Casa No.4, read its sign, looked as dead as the restaurant. The shutters were closed, and it looked as though it could do with a fresh coat of the ubiquitous white paint. The door was locked, but it was wooden and not strong and came off its hinges with barely a hefty kick at the lock.
Inside the smell was of a home that had been shut up and uninhabited for a number of years. None of the electrics worked, and the kitchen cupboards were totally empty. Appliances had been left open to air, and the oven looked as though it had never been used at all. It had been lived in at some point though; there was an ashtray with a few butts on a coffee table in the main living area, and towels and clothes laid around the floors in a couple of the bedrooms. In the bathroom there was a dried out bar of well-used soap on the ledge of the bath. In the garden there were a few semi-circular stone walls, which I realised later when I came across fields and fields of them were for growing grapes. The small walls sheltered the fruit from the harsh winter winds that swept in from the Atlantic.
It looked like a house that someone had tried living in, then gave up after a few days and sought more convivial surroundings. Femés seemed to me the kind of place that would look and feel like a ghost town even if it were fully inhabited. I felt sorry for Emiliano, wherever he was, for trying to run a restaurant business in such a place.
About two miles further on I came to another village, even smaller, called Las Casitas. It was literally a few houses scattered off the main road, most looked to be in some stage of construction. Cement mixers and breeze blocks sat unused by the side of the road. Why would anyone choose to build a house here? This was truly the middle of nowhere. It was partially sheltered by dusty hills that rose either side of the road, but you couldn’t even call this scrubland. There was absolutely nothing growing in the soil except a couple of cacti. Geographic isolation was the only reason anyone would settle in such a place.
A few of the houses were built into the side of these hills, with garages taking up the ground floor and the living accommodation perched on top. One double garage was sitting open and had two cars inside, both old Toyotas, and upstairs I found the keys to both in a house that had been lived in a great deal more than Casa No.4. But it was still abandoned. No electrics were on. This struck me as strange as in Playa Blanca everything was running, fridges, coffee machines, tills, beer pumps.
Why was nothing working in the sticks?
Naturally, neither car started. I smoked a Lucky and drank half a bottle of water in the teeming sunshine. I’d only been on the road around an hour and a half and the sun wasn’t nearly at its full height in the sky but already it was getting unbearable. I would have to find some shelter for the midday hours, but with the abundance of these little settlements that wouldn’t be a problem. Next on the line was Uga, which looked to be a more substantial size than these piss-pot shanties so far.
As I came out of the Las Casitas something caught my eye on a hill a couple of miles away. It looked like a line-of-sight radio tower, probably for transmitting local radio across the island. It was definitely worth checking out though. Even if the electrics were down, if it was a transmitter station it might have a back-up generator or even solar power.
Being a bit of a geek at school, I had for a while been fascinated by radio and had even built my own homebrew ham radio from a kit I begged my father to buy me for Christmas. I made my antenna by stealing a 20 meter length of copper wire from my uncle’s workshop and suspending it around my bedroom ceiling.
I still knew a bit about transmitting from a course I’d done at university, but by that stage I was more interested in amateur dramatics and getting laid to seriously pursue it.
A tingle of excitement ran through me as I imagined dialing in and DXing (geek-speak for contacting far-away stations) some kid in Singapore or Montevideo. The only trouble was that the tower was up some pretty hardcore off-road track by the looks of it. I would have to walk it or risk serious puncturisation on my bike tires. I cursed myself for not having included a puncture repair kit instead of a bottle of bloody brandy in my rucksack.
I adjusted the sack on my back and started up the trail. Distances can be hard to gauge in strong sunlight especially when there are no large landmarks to go against, but I estimated it would take me about a half hour to reach the antenna and, hopefully, the transmitting station it served. I couldn’t see at this stage if there was a building underneath it which would indicate the presence of such a station, but my instincts told me it was almost certainly there.
The walk was hard going, uphill in the searing heat and over stony ground that my flip-flops were not designed to enjoy. More than a few times I had to stop to rest and swig on the water. I told myself to take it easy. If something happened I wouldn’t last long being at least 10 miles from any civilisation, if it could be termed that. I had the first aid kit I’d grabbed from the pharmacy but it wouldn’t do much good for a sprained or broken ankle. The thought of spending the night out here on a cold and dusty escarpment with no shelter didn’t fill me with anticipation.
Damn I wished I had a car!
About half a mile from the antenna I saw the building. Just one, which was a good sign and a bad sign. Transmitter stations can be housed in several buildings or just one. Several would have meant this was a main station, generating its own signal at high power and covering a large area. One building alone meant this was probably an unmanned relay station, operating at low power to service, or fill in pockets of poor reception for, the main station. That was fine. If it was unmanned there was more chance of it having an emergency power supply. There would almost certainly be a manual override as well, so any maintenance men could carry out repairs.
Transmitter stations are just that – transmitters. They take a signal from the main station and bounce it onwards towards its ultimate destination. The only trouble is, although they can send as much signal as they need, they don’t have any capacity to receive. The antenna itself and the systems inside were useless to me unless there was a two-way communications device like a CB radio inside. This was what I was hinging my hopes on.
Having reached it, it was clearly a very basic outfit. It was basically a 2 x 2m shack constructed of the local volcanic rock. The antenna mast was around 30 metres high, which with the flat terrain would have been more than enough to be in the line of sight of several other relay stations. There would probably be a number of them all over the island. There was an even smaller hut next to it of the same material, which housed an emergency generator. It was fuel powered, so useless in other words, but what really got my heart pumping was the small array of solar panels on the flat roof of the main building.
If these were connected, and I had no reason to believe they weren’t, I might be able to get the radio up and running to broadcast.
The next problem that presented itself was the metal door. My shoulder was strong enough to take a wooden door off its hinges but a steel plate door was something different. I looked around for a big rock or something heavy that would serve as a battering ram. The plateau of the hill was totally flat, with nothing in sight for miles except dust and the occasional stalwart bush trying to suck as much moisture from the parched ground as it could. Not so much as a boulder in sight. Plenty of fist size rocks but nothing that was going to worry this door. Gingerly I pushed up against it and gave it as much of a shoulder barge as I could without hurting myself. Then I tried a little harder. And again. The door didn’t even shake on its hinges and I was in serious risk of breaking my collar bone if I shoved any harder.