Bicycle tour in Portugal and Spain, April 2023
First published .For pictures, see the photos page
My flight to Lisbon is from Zurich airport. I arrive early, kill some time at a table, am told it is reserved for guests of the cafeteria area; I move along. I look slightly homeless, traveling just with my camping gear in a reusable shopping bag. I arrive in Lisbon an hour late and Serge is waiting for me with a fully assembled bike at the airport. He has to go meet our host and bikes off. I change into shorts and walk down the hill (thankfully it’s downhill) and enjoy the warm air and the fact that I’m not sitting. We find each other again at the waterfront, just as he has managed to meet the host, who it turns out speaks no English. We walk to the sailboat and settle in. In the evening we meet a friend of mine for dinner. We have trouble navigating public transit and make him wait. We eat outside, the temperature drops, the wind picks up. An umbrella suddenly blows directly into our table, knocks over a heating unit and my friend’s beer, would have hurt me pretty bad if I hadn’t gotten my hands up in time. So far I’m having good luck.
We run errands, buying food and equipment, waiting for a call from the shippers. The supermarket in the Portuguese mall has a huge section of dried fish just sitting out, which stinks. No call. We find a coffee roastery called The Royal Rawness and a Nepalese man (I think) serves us excellent espresso. I buy a half kilo for the trip. No call. An African man working construction says hello to us and tells us he wants to go to America. Finally we go to the address Serge has for the shippers, since we’ve not heard from them. This is an office and they are agitated that we’ve shown up. We go to the airport, but there’s no one to ask so we take a taxi to the cargo area. Taxi driver speaks no English but some Swiss German, so we manage. We finally get into the shippers’ warehouse office and pick up some paperwork but at this point it’s after 5PM and the Customs office is closed. A small defeat typical of European bureaucracy. We enjoy dinner at O Velho Eurico at my local friend’s suggestion. The guy running front of the house solo makes friends with everyone; the food is excellent. We go to bed happy, in the boat.
We get up early, pack up, and I Uber back to the cargo area while Serge rides his bike up there. I stow the stuff behind a sign and settle into bureaucracy part two: Customs. Three people in the office, and they take about 45 minutes to process the paperwork together. By the end of it they’re friendly with us and excited about the trip. I pay my €47.97 at the window, bring the documents back, get the stamp. Finally we can go back to the shipper. Another fee, another wait, and then my bicycle is brought to us on a forklift. We build it up and are in business by 1PM. At a bike shop we replace the front tire and grips and buy a lock. Then we hit the road.
We’ve barely seen Lisbon at all but it’s time to leave. We bike through town to the ferry that takes us across the bay. Then we ride all afternoon on a series of roads that turn out to be…paths. Dumping grounds, lots of sand, a maintenance tunnel under the highway that leads nowhere. Later we are in the woods, lose the trail, ford a stream and push our bikes up the bank to find it again. Finally we reach the end to find ourselves on the inside of a locked gate. Whoops. Fortunately it opens and the first night’s campsite is just around the bend. We arrive late, set up tents in the wind. The other bikers around us are German, two older, one about our age. He works in Brussels, we learn the next day. I take a shower in the evening and promptly leave the bar of soap I brought behind.
The older Germans are packed and ride off before we even cook breakfast. We spend the late morning in Setubal because Serge can’t use the SIM card I brought from Austria and isn’t happy to ride without his phone for navigation. Ferry #2, coffee and cake at a cafe with chess boards. Then an exhausting ride in the afternoon sun. I get nervous around Carvalhal that there will just be no services anywhere if we continue with our plan to ride southeast and put my foot down. We decide to stay on the coast, where the campgrounds are. We make it to Parque de Campismo de Santo André, where the ‘restaurant’ is a bust. Portuguese campgrounds, it turns out, are mostly huge reservations for RV subculture and tents are second class citizens. But the showers are hot and there’s power in the bathrooms. Serge is a bit shocked, as I once was, that he has to show his passport at every campground.
At some point on this day I noticed that the Portuguese language is more gendered than any other I’m aware of. “Thank you” declines with the speaker’s gender; there are male, female, and neuter(?) forms of the genitive-forming particle (do/da/de – I learn later from an Italian friend that this is actually just a combination of the particle “de” with the masculine or feminine article). Serge buys a cell phone in, I think, Melides. I drink a cappuccino at a cafe and have a broken conversation with a man from Sevilla, my first attempt to speak Spanish in probably 20 years, because he speaks no English. He’s riding north. We head out to Santiago do Cacém and enjoy the old city and the castle atop the hill.
We finally realize we ought to take a siesta in the afternoons instead of riding through the heat, so after lunch in Cercal we find a cafe and take it easy for a while. Serge buys some sausage and olives. I buy an almond tart to eat with my espresso. By 4:30 it’s cooled down and we get on the road again. We ride through our first grove of cork oaks in the early evening light. In Vila Nova de Milfontes, we hit the beach.
We continue riding along the coast. Mid-afternoon we pause for siesta in Odeceixe, which is having some sort of festival. Serge buys a huge plate of ham for lunch. I eat from a restaurant on the main square. The food takes a long time but in the end is good. There’s a performance on the square of singers from the community (perhaps a church group?) led by a man with a guitar. It’s like Moxiefest Portugal. In the evening we reach what is probably the best campground of the trip: it’s quiet, the ground is soft, not everyone has an RV. A family gives us some leftover rice they made because they heard me speaking German.
Easter Sunday. We bike in the heat. Arab influence is now clearly evident in the architecture and city names; our day starts around Aljezur. We have lunch and take siesta in, I think, Vila do Bispo, in a cafe with an awesome Portuguese lady who takes no shit and chides her (new?) employee when he doesn’t serve us fast enough. The restaurant has fresh fish and lots of tourists. A couple from Berlin admires our bikes, and it turns out the man is actually a German native speaker from Namibia who writes for a travel magazine. After siesta we push on and shortly reach the End of Europe, the southwest-most point in Portugal. It feels good to have reached something notable. In the campground in the evening, just west of Sagres, it is windy and cold.
We awake to find that our food bag is missing. I lost noodles; but Serge lost sausage and tinned fish. I am worried that the campground people have taken it in a passive-agressive move to force us to pay for a second tent. But then a more likely culprit trots by: a dog, unleashed like apparently all dogs on the Iberian peninsula, carrying a sausage he has scavenged somewhere. Serge follows him and observes him bury the sausage but does not find the food bag. We press on and face a terrible headwind out of Sagres as we head away from the coast. We stop for a second breakfast in Raposeira. It feels like we have left California for Mexico. My knee, which has been hurting since perhaps the second day on the road, has become unbearable and every meter of climbing pains me. Finally I buy a knee brace, which helps, although I don’t understand why. We press on toward Lagos and stop at a beach with some Roman ruins. Serge takes a leak, because Fuck the Romans. We make it to Lagos in time for siesta and have our first night indoors since setting out, an Airbnb which promises two beds and a washing machine. In truth there is only a bed and a crappy couch and the washing machine takes a long time, but it works in the end. In the evening we walk into the center of the city and marvel at the polished cobblestone. Dinner is tapas, with excellent seafood, at a small place off the beaten path that we wander into. It’s run by an older couple who clearly love their work and each other.
We awake in Lagos. Our laundry is not dry but we lay it in the sun, which gets hot quickly. We mail postcards; Serge mails his old phone back to the US. There is a DMV-style take-a-number system at the post office and of course, the locals who know how it works take a number ahead of us with a huge plastic bag of smaller plastic bags which must be packages from their online store. Serge gets to the counter and the post office employees are not particularly responsive to his need to send an international package. I go buy a water bottle. Once the mail is on the way, we pack up and ride to the train station.
The train is a new experience for me: kind of janky and slow, more like a New Jersey Transit experience than European rail, except that the toilet just pipes straight out onto the tracks. You can see the ground ambling by below you. Serge says it reminds him of India. The train follows the whole south coast from Lagos until Vila Real de Santo Antonio. After a final coffee in Portugal, we take a ferry across the river into Spain. Our bicycles are admired by a couple of middle aged women speaking Spanish. One turns out to be from Nevada; she is confused about whether I am Austrian and asks me where I got my accent. I learn from this that I speak English differently when I assume the speaker is European. After the ferry we ride to a campground in Isla Cristina. On the way we ride through some goats being herded toward home.
We spend the morning riding through impressive agricultural setups and press on to Huelva, where the train network starts again after a 60km gap at the border. The train station however is on the far side of another river. There’s a bike bridge but when we get there, we discover it’s closed for construction. Pressed for time, we bike over the car bridge, which is Forbidden. The traffic is fast and the shoulder is small and full of glass and the cars honk at us but we make it. It’s the last riding of any substance that I will do. We even reach the train station in time for the 3:00 train, but there’s only one bike spot left. We book for the 7:00 train and then have four hours to kill for lunch. We eat at a tapas place on a side street off the main downtown tourist street. Our waiter greets us in English; it then becomes apparent that “hello” is about all the English he knows. But the food is delicious and interesting. A table of older professional women are drinking and enjoying the tapas too; otherwise, no one is around. It’s our first taste of the real Spanish siesta, during which everyone disappears until about 6PM. We arrive in Sevilla, meet our host, go for a drink. A “gin and tonic” in Sevilla turns out to be a can of tonic served alongside a full glass of gin and ice. I drink two of them and I’m drunker than I’ve been in a long time.
Our time in Sevilla is spent solving problems. I go to buy a train ticket to Malaga; Serge to replace the missing food bag. There is no space for a bike on any train to Malaga. At first Manuel, our host, says we can stay one more night in Sevilla; then not. I book a bus ticket and then I need to find a bike shop to pack my bike. Manuel feels bad about pulling the rug out from under us and offers us a different place. I run around to different bike shops. We go to Manuel’s other place, which turns out to be quite a bit nicer. We spend siesta wandering through the tourist sites on foot. After siesta, a bike shop by the bus station agrees to pack my bike the next day. Last problem solved.
I take the bike to be packed, then we have the whole day to explore the city on foot. But we are both kind of exhausted from the day before and we don’t end up doing very much that’s worth reporting. We still haven’t figured out the rhythm of the Spanish day. More confusion with Manuel about payment. Serge talks to his girlfriend while I wander a bit. After siesta we pick up the bike and get lucky: the package doesn’t fit into the first (“large”) locker we try at the bus station, but it fits into the second (normal) one. We try Mexican for dinner, mostly for the irony, and it is good but overpriced.
All there is left to do is get the bike and get it on the bus after a hug. I spend a long afternoon at the airport. It is 31 degrees in Sevilla according to the weather app, and 7 in Vienna. I consider letting the bike wait at the airport for me to pick it up in the morning but it comes out pretty quick. I bring it home on the train, which is not too bad, and drag it by myself the last few meters from the U Bahn, which is. But I make it. Serge has a harder day, I hear later.