Lisbon to near Sao Teotonio

that winter was over. We mailed home all of our winter clothes -- ski gloves, fleece jackets, wool socks (and our only Lisbon souvenir, a piece of basalt from the sidewalk). We used the new space in our panniers to hold our boots and we rode in our Tevas. I felt more relaxed than ever.

We took a ferry across the Tejo river, which is really a bay, in front of Lisbon. This was a great way to escape the city without going through much of an urban ring.

We had a steep climb up to a castle in Palmela where we had great views in every direction. We could see clear back to Lisbon, about 30 kilometers away. The narrow old street up to the castle was extremely steep. Our tires squeaked like tennis shoes on a basketball court on the polished paving stones.

While I was pressing especially hard on the pedals at a steep part, the chain slipped. My pedal jerked down suddenly and my toes smashed into the toe clip. I was wearing Tevas. When I looked down, I saw that half my big toe nail had torn off in the impact. In Tibet both my big toe nails had turned blue and then got thick and brittle like they had some sort of fungus. I still don't know why. Gradually the bad part had been growing out. That's what broke off. While we sat at a little cafe and had beers, an English couple chatted us up about our riding. There were a lot of English couples in southern Portugal so this happened fairly often. The conversation often goes like this:

E.C.: Where are you riding from?
US: Today we came from Lisbon.
E.C.: You came all the way from Lisbon!
US: Actually we started a couple months ago in France.
E.C.: You rode all the way here from France!
US: Yes. But last year we did a lot more riding in Asia.
E.C.: Wow. All the way from France.

Asia often seems to be ignored. They probably think we are pulling their legs. It's unfathomable to many people that you can actually ride bikes across Portugal. So when we say we rode across Asia they probably think it is some small province in Spain we are referring to. We like meeting them anyway and we often just leave out that we have been riding for two years and just talk about the European part.

At Setubal, about 30 kilometers from Lisbon across the peninsula between the Tejo and Sado rivers, we caught another ferry to the Peninsula de Troia. This is a 20 kilometer long sand bar. The ferry lands near a bunch of high rise hotels. Along the road a bunch of French tourists yelled, "BonVoyage."

With a tailwind we flew down the sand bar. There wasn't much traffic except a few minutes after a ferry landed when a bubble of cars would pass us and each other like we were in the middle of a grand prix.

I was relaxed anyway. Maybe because of the gas stations. Some had a nice shady area with tables and chairs and you could buy individual bottles of beer cheaply. We made a lot of pit stops.

At dark we reached a campground about five kilometers west of Melides. To put up a little tent they wanted 3300 Escudos or US$18.50!! We could not swallow this no matter how dark it was, especially since we knew that price had nothing to do with quality. We had paid 68 cents to camp at a fine
place in Castelo Branco.

We left the campground and went to the beach. We thought about walking our bikes a few hundred yards down the sand away from the restaurants and buildings and camping there. But it was nearly impossible to push the heavy bikes in the deep sand. We gave up after about ten feet of trying.

Then we found a wide, lumpy road running parallel to the beach just a few hundred meters inland. We found several fine camp sites amid the pines along the road and set our tent up in a somewhat concealed place. The guidebooks all said it was illegal to free camp anywhere in Portugal but no one bothered us. Also it seemed like a lot of people with campers spend the night in beach side parking lots.

We started very early the next morning. The lumpy sandy road took us about 1.5 kilometers on to Costa de Sto Andre. An VW bus was in the parking lot and a couple people sat on the beach making breakfast. We walked down to the water on the cool sand. The sun was still very low. The sky and the ocean were both brilliant blue and the sun cast shadows in all the foot prints in the sand. I've rarely seen a beach look so appealing.

We had coffee at a nearby restaurant then started riding inland toward Santiago. It wasn't very far but it took forever to get there because it was mostly uphill. After climbing some steep hills in the village we ran across a great little cafe with wonderful pastries. On average the Portuguese are better bakers than the Spanish.

Just outside of town we came across another Intermarche. We loved these supermarkets. All of them have big heavy concrete planters in front of the store that are perfect for bike parking. Usually I would go inside and buy the food for the day and something to eat immediately. When I finished shopping we'd take the tent and sleeping bags off the bikes and fill the panniers with the supplies. Then we'd eat it in front of the store. We spent many hours at Intermarches.

The road from Santiago to Cercal was very very pretty, one of the nicest in southern Portugal. It ran along the top of a ridge and we had many vistas both east and west. We stopped at a wide turn in the road in the midst of a thick forest to make sandwiches.

In Cercal we felt great. The weather was perfect. We found great little bars and pastry shops. We decided to seek out the back roads the rest of the day. We followed a pretty little road over a hill and then down into a valley. We saw lots of windmills along the hills. Most of the windmills just had bare poles but a couple were rigged with sails so they would turn.

The map showed the road coming to a river then starting again on the other side of the river. It didn't explicitly show a bridge but we figured there would be some way across.

We went down and down and down. Gradually the road got narrower and narrower though it remain paved. Finally we descended very steep part into the gully. There the road ended at a dock. Definitely no bridge. A couple of row boats sat in the mud along the shore and I considered floating the bikes across but we couldn't see a road on the other side. I didn't think it existed any more.

We turned around and climbed back up and up and up. By the time we got back to the main road we had just about an hour of light left. Unfortunately the next 20 kilometers also turned out to be just about the hilliest 20 kilometers in all of southern Portugal. We descended steeply, crosses a river, climbed steeply out of the ravine, descended steeply to another river, then climbed out of that valley.

After the last climb, out of the town of Odemira, we took another back road, hoping to find a shortcut to the campground we were aiming for. But the signs on the road did not match the town names on our map. After three kilometers we turned around back to the main road. Now it was getting seriously dark. We got off the road at what looked like a suburban housing project just getting started. Dirt roads had been scraped and one house begun but the place was otherwise empty. We rolled the bikes down a small hill and camped about 50 yards from the road. It was almost completely dark by the time we got the tent up. We had sandwiches for dinner.

Next: Sagres: its school and its beer.

Portugal Main Page World Trip