We began at the Atlantic, in charming, tatterdemalion Lisbon, a place so relaxed that nobody checked our passports, let alone asked for customs declarations. Duly hotelled beside the chopped-around Edward VII Park, we set about the tourist’s usual routine: tramping the various streets, wearing out shoe rubber, learning the directions on our pulses, from that high, wind-lashed castle on the city’s brow to the poetical café which celebrates Pessoa, he who chose to be four poets in one and had almost as many noms de plume as Stendhal. I liked the way in which, like a superego in fugue, many downtown buildings were sound at the bottom, bright with tiles, but ruinously decayed at the top.

The royal hill town of Sintra came next, saturated this time with romanticism. In this dense, foggy Dandenongs, one came across folly and grotto, Moorish battlements and bunya-bunya pine, banksias and duck pulao. Inconceivably picturesque it was, and not really the sort of thing we’d thought about at school when we were taught the cant phrase, ‘Portugal is Britain’s oldest ally’. That was presumably built on myriad hogsheads of port and madeira.

But large Spain was calling out its imperatives. And a few holiday deadlines, if that’s not an oxymoron. The next stage of journeying – if you could ignore the scattered traces of Columbus: he of the old pop song, ‘Misto, Misto Christopho Colombo’ – involved the Moorish triangle of Cordoba, Granada and Seville. Arriving exactly a day late at the lovely, fucked-up Mezquita, we achieved our pre-planned appointment neatly, having misremembered the date: creatively, I suppose. The gods were benign in this sense, as in the fact that our Conquistador Hotel window opened directly onto abstract elaborations of the Mezquita wall and gateway.

Over the snowy mountains next to Granada, which one had dreamed of in late adolescence as the locale for Lorca’s gypsy ballads, in their Hiawatha rhythms. Everything had seemed green, then, as lush as Don Quixote’s country was burnt sienna. Now, from a tall, pre-Renaissance house in the tilted Albaicín, we visitors could gaze across the gully at the Alhambra’s long spine. Nothing came back to me more strongly than that ancient ballad in which the Moorish king keeps crying, ‘Alas for my Alhambra’.

That last king, Boabdil, keeps sliding back into a traveller’s awareness. So much so that I started loudly asserting in tapas bars, ‘I barrack for the Moors’. Dab hands with fancy tiles and evergreen formal gardens, they were. In Seville, indeed, I thought more about them than about feisty Carmen or immortal Don Juan, as we stumped around the orange-bright streets or slanted light-footed across the dark-green geometry of a traditional walled garden.

Does travel encourage writing, other than the postcard-esque diary, that’s the question. So far there wasn’t much, beyond sentences like ‘How did noblemen get naming rights in these churches?’ and ‘fat black pigs grazing’. Perhaps both were reflections on the same subjects. But I did begin a ‘Sevilliana’, spoken by Donna Elvira, always a favourite character.

The painter was hungry for Madrid’s treasure of Goya and Velázquez, but a tourism conference got in the way, filling all the pubs with suits and padded shoulders, so we had to overshoot to Bilbao, ignoring a landslide election in Western Australia, as it turned out. Yes, Oz was a long way off; the only news from Melbourne was that of the world’s biggest squid, waiting to be cut up.

The trains were a joy but, changing at Madrid, we found that our seats were occupied by a Cro-Magnon couple, squat and opaque: perhaps refugees from the Altamira caves. Stonewallers, they were hard to budge, their faces denoting nothing but the slow shift of millennia. Eventually the ticket collector got it right and we wove across the mountains to Bilbao in comfort.

Top museum, the Guggenheim, perhaps a runner-up in beauty to the Taj Mahal. But it was full of minimal PoMo, the product of those amply funded boys who hate content and significance. Better to look at the gorgeous building itself and let those Yale graduates do their own vacuous thing. Rich chaps they plainly were, all with more factory hands and floor space than even Rubens enjoyed in his time; but he included lots of flesh, something they didn’t like.

Madrid, on the other hand, was all solid content, especially for the painter, who had herself a beano there. All those royal artists put us on the back foot, scouring through Habsburg and Tudor history, striving to remember whose auntie was who, and why Henry VIII’s sister didn’t want to marry dish-faced Charles V. To back us up we had the solid protestantism of Michael Frayn’s Headlong, a Bruegel thriller. There was also my considered judgment on the merits of tearful Boabdil and architecturally canny Pedro the Cruel, my two favourite crowned heads. I swayed between pathos and taste; but then, don’t we all?

Barcelona was another story again, a Mediterranean world this time. Susan Ballyn, anchor of Australian Studies in Catalonia, was our cluey, generous host. I sang for my supper, of course, dropped the Castilian lisp, and we ate at Basque and Galician restaurants, for some perverse reason. Apart from that, we kept setting out in Gaudiesque directions from the local South Yarra, and tumbling back into siesta: funny business siestaing in winter, but there you go. Or is it siesting?

Apart from my own poetry, the most Aussie thing to read, it seemed, was Gerald Murnane’s prose, so I let my university audience have a page or two of his stubborn story, ‘Stream System’. Even now I wonder what they made of it, but they surely picked up something from his micro-geographical absurdism.

But the month was up by now, and it was time for me to wing off to Singapore, where I was to judge a novel competition. Serious business that would be. And it was, but I and my fellow judges sweated it out, giving guernseys to Peter Carey’s Ned Kelly novel and Arabella Edge’s The Company.