Home » Portugal » Escape from LAgos (12 Random Musings on Portugal and Cadiz)

1) Portugal is definetly and defiantly not Spain. Before I arrived, I too would have been hard pressed to distinguish between Portugal and its larger Iberian cousin. Portugal does however, retain an immediate and distinct atmosphere of its own, although this atmosphere is hard to define. I suppose it seems somewhat Carribean or South American to me, although having never been to the Carribean or South America I'm not exactly an authority on the matter. But it is certainly multicultural and seems much more exotic than other european countries

Escape from LAgos (12 Random Musings on Portugal and Cadiz)

James Taylor
2006-08-23 11:38:12

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come from Sevilla, this screwed up lot of people's travel plans. Some of my Canadians friends left early in the week in an attempt to bypass Sevilla and head straight for Granada. Though I was sad to see them go, I didn't envy their 6:00am bus journey.

With a half of our group departed and MTV rumoured to be showing up in the near future to cause all sorts of havoc, I was also keen to leave. Mike, another Canadian, was to join me for the initial stage of my trip into Morocco. We figured the best way to do this was to head to Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, spend a couple of nights there and then move onto Morocco. Scott, an Australian who I had also met in Lisbon, decided to travel with us down to Cadiz, but he was due to fly out of Sevilla in a few days time.

The difficulty was, that the Portugese decided to have a national holiday on our chosen day of departure. Though Lagos was starting to bore me, the immediate fallout was not too strenous; another day of sitting on the beach and drinking in expat bars. But the next morning was to prove more problematic. A whole host of fellow
hostel residents were planning to leave on the 6:00 bus to Sevilla and with the exception of Scott and I, not one of them had bought a ticket. Because it was a day after a national holiday we had expected the bus to be full and we weren't wrong. Despite a mad rush down to the bus station at 5:00 in the morning there were only two tickets available, leaving many people, including Mike, potentially stranded in Lagos. Unselfishly Dallas, another Canadian, one of the holders of those prescious two tickets, voluntered his and we were finally on our way out of Lagos.

10)Pena Palace in Sintra, seems to me, at least (although there seems to be no mention in any tourist literature), to be the closest real life embodiment of Bowzers castle in Marioland (see pic).

11) There comes a point where one just has to many languages on the ...