July 23rd: After a day of airport hell, Taylor and I rode our bikes out of the Lisboa airport. The Portuguese dusk was cool and the scent of the sea wafted in from the coast. We promptly got lost riding down the brightly lit boulevards and the sprawling rotundas. Finally, Taylor and I were in Baixa, the old and touristy neighborhood by the waterfront. We stayed the night at the Lisbon lounge hostel.
In the morning we caught the ferry across the Tejo river. Searching for the N10 highway that would take us to Setubal, we got lost, took a wrong turn, and ended up on the interstate about to cross the bridge! Once we got on the N10, though, it was fairly smooth sailing. We got into Setubal around six p.m. and after getting groceries and beer, we rode over a hill out of town to a little beach hidden in a cove. The steep, densely wooded slopes drop off suddenly into a wide beach of coarse sand. At the end of the beach rises a jagged stone promontory. There is a sea cave at the base, but we didn't explore. People raced kayaks in the water. Miguel, the bartender at the beach cafe, gave us water and the good word on sleeping on the beach. Taylor and I unwound from our ride by playing frisbee and drinking beer. After a spectacular sunset, Taylor, a few feral dogs, and I were the only ones on the beach. Around four in the morning I woke up because I felt something tugging my foot. I sat up to see a dog trying to eat my sleeping bag. In the morning there was a fine drizzle coming down. It tickled my face and woke me up. We had coffee and donuts at the beach cafe as we waited for the drizzle to let up. The ferry took us to Troia. Troia was dead; a resort town too new for tourists. There are some Roman ruins that we stopped by, but there was an archeological dig and the guard wouldn't let us by to see the ruins.
The peninsula is flat and narrow. We could see across the bay to Setubal. The sandy pine forest lines the road and gives way to dunes. Trails break off from the highway, leading to the beach. Back on the mainland, the landscape returns to rice paddies and corn fields between the ubiquitous pine forests. We stopped for a great lunch in Carvalhal. I called my mom from a pay phone to wish her happy birthday. After eating we pushed on towards our goal for the day: the camping at Praia de Galé. It is at the end of a bumpy gravel road that goes up and down and up and down. We thumbed a ride from a fellow in a truck named Jão. Taylor was really into the camping; it was his first. The shore there has endless sandstone cliffs carved into weird shapes by the wind. The water is freezing cold and the sea bed dropped off suddenly. Sitting, drinking liters of beer, Taylor and I met a Madrileño named Gonzalo who was avoiding his girlfriend. They'd had a fight. The three of us smoked porros and played more frisbee. A little boy and his father joined in. The father would throw the frisbee like a discus and send it soaring tremendous distances down the beach.

That night we got pretty drunk listening to a Fado singer at the bar in the camping and eyeballing the passing girls. Taylor wanted to stay for Saturday night, but I talked him into moving on. After riding out the super-bumpy dirt road, we hit the N261 and took that through the rolling hills, marsh, and pine forest. We took a break in an old cemetery on side of a hill on the outskirts of Villa Nova do Santo André. From that hillside you can see the valley below and the road winding through the hills. A short distance down a little dirt road, hardly more than a path, there are the bare stone ruins of an old church. An olive tree gives shade to a couple of benches, and a fountain burbles away nearby. The walls of the cemetery, as well as many crypts, are all white washed and blinding in the afternoon sun. A bougainvillea was in full bloom in the corner next to the utility shed. The branches waved gently in the breeze.

In Sines we stopped at a grocery store. I asked a shirtless young man with large knife scars across his throat if there were any parties going on that night. He told us about the international music festival at the Castelo do Vasco De Gama near a beach by the same name. He wrote down directions on our map and Taylor and I got there in a few minutes. An ancient moorish castle (the Castelo) on the top of the hill looked down on the half-moon bay. A stage was set up on the wide boulevard that followed the shore. Shops hawking food, clothes, incense, silver, cloth and all kinds of hippy goods lined the boulevard on both sides. There was excitement in the air: it was the last day of the week-long festival.
The music hadn't yet started, so Taylor took a nap on the beach. I watched some boys jump off a dock into the bay for a while but then I got bored so I walked around, getting trinkets for girls back home. I picked up some "chocolate" and some space cake for Taylor and myself. We smoked a porro, drank some wine, and settled in for the concert: The Dizu Plaatjies' Ibuyambo Ensemble, from South Africa, Koby Israelite, an amazing psychedelic accordion player from Israel, Rokia Traore, who is from Mali but sings in French as well. There were three more performances as well, but by this point it was two in the morning and we had to ride in the morning. We hunkered down on the beach in our sleeping bags and woke up with the sun.
Our destination for the day was Villa Nova do Mil Fontainhas, about forty kilometers away. The road is flat along the beach, with occasional rolling hills. The beaches are beautiful, with amazing cliffs and rock formations. We passed many small resort towns and farm villages. There isn't much development there.
The ride was fairly uneventful and easy going. When we got to Mil Fontainhas we felt like more so we made it down to Cabo Sardão. The village is tiny and untouched by tourists. It is surrounded by fields. The population, all of five hundred people, is almost completely middle-aged. We got food for the night from a little grocery. The flirtatious, bespectacled old woman who served us made me promise to return the beer bottles. Just outside of town there is a lighthouse in the dunes that sit above the cliffs. The cliffs are tremendous, dropping off a hundred meters or more to the raging sea below. They were the most impressive and beautiful cliffs I've seen since Big Sur. Much of the stone is dark and dense but on the top of the cliffs there is a lot of sandstone. Veins of granite run through the sandstone and so the softer sandstone weathers away into complex and spidery shapes. Taylor and I decided to camp there for the night, but just as the sun set, ridiculous clouds of mosquitoes swarmed out of the rice paddies around town hell bent on sucking every drop of blood out of our bodies. There were so many mosquitoes they would darken the sky. All thought of camping there was quickly discarded and we beat a hasty 8 kilometer retreat to the hostel in Almograve. The mosquitoes chased us most of the way. The state-run youth hostel felt like a prison. It was ugly and awful but there were no buzzing vampiric insects and it was cheap. We slept until 10 A.M. The breakfast there was abysmal, even by hostel standards. The coffee was undrinkable. After checking out we got a real breakfast in Cabo Sardão. I returned one beer bottle to the old lady at the grocery. I'd smashed the other bottle the night before by throwing it off the massive cliff in a moment of recklessness, remembering my promise to the old lady the instant the bottle left my hand. The flat farmland quickly gave way to rolling hills, foothills, and then mountain passes near Maria Vinagre. Our goal for the day was Aljezur. Ten kilometers north of Aljezur, as we were chugging up a long, large slope, two blondes in a microbus sputtered past us "You going to make it?" one of them called to us in English. A moment later the van went "ker-plunk" and the blondes had to pull over hastily.
"You think they need a hand?" asked Taylor. I knew what he was getting at.
"It's time for a smoke, anyhow," I said. "Y'all need a hand?"
"She just needs to cool down, hey," said the one riding shotgun. The blondes are named Saskia and Aleisha. They'd sold all their possessions, left their native Australia, and bought the van in the U.K. the year before. They had been wandering Europe ever since, living in campings and car parks. I bummed a cig and rolled a porro.
"We'll have to meet up at the camping in Lagos, hey," said Aleisha.
"We were thinking about going to Sagres," I said.
"But who knows," Taylor was quick to interject.
We traded road stories and exchanged e-mails as they waited for the van to recover. Smoke break over, Taylor and I set off again. The girls shortly drove past us, smiling and waving as the van grumbled off into the distance.
"We have to follow them," Taylor stated with utmost conviction as we spun up the hill.
"Man, we don't even know what camping they're going to..."
"Are you telling me you're going to let them get away like that?"
"Lagos is another thirty kilometers away!"
"They WANTED us to come, man."
"Well...let's have lunch and think about it."
Lunch turned out to be fantastic. There was this tiny little German restaurant just on the other side of the bridge in Aljezur, on the Praceta de Kürnach. Taylor and I feasted on Bifandas (Portuguese pork chop sandwiches), Currywurst, half a liter of Erdinger Weißbier apiece, and huge coffee and ice cream floats for dessert. Looking at the map and feeling properly fortified after the meal, I pointed to Lagos and said, "I bet they're going to this camping because it's the one on the map."
We didn't stop riding until we hit the Gulf. We cracked 300 kilometers as we rolled up to the lighthouse at Ponta da Piedade. It had been five days since we left Lisboa.
We found the camping without much trouble. After a shower and a shave, we dropped in on the Aussies. They were surprised and happy to see us. Taylor and I were served gin and tonics and invited out for the night.
Lagos is crawling with Australian tourists. Most of the bars there seemed to be run by Australian ex-pats for Australian ex-pats.
The beaches are beautiful, with many small beaches and some large beaches scattered and hidden among the sandstone cliffs of the coast. I spent the day exploring and sunning myself. I had made reservations for four at a Thai restaurant for that evening and so invited Saskia and Aleisha out. After dinner we went to a manky bar and played a really bad game of pool. The girls were quite flattered and invited us to breakfast the next morning, but their stove went kaput. It's the thought that counts, right? I ran errands and picked up bus tickets back to Lisboa. Taylor and I had to meet Daniel Vogel-Essex there August 1st. Our last night in Lagos, Taylor and I went to a terrible, empty, and consequently quite enjoyably tranquil hotel bar called "One Fat Monkey." After a several drinks (starting with tequila) we went for a stroll and talked about the old days. On a whim we ducked into a trendy bar blaring dance music and crammed full of people. I took a perverse joy in cock-blocking a disgusting old Italian man trying to pick up fat English girls who must have been no older than nineteen. When the English birds blew the bar, my cock-block successful, the Italian then turned his amorous intentions to me:
"What do you want?" He asked.
"A beer."
He passed me a beer from the bartender and then said: "But really, what do you want?" and gave me the eye.
"A beer." I laughed in his face and he got really upset. He spun around and immediately started in on a group of kids sitting behind us. I guzzled the beer and Taylor and I ran out of there.
The next day we just loafed about, waiting for our bus to come. As we were sitting by the water front across the street from city hall, about to smoke our last porro, a fight broke out next to us. There is a row of small stands along the sidewalk of the avenue where local skippers hawk boat tours of the coast. One such skipper was being visited by his girlfriend. They were having some sort of discussion. My Portuguese is pretty non-existant, but I believe the couple was suffering fidelity issues. As the skipper sat on a bench, head in hands, his girlfriend looked down on him in silence. Her cellphone was clutched in one hand.
The skipper from the neighboring stand, shirtless and muscular, swaggered over to the distraught tour boat operator, seated still with his head in his hands. The shirtless skipper said some untoward remarks, concerning, I believe, some indiscretions of the sad skippers' girlfriend. The sad skipper immediately leapt up, now outraged that such accusations could be leveled against his woman.
"I will kill you! Don't think I won't!" he cried in Portuguese, striking a pose of fisticuffs.
"Yeah? Yeah? Bring it on!" responded the shirtless skipper. He took off his walkman and watch and set them near his stand.
The accusations and insults continued to fly. Punches were thrown (and ducked). Vulgarities flowed freely. The sad skipper let loose a series of impressive flying kicks. An old man passing by on a bicycle nearly became a casualty but managed to escape. Finally, the sad skipper grabbed up a long metal pole, used to support the parasol of the stand.
"I'LL KILL YOU!" he screamed and charged the shirtless aggressor, who promptly turned tail and ran. They ran all the way down the avenue, around stands, terrifying tourists, some of whom attempted unsuccessfully to quell the violence. About ten minutes later the police showed up. Of course there was no longer any fight to break up, so the police had to settle for giving everyone a good scolding.
The police left and Taylor and I finally got to smoke. Just as we finished, our bus pulled alongside the curb. Taylor slept most of the way. I managed my notes. It was late when pulled into Estação Do Oriente. The ride along the silent and dark docks of the Tejo shore was smooth and uneventful all the way to the Lisbon Lounge. We didn't even get lost!
In the morning after breakfast Taylor and I rode down Avenida 24 de Julio along the Tejo river front all the way to Torre de Belem (The Tower of Bethlehem). We showed up early but Dan was already there, waiting for us. The three of us, happily united, rolled through Lisboa. We stopped at a cafe for some awful food. Dan told me about his life in Berlin and about his recent stroke, which left him with a blind spot in his right eye. He hadn't slept in two days, so we snuck him into the hostel and let him take a nap in my bunk. Dan had forgotten to book lodging in Lisboa. He claimed he had been occupied with girl drama. As he dozed, I found a hostel for him: Traveler's. Traveler's is on 113 Correiros, in Baixa. The entrance to the hostel is in the back of a tiny little flag shop.
Dan woke up in the evening. Taylor and I were getting restless and wanted to go out. We had struck up conversation with a few girls staying there at the hostel and we invited them out to Barrio Alto. There was another pair of Aussie girls, traveling with an Irish woman. One of the Aussies immediately took a shine to Dan (or Dan's muscles). Taylor's boyish good looks and suspenders won him the attention of the Irish woman. I was left with the other Aussie girl, Karen, 25, Choir mistress for various churches. She spent most of the time talking about her boyfriend and the big diamond ring he'd gotten her but hadn't given her yet. A tribe of Germans accompanied us. After hours of bar-hopping and shameless groping, The Irish woman, age 32, drug Taylor back to the hostel for sex in the bathroom. Needless to say, he was rather tired come morning.
The three of us set off rather late. It was a miserable 60 kilometers getting out of Lisboa: confusing roads, humongous hills, stiff headwinds, and blazing heat reflected off of the burning asphalt. The headwinds were a good ten kilometers an hour. The considerable resistance made even downhill sections tiring and strenuous. The only consolations were cooling effects of the wind and the stupendous views of mountain valleys full of green fields and far-off red-tile roofed villages. It was long dark by the time we arrived in Ericeira, our destination for the day. All three of us were exhausted. We made a hasty camp on a local beach, ate some cream cheese and salmon sandwiches, and fell asleep. The beach was long, low, and wide. Massive boulders jutted out from sand and water alike, and the waves crashed noisily upon them. We had laid our sleeping bags a good seventy feet from the water, but around four in the morning the sound of waves woke me. I sat up to see Dan already sitting up, and the surf a mere five feet away.
"We're going to have to move, man."
"Yup."
Gathering up our things, we moved to a more secure portion of the beach, where the tide obviously did not reach, and slept soundly throughout the remainder of the night.
I woke up a couple of hours before the others. I pulled myself out of my sleeping bag and stretched groggily, only to notice we were right next to the lifeguard post, whereupon a sign was hung stating that all camping was forbidden. I decided to get coffee, and walked to the cafe across the boulevard. As I sipped my coffee and ate a pastry, I noticed the lifeguard leaning against the railing. His back was turned, but he had a half-empty glass of vermouth and was smoking Marlboro lights. He never said anything to us.
Dan and Taylor woke up. We broke camp and rolled out, aiming for Peniche. The headwinds never let up. In fact, they got stronger. We stopped for lunch in Silveiro. The festival for the town saint was going on and a marching band was there in front of the church to welcome us. For lunch we had the best rotisserie chicken I have ever had the fortune to taste. The rest of the ride to Peniche was painful and uneventful, excepting a moment when Dan lost the will to live and collapsed in a cornfield to watch the sunset.
We arrived in Peniche around dusk. For dinner we ate at a little bar in the dunes. I had a burger topped with cheese and pineapple. Delicious! We had a conference over our meal, reaching a consensus: To hell with the headwinds, we should be riding south. A bus to Porto was in order for tomorrow. The three of us wandered into the dunes to bed down for the night.
The Peniche bus station was impressively run-down. It brought back memories of Chihuahua, Mexico. To kill time before our bus left, the three of us poked around a traveling market and carnival in the field next to the bus station. I bought a pair of mirrored aviators from an Indian fellow.
"Betel?" I asked him, as he packed something into his gums.
"No, tobacco. With this, it is very good," he replied as he took a little vial and tapped out some cocaine onto the tobacco. He rolled it between his palms, stuffed it into his cheek, and gave me a smile. His little girl watched me shyly from behind the table.
We got to Porto around ten-thirty P.M. We ate for the first time since the morning in a little cafe across the plaza from the bus station. The plaza is called Batalha. After we ordered I thought it would be a good idea to call the hostel. The person I spoke with at the hostel told me that we had to check in by eleven-thirty! That only gave us thirty minutes for our food to arrive, for us to eat, and for us to ride across town. When the food finally came, we boxed it, paid, and ran. I was in the lead and going too fast through the steep, cobble-stone alleys. When I arrived at the first big road, Rua Clerigos, I stopped and looked behind me. Taylor soon rolled up, but Dan was nowhere to be found! Taylor and I rode back the way we came calling out "Dan!" We waited at the plaza, ducked down side streets he could have turned down, but nothing. I realized that Dan didn't know the name of the hostel, or the name of the street it was on. All he knew was that it was on the West side of town. I began to worry a little bit, especially as I felt it was my fault. Dan didn't even speak a word of Portuguese.
Taylor and I decided to head to the hostel. The ride turned out to be flat, fast, and smooth, alongside the river Douro. We passed beneath the beautiful bridges, one built by Alec Eiffel, that link the two bluffs along side the river. The Cais de Gaia shown illuminated on the Southern bank. I was too concerned about Dan to appreciate the scenery. What if he'd had a break down? What if he'd gotten hit? What if...? After some confusion, Taylor and I finally arrived at the hostel. It was not easy to find, and as we parked our bikes and headed for the front door I felt a sinking certainty that Dan would never be able to find it on his own.
"What took you guys so long?" said Dan, tossing down a magazine as Taylor and I walked into the reception. "I already ate and everything."
"You son of a bitch!" I gave him a hug and told him "I'm never worrying about you again."
The hostel was another abysmal state-run youth hostel, like the one in Almograve. The two night men were a ridiculously over-built, tattooed, and buzz cut troglodyte and a small-statured, pudgy, balding middle-aged man. They only gave us one key for the room. It smelled like a gym, or maybe a really run down dorm. Sixteen year olds tittered in the hall way, trying to get drunk inconspicuously.
In the room, as we disrobed for bed, we noticed our backs were very sunburned. Dan had a hilarious tan line from his muscle shirt. Taylor was a bit uneven due to his partial application of sunscreen. I was peeling. Dan suggested we take a group photo to compare our burns. We lined up in the hall under the light for the picture, hamming it up and cracking wise as to the penal nature of our hostel.
"Be careful, man, you're probably not allowed to have fun in here," I said as we returned to the room. No sooner had the words left my mouth than Mr. Muscles throws open the door and says in his best Schwarzenegger voice, "No laughing. Next time, you sleep outside," and clomped away in his combat boots. We just about died laughing.
On a cafe terrace the next morning, having breakfast, the three of us saw a young fellow on a mountain bike loaded down with gear stop in front of the cafe. We called him over and offered him a coffee. His name was David. He was a graphic designer from Paris. In the last few weeks he had ridden along the Northern coast of Spain to Santiago de Compostela, and had just caught the train to Porto. He was headed South for an electronica festival called "Boom" just outside of Castelo Branco. The four of us soon decided to join up for the trip south. We spent the rest of the day riding around the city trying to find lodging for David and a laundromat for ourselves. We eventually accomplished both. The hostel was near Praça Brasil and the laundromat was at the same plaza. We ate fruit and drank beer in the park in the plaza, beneath the tremendous column. Dan sang "The Ballad Of Sadie Brown" and I sang "Sixteen Tons" for David.
That evening, we went to a restaurant by Praça Ribeira to eat fish. We sat on the dock, looking at the bridges and watching the countless fish swirl in the water of the river. Later, at a hookah bar, we met some older Spanish ladies from Barcelona. They were very flirtatious and smoked us out.
The next day, after a brief, exciting ride down the bluffs to the riverside, we rode slowly and took lots of breaks. The shore was nice, the terrain fairly flat, and the wind was to our backs. I had taped a small transistor radio to my handlebars and blasted eighties pop. It reminded me of Rike back in Madrid.
Dan and David both took quick dips in the chilly ocean. Dan was wearing his ridiculous speedo shorts. Taylor and I played frisbee in the meantime. I will never forget, as we left the beach, David rolling, lighting, and smoking a cigarette as he pedaled along on his bicycle. How French is that? After a sixteen kilometer sprint through a pine forest, we arrived at the camping in Furadouro. We spent the evening chatting with our Helvitic neighbors, first, about the obligatory conversation about gun culture. Then Dan told a story of a girl he knew with split personality disorder, prompting a discussion of how people share reality. People were still talking when I fell asleep.
The next morning we headed down the coast along the peninsula formed by the Ovar canal. The ride was smooth and tranquil, through field and forest. Fishermen hauled their boats up onto shore and offloaded their catch. Farmers drove past in grumbling tractors.
The map didn't state whether there was a ferry to Aveiro, our destination, from the end of the peninsula. When we came to our last chance to cross to the mainland, David had to decide which way to go. He was on a schedule to get to the festival on time. Dan, Taylor, and I had no such concerns.
"So David, what are we going to do?"
"Hmm...I do not know." David paused for a moment. His face was suddenly lit with inspiration. "Ah! One moment!" He dug feverishly in his pack, and hauled out a deck of cards. "We will ask ze tarot!" The four of us hunkered down out our haunches in a circle and David threw a card. It was staff. "AH! We take the unknown way!" And so we pressed on down the peninsula. Of course, there was a ferry.
Aveiro was a small college town, and like most small college towns, dead for the summer. It seemed like a good place to kill our trip. We had ridden 551.4 kilometers, not counting jaunts in towns. We bid David farewell, as he had to catch a train to Coimbra and then ride across the mountains to Castelo Branco. Waiting for the train, Dan, David, and I climbed the ten-meter steel pillars in front of the station entrance. After finding a no-star hotel run by a sweet old lady, Dan turned in early. Taylor and I would have no such behavior and went out to a bar. There we met a couple of Spanish women from Asturias. Their names are Vanesa and Maria Jose. They bought us drinks, made us unbutton our shirts, and danced us dizzy. Vanesa kept dancing closer and closer to me and gave me a rather warm kiss goodnight.
I was hung over beyond belief the next day. Dan and Taylor made a foray to the beach. I just lay in bed and groaned. I felt better by the evening though, and as Vanesa's number was scrawled across my arm, I called her up. Taylor, Dan, and I had a much more tranquil night out with the Spanish ladies, though the night ended rather abruptly when Vanesa and Maria Jose got into a tiff and huffed off in opposite directions.
The next day we caught the train to Lisboa. There were planes to catch.