Time keeping.

Tuesday was the first day of the Pontevedra chess tournament. Phil, of course, is taking part. The event is organised by someone who has become a friend over the years. Every year the tournament is preceded by a "campus", a kind of training camp for young chess players. A few years ago we organised a kind of chess exchange with him. A group of Manchester youngsters came to the "campus" and played in the tournament and then some months later a group of young Galicians went to Manchester. No "campus" but they stayed with chess families, went to the club and then won loads of prizes in a tournament. Not bad!

The "campus" and the tournament take place in a big private school in the outskirts of Pontevedra. It's a prestigious international school with dormitories, which are extremely useful if you are planning a week long residential training session. The disadvantage is that it is up in the hills, so far from the centre of town that access is difficult. You can't just stroll out from town to get there. And so the tournament organisers put on a bus, picking up from Pontevedra bus station half an hour before play starts. Very good!

And so we should have had no problem getting there. Not so! A combination of stuff slowed us down all the way along. In the first place the trains from Vigo to Pontevedra were not perfectly timed. We knew we would have a longish wait at the bus station but we were prepared for that. So off we went for a train at 15.10, from Vigo's out of town station, Guixar. Arriving there, we discovered that the train was now leaving, five minutes later, from the town centre station, Urzáiz. This was because of work being done at the station at Redondela in connection with the eventual, long promised, connection with the AVE high speed train service.

Aah!



We went to get a taxi to the relevant station. Time was pressing! There was a taxi but there seemed to be no driver. Almost at once another arrived but he refused to take us as there was a taxi ahead of him - the driverless one! Not driverless at all! The driver was snoozing with the seat so reclined that he was invisible. He awoke and put his seat back up. Off we went. Would we arrive in time? The next train would be too late. Phew! We made it ... with only minutes to spare!

Our plan was to spend the waiting-for-the-tournament-bus time in Pontevedra checking our email and other such internet activities. First thing to do was check that the bus station cafe had internet. Yes! Did we need a password? No, according to waitress. So we found the network, discovered that you needed to register, did the registering, filled in all the details and then came up against the screen that demanded the password for the cafeteria!!! By then it was too late to operate plan B and go to the cafe across the road with reliable wifi.

And besides, we had spotted a minibus with the name of the school on the side and went out to investigate. It was indeed our transport. A few other people were also waiting. We exchanged greetings and then chatted with the driver, who seemed in no hurry to go anywhere. But it was still quite early so we were not concerned. Some fifteen minutes later another bus had turned up but no more people. What was going on? Last year there were about twenty people. Perhaps they were all waiting at the second pick-up point.

Eventually we got into the bus and waited and waited and waited. We spoke to the driver. He was expecting somebody from the tournament organisation to turn up. He could not set off yet. (Sometimes the Spanish are great sticklers for obeying instructions. You see it as pedestrians wait for the green man at a crossing on a completely empty road!) So we waited and waited and waited. Time was going past. After some phone calls the driver was persuaded to set off. He also needed convincing that there was supposed to be a second pick-up along the way. And yes, there were players waiting there!

And so, after wasting a prodigious amount of time just hanging around, we finally made it up into the hills, really only a ten minute drive from the town centre, to the school, which is named "Los Sauces", or "The Willows" in English. However, there is not a willow tree to be seen, just lots of eucalyptus. They should rename it "Los Eucaliptos". Somehow it doesn't have the same ring to it. We arrived just in time. The opening ceremony was coming to a close. It was a close call. Play was starting!

Heading back to Vigo later, we asked at Pontevedra train station about trains for Wednesay. Which Vigo station would our train be running from? In what we have come to recognise as fairly typical "I am a state employee with a secure permanent contract and really couldn't give a damn" behaviour, the ticket clerk first of all told us he had no idea. After all, we were asking about Vigo stations and this was Pontevdra, all of fifteen minutes away in a fast train and thirty minutes away in a slow train. What did we really expect! Then he thought about it, finally registering that we had told him about problems at Redondela station. His brain clicked into gear. Clearly he had heard something about work in connection with the AVE. Yes, Monday to Friday the 15.10 train would not leave from Guixar station but from Urzáiz at 15.15. We thanked him and left. He called us back. Saturday as well! We set off again! He called us back. He wasn't sure about Sunday!

He was so vague that we asked again when we got to Vigo, where they confirmed that the 15.10 from Guixar would indeed be the 15.15 from Urzáiz. And what, we asked, if we decided to go earlier, maybe on the 13.10 train? Where would that leave from? Oh, that one would leave from Guixar as usual. (Fast trains - 15 minute journey - run from Urzáiz and slow trains - 30 minute journey - from Guixar, under normal circumstances.) What I neglected to ask was exactly when the work for the AVE took place at Redondela station. The station was open for the 13.10 train to go through, closed so that the 15.10 train had to go round a different way, but clearly open again by the time the evening train was running from Pontevedra to Vigo. They must have a small window of just a few hours to do the AVE work.

This probably explains why the long-promised Galicia bit of the AVE, once scheduled to be here by 2012 I believe, is still a mythical creature of the future!