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After my adventures in El Chorro I retired to Malaga for a day and then headed west across Spain to the Portuguese border.

Portugal Feb ' 99

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 11:59:56

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In February however it is relatively deserted, accommodation is cheap and all over the area the almond trees are in bloom in a carpet of cream flowers.

I spent another day trawling around Lagos and then caught one of the very infrequent trains north to Lisbon. The train was slow, nor particularly well appointed and seemed to stop every fifteen minutes to let donkey pass. I made it some two hundred kilometres out of Lagos before a kindly railway official shooed me out of his train with the explanation that I would have to change trains and, regrettably, the next train would not be for four hours.

I wandered around the one-horse, rail-stop town and eventually found my way into the village square and sat reading my book and waiting for the train while I ate lunch. A grizzled old man came to the square unhitched his donkey and watered it at the village fountain. While he sat sipping coffee two be-leathered local kids, maybe his sons, roared up on sparkling new Yamaha's to join him for an afternoon cuppa.

Later that afternoon I re-boarded my train and said goodbye to the little nameless village and continued my trip into Lisbon. I arrived late at night in Lisbon and caught the last ferry across the river to find some lodgings. I eventually found some which were not too disastrous near the train station and settled in for the night.

My one exciting side trip from Lisbon was to nearby Sintra. Sintra is a little town on the coast west of Lisbon that has been a favourite of Portuguese royalty for centuries. There are a couple of palaces here to see but for my money the best is (again) a Moorish castle. A 3km uphill trudge from Sintra takes you up into the hills where the Portuguese royal palace and the Moorish castle sit. I had intended to do both but in the end had only time to visit the castle.

The castle has spectacular views in all directions and like all good castles is quite spooky. While wandering the broken walls and thick forest that has grown up in the centre I bumped into Allen, a hippy from Glasgow. We sat and talked for a while about how the Moors seemed to be a particular switched on race or, as Allen put it "right into their space". After a while Allen and his attendant sheepdog wandered off and I sat in the sun for a while and contemplated what the Moors had wrought.

That night I went in search of something special for dinner. My experiences with piri-piri aside I was most impressed with food in Portugal. Grilled food especially is excellent and in plentiful supply. The other night I went to a little restaurant near my hotel in Lisbon and on a whim ordered barbecued rabbit. I hadn't actually expected to get a whole rabbit but that's pretty much what arrived at the table. Well, nearly a whole rabbit, they did cut it in half and remove all the nasty bits but basically I got all the edible bits of a bunny for about $11Aus.

The rest of my time in Lisbon was spend idling around town, frequenting the multitude of bookshops that abound and politely refusing to buy drugs from the equally plentiful but very polite dealers.

After three months on the road, my enthusiasm for spectacular and historical sites was waning a little and I could feel my first European adventure coming to a close.

I did pick rather a scenic route back to London though. Lisbon to Paris via Madrid and Chamonix. Well, you can't let it go to waste can you ?

My travels