then, we had been sitting as far apart as possible on the back seat. We must have looked like we had just met and had taken an instant dislike to each other.
After the beers were gone, G told me they wanted to know if we smoked. I knew this wasn’t about cigarettes. I also knew that the beer and the heat and the rough and slightly winding road — not to be confused with that more famous long one — were going to be a bad enough combination without adding anything more to the mix. G decided she was well enough to try a joint, though. So the guy in front reached into the glove compartment and brought out the largest bag of grass I’ve ever seen. That was the reason for their trip to Morocco, of course. The fact that we were rapidly approaching the border and that Portugal was even more strict about drugs than Spain made me wonder for a moment if they intended to smoke the whole lot before we reached Ayamonte. Franco had died a few years before but Spain was still edging away from its fascist past. The Guardia remained a threatening presence, especially in the south. Portugal, on the other hand, after the Carnation Revolution of 1974, was nominally socialist but its border guards, like Spain’s Guardia, were less eager for change. This was what we were rushing towards along the road from Huelva. G and I had become unwitting drug smugglers.
As we approached the ferry crossing at Ayamonte, our new smuggling associates assured us that because we were British, the Portuguese guards would pay us no attention. They would not even open our bags, they said. I assumed this meant they wanted to stash the bag of grass in our bags. I had visions of my parents visiting me in an Algarve jail rather than me turning up at their hotel in Armação de Pêra.
We had another beer at a cafe before we drove onto the ferry. The journey took a matter of minutes and as the Portuguese bank of the river neared I was waiting for the moment I would be asked to slip the bag of grass into my luggage. But no. Our driver reached into the glove compartment and slipped the whole bag down the front of his trousers.
We drove off the ferry and pulled over by the border post. Our smuggler friends got out to meet the approaching officers. Everyone looked relaxed. G and I got out the car, too. When told we were British, and after a cursory glance at the covers of our passports, we were told to stand aside with our bags, just as we had been promised.
The guards then searched the car and the bags left in the car very carefully. Then the guards patted down our two friends. Despite the fact that it was almost comically obvious that our driver had something stuck down the front of his trousers, nothing was found. The signal was given that we should be on our way.
We drove off. Within metres the bag of grass had been liberated from its hiding place and a fresh joint was being rolled. This time I took my turn as it was passed around. I felt I’d earned it as part of a daring smuggling operation. Well, as a nervous bystander at least. I got G to ask about the search. The driver laughed and explained that there was no way a macho border guard would ever pat down the crotch of another man. Hence it was the only safe place to hide the stash. Hide is not what it was, of course. The grass had simply been put off-limits. Please note that, some decades on, I suspect that this is no longer a successful ploy for smuggling contraband of any sort into Portugal.
Our hosts were home and they let us out at Albufeira. It was now evening, so we grabbed a quick — and wonderfully cheap — meal of fish and beer and headed for the beach for the night. In the morning we would take a less interesting lift the last few miles along the coast to Armação de Pêra, where my parents awaited us.
