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Europe 2022

September - October 2022
A 46-day adventure by Chris Read more
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  • TravelerEurope 2022
    Day 33

    Lisbon Letter (1)

    October 10, 2022 in Portugal ⋅ 🌧 18 °C

    No Lisbon travel story would be complete without a shot of tram 28 winding its way through the tortuous streets of the Alfama district. The photographs, however, don’t convey the shaking of building, rumbling and rattling of machinery and screech of steel wheel on rail that accompanies the passing of each one past our apartment. Two metres from our apartment. Every fifteen minutes (and often much more frequent), six-ish in the morning to after ten at night.

    Actually, despite the noise, the discovery that we were on the route for tram 28 was quite exciting, and we loved watching the trams squeeze through the narrow passageway near our place and being able to use them for some of our commuting into town. The Alfama district was a great and welcoming place to stay.

    We started our look around Lisbon on the bank of the Tagus River, staring at the vast, prosperous-looking Placa do Commercio, with King Dom Jose I in its centre and the massive triumphal arch of the Arco de Rua Augusta guarding the way inland.

    We visited the very well-presented Lisbon Story, an audio-visual telling of Lisbon’s history, especially in relation to the earthquake of 1755, which quite possibly resulted in 90,000 deaths as well as the flat, regular grid system of the downtown Baixa district, while the areas to the east and west are completely higgledy-piggledy.

    We walked up to the Miradouro de Alcantara, one of a seemingly endless number of viewpoints around the seven hills of the city, then rode downtown again on the funicular Ascensor de Gloria.

    By far the best views of the city and surrounds, however, were from Castelo de Sao Jorge (another Saint George - he seems to have utilised his dragon-killing skills in lots of places), where we also stumbled around the battlements and looked into some archaeological diggings.

    On our second day, the Lisbon Marathon took place. How they found enough relatively flat streets for it is anyone’s guess, but there was a great carnival atmosphere downtown, accompanied by cheers from the spectators and limping and groaning from the competitors.

    We also took in some culture at, among others, Mosteiro dos Jeronimos, west of town and containing the tomb of Vasco da Gama, as well as at Igreja de Sao Roque, a quite beautiful church with a museum devoted mainly to holy relics. Fortunately there were no saintly body parts on display this time.    Read more

  • TravelerEurope 2022
    Day 35

    Lisbon Letter (2)

    October 12, 2022 in Portugal ⋅ ☀️ 16 °C

    As well as having fun in Alfama, choosing badly in restaurants and eating too many custard tarts, we made a couple of day trips.

    Firstly, Evora, a couple of hours away by train, and probably most famous for the Capela dos Ossos, part of the Church of St Francis. Faced with a dearth of interior design ideas, and having 5,000 exhumed bodies on hand, the entrepreneurial Franciscan monks thought that lining the walls of the chapel would be a good use for all those hard-to-store bones.

    It was strangely aesthetic rather than gruesome, although the building trade are unlikely to offer it to would-be buyers anytime soon. Still, for DIY…

    There was also a museum displaying, among other things, a part of the monastery’s collection of over 2,000 nativity scenes, some of which were magnificent pieces of craftsmanship and others just plain weird.

    Evora also has a Roman connection, and we took a walk past the ruins of the Temple of Evora, another part of the town’s UNESCO heritage.

    We also visited Sintra, set in a lush, beautiful bunch of hills just northeast of the city.

    Joining a surging mass of tourists, we queued up for our turn in the Pena Palace, a fantastical faux fortress built in 1838, by then King Consort Ferdinand II (although it was on the site of a ruined fortress that had existed since the Middle Ages). It had spectacular views of the surrounding countryside (at least, after the fog lifted) and the clambering around the ramparts was fun, but we had to sort of flow through the interiors along with the rest of the sea of visitors and didn’t really get a chance to savour the experience.

    More interesting in some ways was the National Palace, in Sintra township itself. With heritage dating back to the Moors and additions made, mainly in the 15th and 16th centuries, by a succession of kings and queens, it was a quite fascinating look at the way the royal court lived and interacted with the rest of us.

    The National Palace also has a pair of very distinctive tall, white towers and we pondered over their use until, at the end of the tour, in the kitchen, we found out that they were the chimneys!

    Our time in Lisbon has now come to an end, almost as soon as we had mastered the metro, taken the tram and learnt the labyrinth of the local area. We are off to the Algarve tomorrow for - hopefully - some time in the sun.    Read more

  • TravelerEurope 2022
    Day 38

    Lagos Listing

    October 15, 2022 in Portugal ⋅ ☀️ 20 °C

    After the fun and vitality of Lisbon it was great to calm down for a few days on the Algarve to break up our trip.

     But first, we had to get here, via two crowded trains choc-a-bloc with confused people and suitcases that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the Queen Mary. The second, local, train was standing room only, the aisles full of bodies and backpacks.

    As for Lagos, although (since it’s a part of Europe) it does have an incredible history - most infamously as one of the first slave-trading ports - we just enjoyed the warmth and the scenery. As Dennis Denuto so succinctly put it in “The Castle”, “It’s all about the vibe”. It’s probably one of the most photogenic places we have seen.

    Lagos is on the River Bensafrim, with a vast marina full of rich persons’ playthings and a whole industry devoted to marketing and providing all sorts of water-based tours, from kayaks to yachts, caving to dolphin-spotting.

    The old town area, winding up hill from the river, is a maze of cobblestones covered in bars and restaurants, with music playing and people eating and drinking at all hours of the day and night. Just wandering around is fun.

     Just west of the mouth of the river is Praia da Batata, the first of a series of beaches, some interconnected through arches and tunnels in the sandstone cliffs, that stretches a few kilometres out to the headland at Ponta da Piedade. The scenery is stunning, with the golden sandstone cliffs and ridges, the almost-empty beaches and the clear blue of the sea making for a postcard view at every turn.

    For a few relaxing days Lagos is hard to beat, and even though we successfully avoided all history and culture (true to form, some might say), we’re still leaving with some great memories.    Read more

  • TravelerEurope 2022
    Day 40

    Tomar Testimony

    October 17, 2022 in Portugal ⋅ ⛅ 19 °C

    We caught the train about 400 kilometres north to Tomar watching the countryside change from flat and dry with lots of Cork Oaks, to greener and hillier with more intense agriculture.

    Cork growing must be the ultimate slow agriculture experience. Plant a cork tree. Wait 25 years. Get first harvest, which will not be up to scratch. Wait another 9 years for next harvest (which also may not be). Repeat.

    It is a most pleasant little town, hugging the banks of the River Nabao, with weirs regulating the water and parks for the inhabitants to enjoy themselves. Away from the river, the old town is very picturesque, although it was a little quiet when we wandered through - and stopped for a drink - on a Saturday afternoon.

    It also has the Convento de Cristo, a stone fortress towering above the town.

    Constructed from 1118 by the Knights Templar, it was controlled and improved by them (between fighting crusades and seeing off the Moors) until 1357, when the Order of Christ completed a “friendly takeover” initiated by Pope Clement I in 1312. The Order of Christ continued in occupation until the tourist industry demanded another historic site on top of a hill but with good bus parking.

    We walked up the hill, paid our 3 euros each (seniors discount; disappointingly they rarely seem to ask for proof of age) and wandered through cloister after cloister and room after room. It was an interesting few hours, and the round church was quite spectacular.

    The Festival of Iria, celebrating the virgin Saint Iria’s drowning and subsequent reappearance downriver in a marble tomb, took place the day we were in Tomar. We wandered around the crowded amusement park and market area, all set by the side of the river and full of happy, laughing Tomarites. We also made our way up the pedestrianised, cobbled main street of the old town, had a drink and thought about anywhere else we could remember going to where the shops were shut on a Sunday.    Read more

  • TravelerEurope 2022
    Day 44

    Porto Postscript

    October 21, 2022 in Portugal ⋅ 🌧 16 °C

    After 14 incredible destinations our trip is coming to an end, and while it wouldn’t be true to say we saved the best for last, Porto is pretty darned good.

    We stayed in Bolhao, about twenty minutes walk up from the bank of the Douro River via a bunch of some very picturesque (but touristic) streets.

    The famous Portuguese azulejo tiles are everywhere - inside and outside churches, on shopfronts and apartment blocks. The bathroom in our apartment was lined with recycled tiles.

    The Sao Bento railway station is a famous tile-spotter’s location, with all four walls of the classic station building lined with tiles depicting great moments in Portuguese history and the people of different regions of the country. Not sure if there are any great moments in Portuguese railway history depicted.

    But it’s the River Douro that sets Porto apart, with the land on all sides sloping steeply down to the wide river, and a series of handsome arch bridges crossing the divide high up on the slopes.

    We walked across the Ponte Luis I, designed, unsurprisingly when you see it, by a protege of Gustav Eiffel, and had brilliant views up and down the river, with Rabelo Boats laden with tourists cruising up and down, and the names of famous Port Wine Houses littering the southern bank.

    At the southern end of the bridge is Jardim do Morro, a small garden with great views that late in the afternoon was full of people lounging around listening to the buskers and waiting for the sunset.

    We also visited the Palacio da Bolsa, a stately building dedicated not to a King or a Religion but which was in fact the Chamber of Commerce (a religion in itself, some would say). The rooms were increasingly handsome and interesting, from the office occupied by the aforementioned M. Eiffel during his several-year stay in Porto all the way to the so-called Arab Room, a fantastical banquet room now available to rent for functions at between 4,000 and 15,000 euros a night.

    For a break, on a rather wet day, we took the train a few hours west to Pinhao, deep in the Douro Valley. The train journey was spectacular, with the track hugging the bank of the river for the last hour of the trip. Then we took a Rabelo Boat a further fifteen kilometres upstream to the junction of the River Tua, admiring the magnificent countryside and the river flowing quite majestically through it.

    So, that’s our trip through the Iberian Peninsula done and dusted. With highlights too numerous to mention, easy transport, friendly people and good company (thank you, Brendan) it was just marvellous!

    Oh, and COVID?

    Well, luckily we didn’t catch it. We had to wear masks on public transport in Spain, and the public were almost universally compliant with this. Otherwise, apart from some fading arrows and spots on the floor, and hand sanitiser almost everywhere, it might never have happened.    Read more

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