Pretogues and Portunhol

I remember vividly the day my father came home from work in 1959, gathered the family and asked "Who wants to go to Angola?" We all jumped up and down and said "Yes!!! Where is Angola?"
So a few days later he bought a small blackboard and started teaching us a few basic Portuguese words - not that he could speak Portuguese, but he had learnt Italian at school and had a knack for languages, something my sister and I inherited (possibly helped by the fact my mother was Danish, though we never did learn to speak that). So at least we could say "Please" and "Thank you" before we set sail.
Early in 1960 we left a cold and snowy England on a boat from Tilbury headed for Luanda, Angola. I am not going to cover that adventure here - the days of seasickness crossing the Bay of Biscay are best forgotten anyway - because this post is about foreign languages. Our few words were not adequate at all, but my sister and I were enrolled at the local "English School of Luanda" where we had some lessons in Portuguese, but I seem to recall the ones about metric measures rather than anything about grammar and syntax, if we indeed had those!
There was a good expatriate community so we spoke English exclusively amongst our friends (Americans, South Africans, British), but I used to play with my next-door neighbour's children, a Portuguese family, so my linguistic skills improved, and I became pretty fluent, and even picked up some of the accent.
We were in Angola for three years before we returned to Africa, this time to Mozambique (another Portuguese territory) and started speaking Portuguese again. The same situation existed there, a very large expatriate community so most social conversation was in English, and, indeed, some of my peers lived there longer but had little interest in the local language. We were schooled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) so spent 9 months of the year away at boarding school, but when we were back in Mozambique I used to spend almost as much time with Portuguese friends as English-speaking ones, and my vocabulary came on in leaps and bounds, though my grammar didn't.
As I was not having formal lessons I knew nothing about correct verb tenses, proper sentence structure (though, fortunately, Portuguese has a similar sentence order to English!), syntax, and so on, but was becoming very fluent - though my friends teased me that I was speaking "Pretogues", not "Portugues", that is the Portuguese that was spoken by the indigenous population (the blacks, or "pretos"), who had no formal education and to who Portuguese was a second language (after their tribal dialect).
My command of Portuguese was now so good I was on more than one occasion mistaken for being Portuguese, despite my grammatical shortcomings! In 1975 (shortly before Independence), however, I left Mozambique for South Africa, and never returned, and my use of Portuguese diminished and dwindled, though I did have a few Portuguese-speaking friends in South Africa, until 1978 when I returned to the UK and stopped speaking it at all.
Fast forward to 2009 and my first visit to Brazil - 31 years after last speaking Portuguese - and it all started flooding back, much to the amazement of my nephew, who lived there, but had no idea of my language skills! What was amusing was that every time I spoke people commented on my command of the language, but then added "But it is Portuguese from Portugal!" - there are far more differences between Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese than I ever imagined, and, 5 years later, I am still trying to get to grips with them all.

Now we come to Spanish. Because I do not have permanence in Brazil I needed to find a second home for the remaining 6 months of the year, and my research led me to believe that Peru might be a sound choice, except for the fact that I spoke no Spanish. Brazil is surrounded by Spanish speaking countries, and, in fact, apart from French Guiana (French), Suriname (Dutch) and British Guyana (English) all the other South American nations speak Spanish. There is fairly easy migration between the South American (Mercosul) countries, and there is a lot of Spanish spoken in the bigger cities (in fact my nephew always has a couple of native Spanish speakers working for him - he speaks Spanish as he spent a fair amount of time in Spain), and I found that my Portuguese helped me a lot in my understanding of Spanish, but realised I needed some help with my oral skills.
I decided to take some lessons in spoken Spanish, but found it far harder to pick up that Portuguese (or French back in my school-days), possibly because there are so many similarities in the vocabulary with Portuguese, but sentence structure is slightly different, and the pronunciation of letters and combinations of letters is vastly different. But armed with my basic skills I headed for Peru in 2012 on my reconnaissance visit, and found that I managed adequately, apart from one hotel where the only staff member could not, or would not, understand me - everyone else seemed to cope with my mixture of  Portuguese and Spanish (Espanhol) - Portunhol!
I am soon heading back to Peru for my third 6-month stay, and, though my Spanish is by no means great, I am confident that I can get by, and last year toured 5500 miles (almost 9000 kms) alone by motorbike without any problems. In some of the remoter areas there were no English (or Portuguese!) speakers so I had to manage, and even dealings with the Police at roadside checks (who were mostly amazed at this lone Gringo on a motorbike!) went without incident.
Although my Portuguese and Spanish are not that grammatically correct, I am pretty sure that I am fluent in Pretogues and Portunhol!