The Lisbon Redemption

Lisbon. April, 2024.

“Hello.”

“Hi”

“Travelling, are you?”

“Yes.” I replied, slightly baffled.

A young Irish gentleman had been waiting for me to finish my morning pan au chocolate and coffee on my final day of a week-long trip to Lisbon, and confronted me with a positive yet beguiling stretch of small talk After this strange bout of niceties he cut to the chase and explained that he’d traced a GPS signal to my building. The tracker was attached to 13,000 pounds worth of personal electronics which had been recently stolen from his apartment. The police, who I’d seen questioning him outside a short time earlier, couldn’t do much to help him enter the building, frustratingly.

I let him know that I was, alas, not the culprit, and shared my own hazy story of how I had lost my valuables the year before in southern Lisbon, albeit almost certainly through my own fault as it was late and I was coming back from a bar. A year of attempting to recollect the sequence of events that led to the hollow feeling of returning home without my beloved camera and lenses, valuables totalling 3K, and photographs from 10 days of traveling the country was met with the consolidatory “It could be worse” from friends and colleagues. Of course It could, and this young man, defiantly wearing a beaming smile was proof.

His positivity was a stark contrast to my sunken state a year before when, on the 11th day of a two-week trip that had up until that point been a cultural deep dive and much-needed destresser, I found myself two of my main drivers of any trip – music and photography. As couples, families, and locals passed me by on the streets and I traced my steps in vein, I wondered: “What am I even doing here on my own?”.

One of the most common questions I am asked when I announce an upcoming trip is “Who are you going with?” Usually I reply that I’m going solo. But without a camera in hand, those questions suddenly made sense. With a camera slung around my waist, traveling with a friend is more of an optional extra than a necessity for me.

The Irishman said he was going to move to the coast with his partner and start afresh, and in keeping with his unfathomably chirpy and affable vibe, invited me to stay with him whenever I came back. What a guy. Whilst I wasn’t quite as stoic as he had been after my little own blip, I had huge a sense of gratitude that I was leaving Portugal this time with my camera firmly in my bag, my bag firmly on my back, and photographs firmly backed up.