Let me tell you a little story.
In the late summer of 2000, my mate Graham Walker and I went to Ibiza for a week away from it all. All we wanted was 7 days by the sea, with a constant supply of beer, scantily clad ladies with just a bit of string up their bum for decency, and sunshine. We got the first and second in spadefulls, but our first day was blighted by their WORST STORM for 30 YEARS. The writing was on the wall from early in the morning. Great swirling black clouds loomed ominously on the horizon from first light, (See piccy above) and I thought then that this wasn't how I remember the Mediterranean in early September. As it obviously wasn't going to be a beach day, we thought we would take the opportunity to explore the resort a bit. First stop, a typical Ibiza/Gosport roadside Café for brekky. You know the type…2 eggs, 2 sausage, 2 bacon, 2 toast, 2 quid. Luverly, never mind the cholesterol and heartburn burp, fart, belch.
Right, that's us sorted for the day, now for a wander around. Hang on, who turned the lights out? Outside of the café, it was like midnight in a coal yard. People were scurrying around like ants looking for a safe haven before the heavens opened. It started slowly, but built up like the gas turbine engine on a Boeing 747. Pitter, patter, pitter, patter, SPLOSHHHHHHHHHHHH.
Holy shit!!! I have never in my life seen anything like it. Rain is too simple a word for it. Just imagine you are below an upstairs window, and someone is emptying a never ending bathfull of water out of it. That's how hard it was. And it didn't stop. It just carried on bucketing down for hours at this horrendous rate. To start with it was quite a novelty, after all it's not every day you witness a monsoon. But after a while we started to think this could get a bit serious. In a country where people are more used to sunstroke than a passing shower, it was obvious that within a very short period of time the general infrastructure of the place was not going to cope with this volume of H2O. The first clue of impending doom came when suddenly all the manhole covers in the road outside of the bar we were hiding in popped several feet in the air almost simultaneously.
Now these things weigh the best part of 2 sacks of spuds each, so this was no mean feat. But what really clinched it was what followed. Anyone who has been to the Mediterranean knows that the standards of drains leaves a lot to be desired. Many of them are little more than ditches with concrete over the top. Most aren't segregated into separate sewage and rainfall outflows, but are just a glorious mixture of the two. A stroll down any Spanish street without plugs in your nostrils will vouch for what I'm saying.
You know what's coming next, don't you? Well we didn't.
SHIT, loads of it. Shit in bucketful's, shit in lorry loads, shit au-gratin, shit soufflé. Sorry, keep it clean David…sewage on a scale unprecedented to the uninitiated flowed down the street in a torrent of ladies unmentionables, sexual rubber leftovers, and just about everything else that you can imagine goes down a toilet. Dead dogs, rats doing the breast stroke. Everything flowed past at an increasingly alarming rate. By this time everyone around us was heaving with the stench, but in our intoxicated state we were almost immune to it. (We had now considerably drowned our sorrows with cheap local alcohol) The only thing that was distressing was seeing young children wading up to their knees across the river of filth that used to be the road. We both knew that somewhere under the murky depths was several gaping manholes that could easily swallow a small child.
We frequently shouted to anyone who would listen 'Don't walk in the black stuff' since it was pure sewage. One fair haired woman evidently emanating from Essex called back 'Why not'? with the crap wrapping around her legs. Her bloke turned and said 'It goes with the hair mate, and I married it' Good blonde joke! It made us laugh.
So, being British, we did the decent thing and paddled out into the mire and placed a bar table over the hole to identify where it was. What a waste of time that was. Within a moment a bus stopped and shifted it. Accelerating away, he showered us with a tidal wave of black gunge. Cheers mate!!! More cars whistled by, all churning up more obnoxious effluent.
So out we went again (are we mad?) this time fishing for the manhole cover. Locating the thing by feel (Yuk) we half dragged, half carried it over to the yawning mouth of the black hole. It dropped back in with a very satisfying plop, which was in keeping with the current lavatorial environment. Thank God for that.
Looking across the road, we were highly amused to see the maids desperately trying to bail out the foyer of their hotel with buckets, as if that was going to make any difference.
Then the hail started. Not your normal everyday hailstones, but huge buggers the size of golf balls. Get one of those on your head, you'd know about it. Bikers riding past on their Harleys were being pebble dashed.
Suddenly, as quick as it had started, it was over. The sun came out and the whole area became a steaming swamp. As the water flowed away, the true horror of what had happened hit us. The place stunk. All you could smell was shit. It was everywhere. You couldn't escape from it. So we made our way back to our apartment to scrub ourselves raw.
It made no difference, by 3am the next morning we were both heaving in the toilet. We had obviously breathed in so many airborne viruses that being ill was almost inevitable. For two whole days nothing would stay in any orifice. Even water was immediately thrown straight back up. Just the sound of Graham puking made me heave. Eventually, since I started to recover first, Graham begged me to go to the Pharmacy and buy drugs. Any drugs, so long as they stopped the torrent. Oh yes, and a large cork for his…..other end. When I got there, a queue a mile long stretched from it's door. I bet they sold more anti sick medicine that day than in the previous year.
So ended the first 3 days of our sunshine holiday. What a cock up.
Bet that's the last time Graham comes on holiday with me!!!