The train from Rome Termini speeds south under blue skies. As we leave the city, a two-thousand-year-old aqueduct parallels the track for a kilometer or two, towering over freshly plowed fields before diverging and receding into the distance. Whatever else you can say about the Romans, they certainly knew how to leave a mark on the landscape.

The rest of the journey is through flat farmlands with an occasional ridge of low mountains leading toward the coast. Right before we reach Napoli the train passes through a long tunnel under the largest of these. On the other side, sunlight and, beyond the city, the colossal outline of Vesuvius, capped with snow and crowned with a wreath of clouds.

The train pulls underground as it arrives at Napoli’s central train station. The local connection to my hostel takes me out of the city along the coast, to the smaller, more residential fishing neighborhood of Portici. It’s dark by the time I get to my hostel, and the next seven days are mostly full of a cold driving rain that keeps me inside and out of any part of the city other than my immediate surroundings. It’s okay, though; I have work to do, and am in the middle of Hugh Laurie’s The Gun Seller, and it’s nice to spend some time relaxing in the shabby little fishermen’s bars, reading and listening to the rain outside.

Portici's fishing harbor, in a rare moment of blue skies

I avoid my hostel; it’s a massive structure with hundreds of beds and almost entirely empty, save for a genial local homeless man who’s been given a bed, and an earnestly intense young German with high cheekbones and a mullet that wouldn’t have been out of place at a hair metal concert thirty years ago, who spends his days on the hostel computer browsing online gardening catalogues, occasionally bursting out laughing at jokes there only he can see. When the bars close and I come back to work, it’s at a lone table in a huge empty hall that’s so cold I have to wear both my jackets.

Still, Napoli interests me, and rather than immediately heading back north, I book another week, this time at a hostel in the middle of the city. Portici’s nice, but it’s a half hour out of town and I’m itching for a more central location. So, on the first sunny morning since my arrival, I make my way to the Welcome Inn hostel, next to Napoli’s Archaeological Museum.

Inside the museum

I’m immediately at home. Unlike the industrial monstrosity in Portici, Welcome Inn is small, warm, and friendly. I spend my first day there exploring the city, which impresses me both with the dirtiness it’s famous for in the rest of Italy, and the beauty that shows through despite, or maybe because of, the grime that covers it. If Venice is a painted lady, Napoli is a drummer in a punk band, covered in tattoos and with a glare that says she’s not going to take any of your shit. The churches are covered in graffiti, young men crowd on sidewalks to smoke and talk, which in this party of Italy seems to require a lot of shouting and gesticulating. Skinny kids kick soccer balls across busy streets, using cars as moving goal-posts, and packs of Vespas pass each other on streets where even pedestrians have to make way for each other.

Needless to say, by the time I return to my hostel, I’m enchanted.

Back at my hostel that night, I meet two of the volunteers working there: Laura, who’s from Lithuania but has been studying in Scotland, and Alima from New York, who’s been here two weeks and is already conversant in Italian. My plan is to city-hop a week at a time through northern Italy toward Paris, where I have to be in a little over a month; they tell me I should ask the owner’s son if I can work in Napoli for that time instead. I say I’ll consider it, so they resort to a new tactic: taking me out to pizza.

And thus, my mind is blown. I thought I’d had pizza before, but I was wrong; Napolitan pizza is on a whole different plane of existence. Napoli takes its pizza seriously: the city has legislation in place that require ingredients to be fresh and the cooking to be done in a proper wood-fired oven. Not that the city’s famous pizzerias need the encouragement, as they’re already doing everything they can to outdo each other. This being Napoli, the pizza is cheap — for three and a half euro, you can get an entire margherita pizza, heaven on bread and topped with basil and mozzarella, which also originates in this part of italy. Finish one and you’re hardly able to talk, more from the sheer happiness than anything else.

A few days later I ask Davide, the owner’s son, if I can work a couple night shifts a week in exchange for free lodging.

“Sure,” he says, and just like that, I have a job.

All good things must end, and on a Tuesday toward the end of February I pack my bags, say goodbye to my friends in Barcelona, and head for the ferry port. I came into the city by ship, and I leave the same way: I’m headed for Rome, via the port of Civitavecchia, the same way I arrived in the city the last time I visited.

I’m getting familiar with the various Mediterranean shipping companies, and this one is Grimaldi, my personal favorite. Lots of places to sit, plenty of power outlets, free drinking water; I spend my time writing and working, and sleep late the next morning. We come into sight of the Italian coast just as the sun sets the next evening. By the time we pull into port and the ramps are lowered, it’s already dark. A deep chill has settled in the air, and it’s too late for the shuttle buses that usually run into town, so I walk the several kilometers from the port to the train station. On the way I pass a religious procession, people on foot in a long line, carrying candles that waver in the chilly breeze. In front of them walks a priest, carrying a crucifix on the end of a wooden pole. They’re chanting in Italian, and the tradition of it is strange against the industrial backdrop of the port.

Ferry prices being what they are, I haven’t eaten all day, and in the half hour before my train into Rome I devour two cheap, massive slices of pizza. One of the things I love about Italy is that even train station pizza is decent — amazing, in fact, if you haven’t eaten anything in the last twenty-four hours.

My train whisks me across a dark countryside and into the lights of Rome, and when I get off at Rome Termini it doesn’t take long to remember my bearings and find my way to the city metro. My hostel is across the Tiber, east of the Vatican, on the fifth floor, and when I walk in I’m surprised and pleased to see Mikey, a friend of mine from Barcelona. He’d left a few days before I had, and after the initial round of surprised greetings he introduced me to the rest of the hostel crowd.

I spend the next couple of days wandering, though the days are cold. I temporarily regret leaving Barcelona, and then find that Barcelona, and the rest of southern Europe, is entering the same cold snap. One afternoon, while I’m working in a bar a few blocks away from my hostel, big wet chunks of snow begin to fall from the gray sky. Romans gather in doorways to watch as the road first turns wet, then white, as the snow piles up. By the time I walk back that night, the roads are full of slush, and the snow’s still falling hard.

The next morning Rome is covered in the first snowfall it’s seen since 2000. For once, the tourists stay in and the locals are out in their place, cameras in hand, kids in tow, taking pictures and making snow angels and rolling clumsy but exuberant snowmen. Traffic is almost nonexistent, the train lines are down, and the taxis are refusing to operate; it’s a good day for walking, despite the fact that after a few hours slogging through the slush my feet start to go numb. After all, seeing Rome covered in snow is an opportunity that only comes once a decade.

A day later, the snow has turned to ice, and a day after that, it’s already started to melt off. I’m nearly caught up on the History of Rome podcast I’ve been listening to since Scotland, and I listen to the last few episodes while walking around the city. I know a lot more, this time around; I can recognize Constantine’s arch, the Temple of the Vespas, and the Porticus Octaviae. I download a map of Rome as it was during the rule of Hadrian and find that it still works to navigate the old part of town.

Constantine's Arch

Porticus Octaviae

But after a week of cold and slush in Rome I’m ready to move on. With a little under two months until it’s time to meet Kate in Paris, I’ve settled on exploring northern Italy and save on the transportation costs of going all the way down to Sicily and back. First, though, there’s a city to the south I’ve been told is nice, and which I know almost nothing about: Napoli, home to the ruins of Pompei, the famous Mount Vesuvius, and, they say, the best pizza on the planet.

With routine, with structure, with hours of walking every day, comes thinking. I sit and drink coffee and read, or go to a cafe and work. I don’t visit museums or churches. I don’t even make it down to Barcelona’s famous beach until one of my last days in the city. So why, I ask myself, do I travel?

These questions come to the fore as I read Alain de Botton’s On Travel, an engaging and thoughtful book that I’d recommend to any serious traveler. Several of the more famous literary travelers he cites match some I’ve known personally: those who travel as a way of escaping boredom. These are often the most disappointed of wanderers, because they either stop traveling too early and spend their lives daydreaming of the excitement they once experienced, or travel too long and become aware that the world is the world wherever it is, and that every city and town is full of people who wish they could go somewhere else. Even the citizens of Shangri-La wonder what lies beyond the mountains.

The reason such travelers are unsatisfied is the same as the reason career corporate workers can’t find happiness in a corner office, and why true love so often ends in divorce: expectation. If you take some element of the real world, such as a city or a job or a person, and idealize that as something you can possess, then you will be disappointed. Reality can never be possessed. A city doesn’t care if it meets your preconceptions, a job is more than just its paycheck, and another human being will always be more deep and more complex than any romantic notion of them you could possibly have.

Curiosity is a better approach. For me, travel is no longer an escape to some exotic Other Place, just as love is no longer possession of some idyllic Other Person. Travel is learning, untangling a mystery, finding the other components of a whole that includes my home and all of the mundane parts of life that come with it. Is Barcelona the same as my hometown in Montana? No, of course not. But they are both parts of the same world, and I cannot understand the one without also knowing the other.

So too, one cannot understand the present without knowing the past. I sit one day and read in an old city street called Passeig del Born. It’s slightly wider than many of the old city’s alleyways, but is otherwise unremarkable — until you find out that it was once the jousting ground of the medieval city. Know that and you can look at the street and hear the cheer of the crowds, the whinnying of horses, and the crash of splintering wood, can smell the raised dust and spilt blood, can sense the loyalties and tensions of feudal kingdoms in the air. History makes the present more complete.

Passeig del Born

The question then arises: is there a right way to travel? I don’t think so, for the same reason I don’t read guidebooks — because there isn’t a right thing to see. There is no one monolithic Barcelona that every tourist experiences, or should experience. You could come here and spend all your time in museums, or in the underground art scene, or learning flamenco guitar, or drinking into the early hours of the morning, or, like me, wandering the streets and reading and writing, and each experience would be valid in its own right. Traveling is like looking at art; the resulting experience depends both on the thing being taken in, and on the brain doing the taking. My Barcelona is different from yours, or my friend’s, or Hemingways. My Barcelona now is different than my Barcelona will be the next time I visit.

And yet, our Barcelona is, outside of the unique aspects of our individual perceptions, Barcelona. Maybe we’ve both seen Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, or drank absinthe at that little place off Las Ramblas, or sat on the beach and watched the surfers. Maybe we’ve both sat in Passeig del Born and daydreamed of jousting knights. We each have our vision; when you tell me yours, mine will be the fuller for it; and when you read mine, so will yours.

After all, half the fun of traveling is talking about it.

My last day in Morocco is spent first on the train, headed north to Tangiers, and then making my way further up the coast to the industrial port at Tangier Med. Then the slow monotony of customs, brought to a close by a pair of jovial inspection agents who eye my pack and guitar case and raise their eyebrows.

“You smoke?” says the one on the right.

“What?”

“Only tobacco, eh?” the one on the left says. He winks and waves me through.

Tangiers is the hub of the massive export of Moroccan hashish through Spain and into the rest of Europe. On this side of the Strait, apparently, the laws are more like guidelines. It’s not until European customs that the drug-sniffing dogs and sub-machine-gun-carrying police come into play.

At one point I’d intended to head south from Fes into the heart of northern Africa, hitching and busing my way through Mauritania and Mali and trying for an Algerian transit visa to get me back to the Mediterranean coast in Tunisia. However, it’s almost Christmas (yes, this blog is that far behind) and my brother Michael’s term at Yeditepe University in Istanbul is coming to an end. He’s stopping for a few days in Barcelona over Christmas before heading back to the States, so we’ve decided to meet up for the holidays.

My means of getting there is via a direct twenty-eight hour ship ride from Tangiers, that hugs the Spanish coast all the way up to Catalonia. The line is Gran Navi Veloci, a discount Italian cruise service, and from the moment I step on board I realize just what that means. Everything, even drinking water, comes with a price; all of a sudden I understand the giant jugs being toted by my fellow passengers. I’ve reserved the cheapest option, a seat in a large room full of snoring Moroccans. The next day and a half pass slowly; there are no power outlets whatsoever on the ship, so I don’t get any work done, and pass most of the time reading out on the deck, where it’s warm and sunny for the most part.

The ship ends up being fully twelve hours late, arriving in Barcelona around seven in the morning, instead of in the evening the night before. It’s a cold and gray dawn as we disembark, go through security and customs, and then I’m in the city, pack on my back, guitar in hand. A high green hill lined with medieval fortifications rises on my left, the port and centuries-old marina line the shoreline on my right. Straight ahead is La Rambla, the main thoroughfare of Barcelona’s old town. As I walk up it, the city comes to life: chairs are lined out around tables, metal grates scrape up from shopfronts, and sidewalks are swept. It’s already almost nine; life here starts late.

Two days later is Christmas Eve. Michael’s flying in the following morning, so I spend the night on the roof of my hostel with a group of Polish and Estonian street musicians, drinking wine and eating roast chicken, listening to and occasionally, fumblingly, contributing myself. I’m informed of the best places to squat (the old apartment blocks a few metro stops north of Passeig de Gracia) and to busk (the parks around Sagrada Familia) and the conversation goes late, the warmth of the wine helping to stave off the chill of the night air.

The next morning I say goodbye to my new friends and head a few blocks away to the hostel where I’m meeting my brother. He’s already there when I arrive, and I stow my baggage before we head out to the old city to explore. The Gothic Quarter, as it’s called, has its roots in the Roman and pre-Roman days, and the old Roman walls have been incorporated into buildings all around the district center.

Part of the old Roman walls

Catalonia is a notoriously independent part of Spain, and Barcelona is the heart of that independence. Part of this stems from the fact that Catalonia was one of the first provinces to be reclaimed from the Muslim empire of Al-Andalus, and thus has been independent for longer than most of the other Spanish states, but Catalan orneriness seems to go back even further than that. It’s possible that Hannibal himself, perhaps the single greatest threat the Roman republic ever had to face, grew up here: local legend has it that the city was founded by Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal’s father.

We head back in the afternoon to attempt a Skype call to family back in Montana, but the connection is too slow for anything more than an exchange of Merry Christmases. It doesn’t feel like Christmas; it’s warm, and the Spanish don’t seem to be going out for much in the way of decoration. Michael’s friends Jake and Rachel show up in the evening, and we spend the rest of the night talking, playing chess, and experimenting with the guitar. We also take a walk to the Sagrada Familia, the massive Gaudi-designed cathedral in north-central Barcelona. The whimsy of its design belies both its impressive mass and its quite respectable age: ground was broken for its construction in 1882, and it’s not scheduled to be completed until 2026.

Michael stays a few more days before moving on to visit Ireland and Scotland before his return home, and I settle in to a regular schedule of work. I spend a week or so over New Year’s in a hostel on the outskirts of the city before heading back into town to Graffiti, the relaxed, friendly, and cheap locale of my first few nights and Christmas Eve dinner in Barcelona. I’d spend the next month there: I like the place, and I like the city. I often walk into town in the morning, where I find a good cafe to write at. Clandestin, a hard-to-find place deep in the narrow alleys of the Gothic Quarter, quickly becomes my favorite.

Occasionally I stop in at Cafe de l’Opera on La Rambla for chocolat con churros and an hour or two of notebook work; by this point I’m rewriting and reworking, checking facts and adding research, spending far more time and energy on a single project than I ever have before, blindly placing my trust in the hope that one way or another, this book will pan out. If you happen to know any young adult publishers or agents, by the way, drop me a line and I’ll love you forever.

The Cafe de l'Opera

My time thus split between writing and working, I hardly have any time to explore the more touristy parts of the city. In a whole month’s time, I never once visit the beach or set foot in a museum. Funnily enough, the regularity of work is relaxing, and I realize that the very thing that most people travel to escape from, monotony of schedule and place, has become for me a vacation in itself.

It’s almost dark by the time my train pulls out of the Tangiers station and heads south into the interior of Morocco. Tangiers rises sharply as we approach its edge, house-lights in terraces along steep hills, and then we’re in the dark of the countryside. The train is well-worn but well-maintained, and as the slightly pricier alternative to bus and shared taxi transportation, is still the main mode of transport for the country’s upper classes. My fellow passengers are a handful of Moroccan men in suits, carrying briefcases and reading newspapers, on their way back from meetings on the coast. Here and there a few women sit in elegant, if conservative, gowns, and French couple struggles with oversized packs toward the back of the car.

I sit next to Salim, an engineering student from Casablanca, who’s well-educated and speaks four languages (Arabic, French, Spanish, and Berber) fluently, as well as English that’s about as good as my Spanish, so we switch in and out of the two languages. He is, as it turns out, an atheist, one of the first atheists of Islamic origin I’ve met, and he strongly supports the secularization of Morocco. He has some hopes for the current king, Mohammed VI, a man he says some Moroccans hope will be a new Ataturk. The future, Salim says, is a separation of church and state; to legislate otherwise is to sideline your nation in the scientific advancements of the twenty-first century.

He gets off at Rabat to catch his connection west to Casablanca, and I read for the last hour and a half. I arrive in Fes around 10:30, where I find a message from my friend Shreya, who’s already got a room in a hotel in the medina with her boyfriend. I write down the name of the place and go outside to hail a taxi.

I quickly find myself trying to compare the scenery sliding past with previous experiences in Islamic or Arabic countries, especially the ancient cities of Aleppo and Damascus in Syria. But while there are a lot of similarities, there are a lot of differences as well — lumping the Moroccan and Syrian worlds together as “Arabic” or “Islamic” is a bit like lumping the Spanish and German worlds together as “European” and “Christian.” The proportions are different, for one thing; everywhere I look as we drive I see the classic pinched arch of Moroccan design.

Men wear thick camel-wool djellabas, sleeved and hooded robes in dark earth tones, instead of the flowing white thobes of the Syrian desert. On the women, there’s scarcely a full burqa to be seen, though headscarfs and hijabs are common. Some women, dark-skinned and weathered, have dark tattoos on their face that, upon further research, turn out to indicate tribal identity, social status, and how many male heirs a Berber woman has produced. There’s more meat on display, less eggplant and chickpeas. In terms of the city itself, Fes has less French colonial influence than does Damascus, but also less history in general; no streets laid by Alexander the Great here, no pagan temples turned into Byzantine churches turned into mosques.

But these sorts of comparisons can only get you so far. I find the hotel, which is fortunately just inside the main gate to the medina, and end up next to Shreya and Adam’s room, on a large inner courtyard. We sit out on the roof terrace and have a glass of mint tea as the city winds down in the night outside, orange lights blinking out one by one.

The next day, it’s time to explore. The medina, or old town, of Fes is a UNESCO world heritage site, and is rumored to be the largest car-free urban area in the world. Streets are impossibly narrow and, until you get the hang of them, chaotically twisting; a turn or two and you’re hopelessly lost. But this being a Moroccan city which gets the vast majority of its income from tourism, there’s always an overager child or timid hash dealer to point you in the right direction, for a small fee.

The touts generally try to point you in the right direction, or, more likely, whatever direction leads to a shop where they can get a commission (a.k.a. “my father’s shop! Very cheap! Very nice!”), whether you’re lost or not. They get old quickly, and so you learn ways around. A polite no, thank you, in Arabic: laa, shuqran, or just ignoring them, work as well as anything. When you ask for directions, ask an old man behind a counter.

A Berber clothworks

In fact, in talking with some of the older men, a certain annoyance can be felt there too. The old men working have a level of independence; they make their own money, they provide a service, they help their community. Many of them see the young hash-dealers and street touts as an annoyance, overeager parasites who give Morocco a bad name and unfairly advantage those shops that decide to use them.

One afternoon we navigate through the medina to the tanneries, which are enormous and multicolored. The specific hues of the dying pools change from week to week; today they’re warm, yellows from saffron and reds from sumac. Fes has a long history of leather production; during the first few centuries of the second millenium, the city supplied the light adarga shields, which were made of antelope skin and carried by Moorish light cavalry during the conquest of Spain. It proved to be so effective at deflecting lances and arrows for a mounted soldier that the Christian Spaniards picked up it’s use, and the adarga remained in high demand until the invention of firearms.

Much of the rest of our time is spent browsing the narrow souqs for this and that. The impulse to spend money is difficult to resist, especially with prices so low, and each of us end up with a few extra items in our packs. I come away with a box of spices and a blue Berber scarf. Our nights are usually spent at our hotel, drinking mint tea; Adam’s a good musician, and shows me a few tricks on my new Granadan guitar.

Shreya and Adam leave for London the day before my own departure back up to Tangiers. I spend my last morning in Fez with a cup of coffee on the roof terrace of the train station, practicing my guitar and watching the light on the orange trees.

I leave Granada on a sunny afternoon, bound for Algeciras, on the southern tip of Spain. I change buses in Malaga, and end up sitting next to a pair of travelers, Hamish and Lilu, from Canada and Russia, respectively. Hamish is a proper hippy, with a beard, tied-up dreads, and the well-worn shoes of two years (and counting) on the road. He wears a shalwar khemiz, and has been to Morocco several times before; he’s quite a connoisseur, he says, of hashish, and the Moroccan variety is some of the best. Lilu is young and Russian; she met Hamish at a commune north along the coast, and thought Morocco sounded interesting, so came along.

We talk as the sun sets and the bus rolls south. In the early evening the Rock of Gibraltar rises through the hills, striking in the gold light, and I’m surprised at how impressive it is among its lower, softer surroundings. It looks as if a giant has split a hill in two with a wedge and hammer, and thrown one half into the sea.

The ferry offices in Algeciras are only a few blocks from the bus station, and Hamish, Lilu and I decide to join forces for the night. We manage to find tickets to Morocco for just over ten euro, and spend the next few hours waiting in a dockside cafe, crowded with Moroccans waiting for their ride home. The air is full of cigarette smoke and Arabic.

The crossing, when it comes, is quick and easy. Hamish lets us in on the fact that we can process our passports at the ferry’s desk, so when we dock, there’s no paperwork waiting between me and my new continent.

But it’s dark, of course, and as our shuttle takes us from the port at Tangier Med to the Tangier city center, only silhouettes of jagged mountains show above the horizon. Tangiers is a modern city, and the streets of the center are well lit, wide, and at right angles. It’s not until we pass through the gates into the medina that they gain the narrow, twisting, dimly lit nature of Arabic city-planning I remember from Syria.

Our hotel, when we find one, is a bit dilapidated, but a bit grand, too, in that dilapidated kind of way, and we manage to pay 50 Moroccan dirham each for a room; a little less than five euro a piece. Hamish has already found one of his favorite hash dealers from his last visit, a friendly local named Chino — “because of my eyes,” he says, pointing at the way they slant down at the corners.

Chino, it turns out, spent most of his adolescence in Spain, culminating with an arrest for unspecified reasons that put him in prison for three and a half years. “But it’s okay,” he says, “Spanish prison, like Moroccan hotel!” He further elaborates on his plan to buy a jet ski to cross the straits, sneak past the Spanish coast guard, and return to visit his family in Granada.

By the next morning, I have word that my friends Adam and Shreya have arrived in Fes on a week-long visit, so I don’t stay in Tangier for a second night, and don’t have much time for pictures. My impression is of a city in the throes of modernization, pushed forward by King and people, where the medieval quarters of the city, once so charming, are now a little lost, and a little out of place.

As for me, I head for the train station, and buy a ticket to Fez.

Initially, my plan after Madrid is to head down to Córdoba, the historic capital of the Caliphate of Córdoba, which ruled the Islamic state of Al-Andalus for just over a hundred years in the tenth and eleventh centuries. But despite being in the off seasons, accommodations there are expensive, and so I head further south, to the city of Granada.

Granada itself interests me from a historic standpoint, as it was the last Islamic holdout in Spain. The fall of the city in 1492 marked the end of the Moorish presence in the Iberian peninsula and the end of the Reconquista, and marked a change in the Spanish approach to the world. That date, in fact, so famous to Americans as the year of Christopher Columbus’ famous voyage, is no coincidence: Columbus was funded in large part by the wealth the Spanish government captured in Granada. The main street, Gran Via de Colón, is named after the explorer.

I arrive in the outskirts of the city, in the dilapidated but relaxed modern district, and it’s a sunny half-hour walk into the center. Behind the city rise the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevadas, which mark the first snow I’ve seen since leaving the Rockies way back in June.

Once near my hostel, I turn up into the Albayzín, the old Arabic quarter, and immediately the right-angle grid of the modern town gives way to the narrow twisting alleys of classic Arabic urban layout. My hostel, Oasis, is set up in a beautiful old four-story building with a covered central courtyard and roof terrace, and I immediately feel at home. Granada is cheap and relaxed; a beer or glass of wine costs about a euro fifty, and comes with a surprisingly substantial tapas plate free of charge. Two or three of these can make a lunch, and if you’re still hungry, a falafal wrap or lamb sandwich runs you around three euro.

I stay in Granada for about a week, working and writing. My young adult novel, which I’ve been composing in a series of notebooks, has come to a standstill, and so I stop the forward composition and go into intensive restructuring and historical research on topics ranging from the first Crusade to the Mongol conquests of the 13th century to the French occupation of Syria in the early twentieth century. As the research and plotting picks up, so do the book plans; the middle third of my notebooks is full of notes and ideas, and my computer copy slowly starts to reform in a way more to my liking.

One morning, I take a truly excellent walking tour up through the Arabic quarter to the church that crowns the hill in the center. From here, you can see the caves lining the hills behind the district. Divided by a path into the Gypsy caves and “the hippy caves,” this area has been a haven for the disenfranchised since the Muslim days, and local legend has it that the rich tradition of the Spanish guitar began there.

Music in general is taken very seriously in Granada, and talented street musicians are everywhere. Several are staying at my hostel, and late-night music sessions on the roof are shut down more than once by apologetic staff pleading sleep for those in the rooms just below us. It all makes me wish for an instrument; I play piano, but pianos are hard to come by when traveling. So instead, I interview several of the musicians staying at my hostel about the nature of travel with a guitar. Finally, I make my choice; I don’t play, but I can learn, and I figure carrying it around with me will force me to practice.

So I take a tour of the city’s many guitarrerias, where old master craftsman build instruments by hand, and where a good guitar can go for prices approaching a thousand euros. I, of course, have nowhere near that amount to spend, and so finally find a place that sells cheap guitars as well. I sit down to try a Made in China model that sells for thirty-five euros. The strings are stiff, the sound is flat, but, I think, it will work to learn on.

Then the shopkeeper pulls a guitar from the rack and hands it to me. “This is my cheapest hand-made model,” he says, “it’s probably more than you want to spend.”

I pick it up, and even though I don’t play guitar as yet, I’m immediately in love. It’s both lighter and stronger than the machine-made model, the sound is rich, the strings pliable. I find myself unable to set it down. “How much?” I say.

Half an hour later, new guitar and case in hand, I walk back to my hostel with a lighter heart and a lighter wallet. It was worth it, I think; I can eat rice for a few weeks.

Before I leave, I visit the Alhambra, the massive Arabic fortress that crowns one of the hills above the city, full of fortifications and palaces that served as inspirations for famous artists from Washington Irving and Salman Rushdie to M.C. Escher to Claude Debussy.

Immediately apparent is the different value system held by the North African Muslim rulers compared with their European counterparts; in Islamic culture, based til that point in fairly arid parts of the world, water, not gold, was the primary way of publicly displaying wealth. So whereas in places like Versailles or the Vatican gold and filigree are the most visual elements of construction, Islamic palaces like the Alhambra display wealth in their gardens, fountains, and waterworks. Construction is done in intricately carved wood and stone, streams run through carved channels behind and beneath pathways, every terrace holds a garden, and fountains are everywhere.

By the time my stay in Granada is up, I’m sad to see it go, and promise myself that I’ll come back. Maybe I’ll live in the hippy caves, learning flamenco guitar; who knows. But for the moment, Morocco is calling.

We’re turned out at seven in the morning from the Cruz Roja auberge in Catalayud, but I’m well rested, having gone to sleep at ten the night before. There’s frost on the ground and an icy mist in the air that makes me happy again to not be camping in the hills nearby.

That said, my money isn’t due until the evening, thanks to an eight-hour time difference between my bank and I. Jesus and I walk around for a while, to stay warm as much as anything, before I finally give up and drop my pack next to a comfortable enough chair in the train station. Jesus stops in from time to time during the day to talk, and the rest of the time I spend reading. Around five Jesus leaves for good, to a different charity run by las monjas this time, in search of another bed and another meal. It’s not an easy life; if travelers think having to sort out hostel reservations and ticket times is stressful, they should try doing so with no money. There is, in fact, a whole sin casa network of underground information, something like the old hobo codes in the States during the Great Depression; show up in a new town, sufficiently ragged to be accepted as a fellow vagabond, and you’ll be treated to reams of information as to the restaurants that give away free food after closing, the churches that open their doors on cold nights, the monasteries and convents that provide beds for the poor, the state services and the rules that accompany them, and the best ways to circumvent those rules.

But at six or seven I leave that network when an email informs me I now have money. I book a ticket to Madrid on the night train and eat the last of my bread and cheese en route, while breaking into a new book: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, which is impossibly entertaining and unspeakably horrifying in equal measures. The first fourth of the book takes me all the way to Madrid.

Most of the hostels here have one simple purpose: to provide a place for people to fall asleep after a night, and possibly a morning, of hard drinking. Beds are utilitarian and crowded, as many as will fit, into small, plain rooms that nearly always have at least two or three people sleeping off a binge in one corner or another. Every hostel advertises pub crawls, sometimes in multiple flavors, and each boasts one version or another of a claim to being the best party hostel in the city.

But it’s a place to sleep, and I’ve long since gained the gift of sleeping through drunken roommates stumbling in at all hours of the morning. I even join one of the pub crawls, figuring it’s an experience I might as well have sooner or later. The “pubs” are loud bars, with a lot of flashing lights and electronic music, mostly full of other backpackers. What little conversation there is takes place outside, in clouds of cigarette smoke and shivering clumps of underdressed tourists. One of our fellow pub crawlers comes out of the bar swearing and goes off in a corner to sulk — a girl he was trying to sleep with has apparently started crying and gone home, and he views it as a personal slight. I stay with the crawl until the last stop, an artificial-smoke-filled club lanced with green lasers, and, tired, leave after a few minutes to walk home by myself.

On the walk back the difference between these two nights strikes me keenly. The people weren’t so very different — whatever proverbs may say, I’ve seen no evidence of poverty granting virtue. Maybe it was the means. In Catalayud, we had little — and my companions far less than I did — so things like hot soup and a comfortable bed became luxuries. In Madrid, the expectation for many young travelers is fun, drunkenness, and free sex, and when any of those things is denied, it’s cause for unhappiness. What does this mean, exactly? Jesus and my Romanian friends aren’t sages or saints, just normal people on hard times. It’s pretentious in the extreme to romanticize poverty from a perspective of wealth, but there is something to be learned from going without for a bit: there is happiness to be had in the very simple things, if we can just get past all the noise and flash of the luxuries we’re supposed to want.

I spend a few more days in Madrid, though I don’t book another pub crawl. Instead, I walk around, to cafes here and there, to some of the city’s famous art museums, where I have my first real personal encounter with the works of Picasso and Goya and Dalí. Picasso’s works are strange and fascinating, requiring you step back and bend your head and stand in confused attendance. Goya is realer than life, full of a liquid physical light and a playfully metaphorical dark; Dalí is entrancing, full of meaning I’m not quite able to grasp, full of detail that hints at realism but is warped by the special properties of space in Dalí’s universe. Every one of his later works is the clean-edged creation of a divine madman.

Madrid itself is, at first glance, a somewhat dirty and unassuming kind of city, with a brusque and utilitarian air that reminds me at times of Queens or certain parts of London. There’s a giant palace on one side, swarming with tourists and somewhat the worse for wear, and a cathedral that only looks the part from certain angles. But every now and then, I get a glimpse, through gateways and church doors, into cavernous and elegant interiors and garden-filled courtyards. I’m told by a local that there was a time here when taxes were determined based on what could be seen of a place from the outside, and so many buildings were set up to look poor from without while being luxurious within.

Overall, that’s the impression of Madrid I come away with. There’s a hard shell around the heart of the city, and it’s easy as a tourist to just bounce around outside it. But I have a feeling that, if you were to live here, and if you were to let it, the city would open itself up to you and show you what it’s really about.

It takes perhaps five minutes to walk the length of the little village of Morata de Jalon, where I leave the train, and beyond that it’s a long ribbon of road through rocky hills, crossing and re-crossing a shallow river, while the sun sets and the day slowly cools into evening. Cars pass only occasionally, and as it gets later, not at all. Pack lighter after abandoning some extraneous gear and finished books in Zaragoza, it feels good to walk.

The mist rolls in an hour or so before nightfall, and as it does I come upon an abandoned village perched on a hill, crowned with the high walls of a medieval church. I jump at the chance, and climb up the steep slope past half-fallen houses to the church. There’s no roof, and where worshipers once knelt there’s now only grass. But three walls still stand, keeping out the wind, and through the fourth I can see the whole valley spread out below me. Every so often, the high speed AVE train from Zaragoza to Madrid rockets by in the distance like a jet at ground level, shaking the air for a moment before silence descends again.

Above the church on a high outcrop of rock is an improbable watchtower that, when whole, must have given its occupants a view of all possible approaches for miles in any direction. I climb up to it before dark, but it’s getting cold now and I don’t stay long before heading back to my sheltered little church.

There’s dry wood everywhere, and I build a fire as darkness falls in full. I spear bread and cheese and chorizo on a stick to roast and enjoy a hot meal, then settle in to read Walden. In one sitting, six hours by my fire, I nearly finish it. It seems appropriate, somehow, to be reading it here. Around midnight I let my fire die and climb into my sleeping bag, draping my jacket over it for extra warmth. It’s a bit chilly, but I’ve slept through worse in the mountains of Montana, and I wake the next morning rested and ready for another day.

The mist burns off quickly as the sun comes up, and by late morning I’m down to my t-shirt. As I get closer to Madrid, kilometer by slow kilometer, my narrow empty road joins another, and by two in the afternoon, I’ve reached the carreterra, triple-laned and loud with traffic. I consider hitchhiking, but I have a few euros still and figure I might as well see Catalayud — just a dozen kilometers further on along the tracks — before I try that. I finish Walden on the platform, which helps to pass the three hour wait.

Just as I’m turning the last page, a Spanish man shows up, also on foot. His name is Jesus, he speaks no English whatsoever, and he is sin casa — homeless. With an hour and a half left to wait, we talk, in my best broken Spanish, my first real conversation in that language since arriving in Spain. He’s from the south, a town on the border of Portugal, has five sisters and a brother, and hates the cold, a sentiment I share just at the moment.

My plan is to take the train to Catalayud, one of the larger towns in the region, and walk out of it to the mountains to camp another night. I still have bread and cheese to eat, and am getting paid the next day, so I’m not worried, but Jesus tells me about the Ayunamiento and la Cruz Roja of Catalayud — the town council and Red Cross, respectively. In Catalayud, the Red Cross and affiliated organizations are run by las monjas, or nuns, and I can’t pass up the opportunity. So we register for the night with the police at the Ayunamiento, where I am greeted with surprised but friendly smiles and a single officer whose English is slightly worse than my Spanish. I understand enough to catch the common sentiment — “it’s very cold, and if you camp in the mountains, you will die.” Clearly, these people have never heard of Montana, where three or four degrees Celsius is an unseasonably warm night in the winter, but I’m happy enough to accept the help. They’re happy to give me a place to stay, on the condition that this be a one-time occurrence. They have room tonight, but don’t generally want to be taking care of American tourists when they have Spanish mouths to feed.

So Jesus and I walk to a nearby auberge, where the nuns, kindly older women who also don’t speak English, are waiting with hot food: soup and bread and, wonder of wonders, roast chicken! The only other residents tonight are a Romanian couple, residents of Spain for the last eight years, down on their luck on a cold night. I never catch their names, but I talk to the Romanian man for some time. As his Spanish is slow and carefully pronounced and simple in its vocabulary, he’s easier to understand: he had two children, a boy and a girl, back in Romania. He came to Spain with high hopes of providing for his family, but right now, there’s no work to be had, especially for an immigrant. Times are hard, and his children, he is ashamed to say, are living with relatives, with no money at all coming from their own father and mother.

And yet, there’s a quiet kind of happiness. Jokes are still told, the food is good, and the old man who runs the auberge seems to have had his own history of hard times, and has none of the pitying piety I’ve occasionally seen in homeless shelters elsewhere, and instead shows an understanding, a commiseration, that makes us feel more like guests than recipients of charity. There’s a hot shower, and the beds are soft, and I use some of my newfound vocabulary to express my gratitude: “Muchas gracias, señor. Esta es mejor de las montañas.” Thank you, sir. This is better than the mountains.

I go to sleep warmer and more comfortable than I’ve been in a good many of the beds I’ve paid for.

From San Sebastián I head across a wide green landscape marked here and there by rocky ridges raising above the surrounding forest that cast ever longer shadows as the sun sets. By the time I get to Zaragoza, it’s already dark, and I step off the train into an immensely cavernous station, with four stories of hotel room balconies above ground and three levels of train platforms beneath. When I step outside, I find I’m on the outskirts of a large and busy city, the political capital of Aragon. A six-lane highway is the only road adjacent to the station, and it’s a long half-hour walk through upper-class but characterless residential districts before I finally reach my hostel, near the city center. It’s cold, and there’s a low damp layer of cloud hovering just over the tops of the buildings, and as I check in and drop off my luggage, I’m having doubts as to whether coming here was a good idea.

Then I walk out into town, and as I near the centers, the spires of the Catedral-Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Pilar, or Our Lady of the Pillar, soar up above the medieval town center, lit up by spotlights, massive and otherworldly, and my doubts are banished. Satisfied with my choice after all, I stop in at a heated cafe for a coffee before heading back to the hostel for some work and sleep.

I spend the next few days exploring. History here emerges in succession; Our Lady of the Pillar is by far Zaragoza’s most visible landmark, a fancifully baroque testament to the amount of time and money the Catholic Kingdom of Aragon and the united Spanish state that followed it were willing to spend on their monuments to the faith. Move a little away, and the narrow streets still bear marks of Islamic architecture from the few centuries of occupation by the Caliphate of Cordoba, under which the city got its first iteration of its current name: Saraqusta.

Beneath that, Rome: the city was founded by the emperor Augustus as  Caesaraugusta, in the last few decades BCE, and the remnants, in the form of old walls, pillars, and river-works, are still found throughout the city. The food here is meant to be excellent, but a few days into my visit, I’m running into a problem: my funds are running dangerously low.

As I have money due to arrive in my account in a few days, I make a calculated choice to spend some time on the road. I’ve packed a sleeping bag and shelter, and had very little use of them so far, so, I think, why not? The only thing that worries me is a frigid wet fog that’s settled into the city deeper and deeper since my arrival, and shows no sign of departing. I cross my fingers and wait.

On the morning of my departure, it’s as cold and wet and gray as ever, and my heart sinks. But at this point, I’ve already made my decision, and so I spend two of my remaining few Euros to take the local train out into the countryside. The city falls away behind, and then we’re plunging into the backcountry of Aragon. I find out later that Aragon used to be extremely rich in mineral resources, full of thriving communities built around the mines. Now most of these are depleted, and the train rattles on past ghost town after ghost town, windows black and boarded, roofs caved in, street signs unreadable. In the gray fog, through a train window, the whole scene has the feel of apocalypse.

My nervousness grows as I near the starting point of my walk. Aragon is beautiful, but the fog obscures almost everything, and makes being outside uncomfortably cold. I think of trying to stay on the train past my ticket, just get to Catalayud and from there try to use a credit card to make it to Madrid.

Then, just minutes before we reach my station, the train rises abruptly into a series of jagged granite mountains, and plunges into a tunnel. A few moments later, we burst out the other side into brilliant sunshine and a gorgeous view of narrow peaks crowned with the improbable ruins of medieval watchtowers, rising up from rolling brown hills. The train’s brakes creak as it pulls to a stop, and I step off with a smile on my face, my pack on my back, and my feet ready for walking.