Welcome back!
We ended up staying at our 'Flu with a View" apartment for eight days. The first six were spent locked up inside with Netflix. Strangely, even though I got covid five days before John did, we both tested negative on the same day. I had had it for about ten days.
It wasn't until we had been in the apartment for five days that I realised the building had a dampness problem. I really dislike the stink of damp houses and I had lived in one for five days before I could smell it!
It was great to finally venture out. Two half-dazed Aussies out enjoying the Portuguese sunshine.
The walks around here were amazing! There were views everywhere we looked.
Wildflowers grew along the clifftops.
We found a stunning secluded beach just over the headland from the main town beach.
There were great views back over the town too.
Our home for eight days. Ours is the apartment on the corner. We came to the conclusion that there must be some sort of building code where the houses have to be built in a certain style in this town because the chimneys were fake!
The view from just opposite our place.
We kept comparing Portugal to Greece as there are lots of similarities. One of the big differences though is that there are plenty of birds here. I loved watching the large gulls soaring along the cliffs. They were good at spotting fisherman fishing from the cliffs and they would fly in loops above them looking for leftovers. Swallows built their mud nests under the eaves of houses everywhere. There were so many of them!
My favourite place to eat was a tiny Indian place with a lovely guy working there. We found it when I lost my sense of taste and was desperate for spicy curries. Every meal I ate here was sensational and I could drink their banana lassis every day.
On our last night we went to a good restaurant (it had white tablecloths!). It was famous for its seafood and John had a blast tasting unusual things like these "barnacles". These are collected by hand from rugged rocks around the waterline. It's quite a risky job apparently as it can only done when the sea is calm enough to not crash the person onto the rocks.
Once again, the town was full of Indians and Nepalese. One day we were at the post office, trying to get a postal problem sorted, and an Indian guy came in. He spoke to the lovely postal lady in English and a local customer nearby told the Indian guy to speak in Portuguese. I'm guessing that it's not all smooth sailing with the integration of people from the sub-continent into Portuguese communities.
We've already decided that there's so much to see in this area and so much that we've missed that we'll have to come back again one day.
As much as we loved the area, it was a relief to finally leave. We caught a taxi to our last destination on our walk-which-is-no-longer-a-walk, a town called Sagres. This was supposed to be the end of our long walk and we had booked three days here for some R&R. Our apartment was sensational but it wasn't very central. We were stuck out in the 'burbs a bit. Luckily we had pre-hired some bikes so we were able to get around and see a few things.
Sagres is located near the most south-westerly point of Europe. This was the last Portuguese land that the likes of Magellan and Vasco de Gama saw as they sailed off into the unknown in the 1400's to discover the world (and to discover that the world was round). Considering its historical significance, we were a bit disappointed in the town. Apart from a few forts there was little of historical note to see.
The coast line was amazing though. Those rugged cliffs tumbled dramatically to the brilliant turquoise sea. There was some sort of military communications dish in the background.
In places there were huge vertical tunnels formed by erosion. From a distance there's nothing to indicate they're there. Sometimes we were just walking along and suddenly there were massive holes in the ground that disappeared into darkness. Sometimes we could hear the sea moving at the bottom.
We ate a couple of times at a local restaurant. One night I watched as a local family with a girl about 3 or 4 years old ordered the same barnacles that John had in the previous town. They gave one to the girl. She tasted it, nodded and patted her stomach in appreciation of the delicious treat. As a non-seafood lover I found this amazing!
We rode the bikes 6kms out to one of the most south-westerly points (there seem to be two peninsulas that are candidates for the title, but this is the main one!). We were shocked at the number of tour buses and tourist stalls there. We took some photos of the fort and lighthouse on the peninsula but didn't want to join the hordes inside the fort. It was a really picturesque place with more of that stunning, rugged coastline.
This was the most exercise I had done for a while and it was hard work as we had a head wind going out. Luckily we whizzed back with the wind behind us.
I hit a bit of a low point in Sagres. I was fed up with not feeling well, the last couple of towns hadn't excited me and I didn't have a lot to do. Luckily, one day I woke up feeling so much better. At last I was feeling normal again!
We headed out on the bikes to explore the port the next day. It was large but there was nothing fancy about it. It was a genuine working fishing port. In the town itself we found this old phone box that had been converted to a home for a book-swap. Cool!
The chimneys here have a distinctive style. We wonder if they're designed to keep the never-ending wind out!
We explored the other "most south-western point of Europe". The fort here was unattractive. It was rendered in concrete-coloured render and buildings from the 60's or 70's were scattered inside. The best thing was the long walk around the headland, complete with more of those amazing vertical tunnels. What appeared to be wild garlic grew everywhere.
Seeing we had the bikes, we hunted down somewhere to eat in the centre of town on our last night. It was much more interesting here. The town is a big surfie destination. I've never seen so many campervans with surfboards on the rooves. Cool dudes with dreadlocks and wearing pants so low that their jocks were on display greeted each other coolly in the street.
We found a great place with wonderful tapas and enjoyed a fun couple of hours here eating, drinking and watching the locals. There seem to be very few Indians and Nepalis here. Instead, there are many people of African descent. There was an influx of African immigrants in the late 20th century. These people are very much part of the community. They appear to have integrated well.
In a shop we saw a sign advertising a barnacle festival in the next town. It would begin that night with an Abba tribute band! I immediately began working out how we could get to the next town and back. Then I saw the starting time - 10pm. Portugal is much like Spain in that everything runs late. This was way too late for us, especially as we had to catch a bus early the next morning. What a shame!
The next morning, on a bus so new it still smelled of chemicals, we took 4.5 hours to get to Lisbon. We must have passed tens of thousands of pine-nut trees along the way. It's a bit strange that there are so few pine-nuts in the food here. Maybe they export them all!
We returned to our wonderful small apartment hotel in Lisbon. Our usual receptionist wasn't there - she was sick, possibly with covid. Maybe we didn't get it from Courtney after all! I realised somewhere along the line that if I had to have covid on the trip, it might as well be while I had my sprained ankle because that seemed to take forever to heal.
We were just in time for a long weekend of festivities so we had a great night's sleep on the comfortable bed and got ready to hit the streets of Lisbon.
See you soon,
Heather and John
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