Day 2 lisbon (garden and belem pic)

I still had a bunch of spots to visit that were a little too far away for me to get to yesterday so today I woke up nice and early, had some hostel croissants for breakfast, and then caught a bus to go check em out. The first place I went to was the palace fronteira, its a palace that a family still lives in but they let people come and have a look around. I only went to see the garden and it was fantastic! It was so lush and green and it also had a fantastic pond with a big tile gazebo behind it that was really cool. I was quite confused to see they had a black Swan in the pond and was thinking maybe someone had stolen it from Australia but then learned that apparently the government gives them away as diplomatic gifts to people, so there you go... It had clipped wings and nowhere to go otherwise I genuinely would've tried to set it free. After that, I took another bus to a suburb called belem because it has a nice foreshore with a few landmarks I wanted to check out. In belem I saw a castle with a guy out the front playing Taylor swift songs on his violin, a big stone monument that had a bunch of carvings of people working that reminded me a bit of the statue at the ministry of magic with the muggles, and a really big palace. It was just after noon and I was roaming around the belem foreshore when I saw a bus that had "sintra" written on the top as its destination. I was surprised by this because I'd assumed sintra was too far for me to visit on this trip but when I actually checked it was only an hour train away!! I quickly rushed to the train station and went to visit. The scenery on the way to sintra reminded me a bit of Carnarvon or Bali but not quite as tropical, there were pervasive looking vines and lush green bushes everywhere and lots of hills. There were a few things i wanted to see in sintra but I didn't have long and they all cost like 20 euros to enter so I prioritised a place called Quinta da regaleira. Quinta made the whole trip so worth it and is definitely one of the highlights of lisbon for me. Its an awesome Asian style palace surrounded by an amazing tropical park that features lakes, grottoes, wells, benches and fountains. The main attraction in the garden was the initiation well, its a dripping wet, moss covered spiral staircase that goes underground to a cave that you can walk through, it was so sick. My 2nd priority was the pena palace. I didn't realise this until I'd already gone too far to turn back but the pena palace is at the top of the biggest hill in the area so I ended up trekking it up 2kms of super steep stairs. Some evil person decided to put the entrance gate to pena 3/4s of the way up the hill, not at the bottom or at the actual palace entrance. I was planning on just checking out the palace from the front and not paying so i guess they put the gate there to get people to commit to the walk up and then be in way to deep to pull out by the time they have to pay. Long story short I did that huge walk for a pretty bad view of the palace and then just turned around went home ahaha. On the bright side I did get to see it and the walk up the hill had some great views, it would've been so awesome if I hadn't already walked like 10kms that day.
It's been a brilliant second day in portugal, I'm going to get another early night hopefully and wake up at 3am for my flight :))Read more