August 2023, Exeter.
Preparing this latest retrospective blog for the internet in August 2023, we learned that large areas that we travelled through in 2002 are being ravaged by wildfires. It is sobering to realise that our memories are destroyed in so many different ways, and our hearts go out to those who have lost so much in these devastating infernos. What a world we are creating for ourselves in this Anthropocene epoch.
21 September 2002, Faro Portugal.
We had booked to go to Portugal from Exeter airport for the last week in September and the first in October and were given a lift to Exeter Airport this morning by our friend Alan. We flew off over Woodbury Common on a grey morning at 10:40. Above the cloud cover the sky was brilliant and two hours later we landed in Portugal.
Despite the assurances in the Lonely Planet guide book that the buses ran every 15 minutes to the town centre we were obliged to wait a full hour before we got a bus for the 18-minute ride into the town, passing through shabby little backstreets covered in graffiti on the way. We also passed some very pleasant white villas with their heavy red-tiled roofs and gardens filled with large flowering trees and shrubs. Modern buildings looked well built and attractive in the midst of many streets and corners of old neglected properties.
Seeing a sign saying "Rooms to let" as we reached the town centre near the port and marina, we scrambled off the bus and went to investigate. That bit was easy. We spoke to a delightful Portuguese lady in phrases we had learned straight from the phrase book on the plane. It was all quite amusing. We are now in a huge, clean, very pleasant room with an enormous en-suite bathroom overlooking a quiet backstreet. At 45 euros it is dearer than we want for every day, but it gives us a time to find our bearings.
The weather is a lot warmer than in Exeter so we changed into shorts and sandals before venturing out to explore the town where we needed our sun hats and sunglasses against the strong glare of the afternoon sun. Three minutes down the road we reached the marina with its many bobbing boats sheltered from the Atlantic breeze. Two minutes later the rain began - average rainfall is two days in September and five in October so, by our reckoning, we ought to have a few days dry in the coming fortnight. Actually it didn't last long, and we have spent a happy afternoon exploring the old part of Faro and the very pleasant shopping area, also fairly old with its pedestrianized cobbled streets and bars and terraces. We sat at a street cafe watching the very beautiful Portuguese people, so slim compared to the British and German tourists, together with their lovely kids strolling around the town. We had a couple of coffees and an apricot meringue which we asked for in what we hoped was phrase-book Portuguese and our lovely waitress actually worked out what we meant! It will probably have been easier for her if we didn't try.
The language is really easy to work out when you see it written, but too fast to understand out of context. I’m nervous to try pidgin Portuguese. To ask for a couple of cakes would mean raising two fingers and saying “boulos”. I think someone might hit us! The tourist office was really helpful with bus timetables. The bus station told us that there are two buses a day to Seville and it costs 11 euros (about £7). The railway station says you cannot get trains from Faro to Seville; the Lonely Planet guide says you can. I think we should volunteer to write guides for them and be paid to do all this, that will be brilliant!
Having spent such a nice afternoon, we bought wine, water and nibbles in a supermarket and returned to our room. We have now eaten the nibbles and the bottle of really nice vinho tinto from Portugal is half empty. On the assumption that folk eat late in Portugal as they do in Spain, we are now going off in mellow mood to try out one of the many pleasant-looking restaurants we have seen this afternoon. Many are fish restaurants with tanks of seafood swimming in their windows. Prices seem to range from a few euros for sardines to 64 Euros for lobster.
By the way the worst aspect of Faro is the sound of the aircraft landing and taking off every few seconds. You almost need to duck as they pass overhead. By the river estuary where it appears to be a mass of salty marshes and green islets, a landing plane looked about to crash into a white stork that had just flown off its nest on the top of one of the twin towers of the cathedral in the old town.
The Ria Formosa or estuary of the river is a national park and folk are taken out by boat and abandoned on various islets for the day to fry in the sun shaded only by the shadows of low-flying planes as they skim the shore, seemingly a few feet above the estuary and its islets - not my idea of fun at all.
Later
We are back in our room after a supper of sardines and salad which was very nice in a bony, fatty sort of way. Ian liked it a lot, but I don't think I'll bother again.
In our bathroom hangs a curious piece of pristine white fabric. Beside it is a picture of a black boot with the words “para limpar os sabotas”. Each country has its different customs I guess. In Crete we couldn't put paper down the loo, and here we are ordered to wipe our boots before using the toilet - at least the cloth hangs beside the toilet paper so that's the impression it gives.
Sunday 22 September 2002
Ian's in the shower and it looks like being another hot day so we've got up early to catch the bus to Tavira for the day.
I think this room was a mistake. It's very nice but far too expensive for more than a night when we only need a bathroom to clean up. As yet we've not had time to get grubby. We've seen several places around Faro that look cheaper, but we have contracted to stay another night and then we will move on. The worst though is that the quiet little backstreet onto which our room faces was used all last night by a group of very noisy young Portuguese men sitting in doorways and shouting at each other immediately below our room - I never thought to bring ear plugs. We were obliged to sleep with the window shut which helped with the noise but made our room very hot - bed covers were out of the question. However, we felt so weary from our long day that we both slept despite the noise. It's now 7:40 a.m. The lads have gone to their beds around 6:30 a.m. and the flights to the airport have recommended every few seconds over our heads. Being Sunday, local churches are putting up good competition.
Later
We are now back in our room in Faro at 10:00 p.m. Tomorrow we must get up early in order to catch the 8:00 a.m. bus to Seville. It has been an enjoyable day, rather hot and close with short several short but heavy showers, none of which occurred at a time to cause us any inconvenience whatsoever. We had a superb breakfast this morning for five euros for both of us here in the hotel. A basket of fresh rolls with butter, jam, honey and even cheese, a jug of orange juice and another two big jugs of coffee and milk - super value.
We arrived at the bus station in good time for our 9:00 a.m. trip to Tavira, some 30 kilometres along the coast to the east. It took an hour to get there with the bus turning off to various small towns and villages on the way, just in case anyone wanted to get on. Nobody did, so it was like our own personal taxi, except for an elderly man with a flat hat and umbrella who seemed to have come along to chat with the driver. We passed through the narrow cobbled streets of Faro, full of tile-fronted old houses in varying states of decay with washing festooning their facades, graffiti everywhere, litter and dust on the cobbles, and innumerable docile dogs lying in the road or trotting around unaccompanied in a way that would never be tolerated in England. Frequently there were groups of dogs on a mission of some sort, known only unto them. They wandered in and out of the traffic, stopping frequently to scratch or lick each other's balls. They seem to have aimless lives, rather like a canine equivalent of the nocturnal gathering below our bedroom window last night. There are two supermarkets in Faro Lidl and Jumbo. They advertise side by side on street hoardings it struck us as a case of Little and Large (a UK TV comedy series at that time).
The bus route passed through largely unprepossessing countryside with distant hills lending interest to the vista across the flat coastal plain as it skirted the marshy estuary of the Ria Formosa. Along the roadside were acres of abandoned fields overrun with weeds, covered with rubbish, with shabby crumbling buildings standing in isolation. Then suddenly we would see half a dozen beautifully built homes with wonderful gardens and patios. Then there would be a return to the scruffy abandoned countryside again. As we travelled further from Faro, the countryside began to look better cared for. Sheep grazed in orchards of citrus fruits, mainly oranges and tangerines. Nearer to Tavira however we saw huge plantations of pomegranates. I've never seen them growing before and it struck me as very exciting. Soon they will be appearing in the Exeter shops and I've always associated that with Christmas, yet here they were growing in their thousands along the southern edge of Portugal. I was really astonished at the density of food production. The citrus trees were quite bowed down with the weight of oranges and there were fig trees and peach trees equally burdened. We passed quite a few olive trees covered in fruits and all kinds of beautiful shrubs from purple oleanders to scarlet hibiscus as well as many others whose names are unknown but are now becoming familiar from our visits to Mediterranean islands, Tenerife and the coast of southern Europe.
By 10:00 am we were wandering the streets of Tavira in the hot sunshine. The town lies on the estuary of the river Gilão about two kilometres inland from the sea and beyond the town are are salt pans where salt was previously evaporated off, but today the industry is virtually finished, as are the canning factories that used to proliferate in the days of the town's heyday as a fishing port. It still boasts a certain fishing industry, with net menders working beside the muddy flats of the river at low tide.
The town is very pleasant. There seems to be a ban on traffic in the town centre this Sunday, so the streets were devoid of cars and we could wander the many narrow cobbled streets of tile-fronted houses at leisure. A few baroque houses looked rather elegant with their facades of decorated blue tiles reflecting the Moorish influence of earlier times. Most however were horrid modern tiles in poor taste, which generally clashed with those of the adjoining properties on either side. Frequently at the tiles were damaged over the years with bare plaster patches, and spray can graffiti were present and generally, as in Tenerife, electric cabling was hanging across the fronts of properties which drooped down, looking horribly ugly. Again we had to pick our way amongst the many stray dogs and their excreta.
There are 38 churches in the town, and I think we visited the main ones. They are lovely, frequently baroque in style, with tiled walls inside depicting religious scenes, some with very elaborate doorways or heavily carved and gilded altars.
We climbed up to the old castle with views from its ruined walls over the heavy orange-tiled roofs of the town with the salt flats and the sea beyond. Within the castle there was a beautiful garden full of exotic plants while below in a little corner was a garden growing pomegranates, tangerines, figs, olives and bananas while chickens and geese scrabbled beneath them.
Back in Faro, we explored areas of the town to find food for our five hour bus journey tomorrow. However nowhere was open on a Sunday evening so we will just have to starve until we reach Seville. I only hope tap water is okay here as I filled our bottles from the tap as we cannot even purchase water.
Exploring a little park where parents paid played mini-golf while their infants amused themselves with slides and climbing frames, we found ourselves outside the town centre surrounded by endless blocks of white rendered modern flats, each with their own balcony, faceless and characterless. We crossed the railway track and wandered down towards the sea, far away across the salt flats.
Here we discovered what had earlier presumably been little wooden sheds and single storey buildings, perhaps occupied by those at worked on the many abandoned salt pans where seawater was left to dry in shallow basins constructed in the mud. Now I suppose they act as a sanctuary for seabirds and small mammals. They are certainly used to dump unwanted articles from abandoned mattresses or chairs and cookers to empty water bottles, old shoes, bits of piping, broken glass, builders’ rubble and torn plastic sheeting. A whole shanty community has grown up in the wooden sheds - the Portuguese underclass; dropouts, immigrants, the dispossessed, a third world ghetto in what is already one of the poorest countries in the EU. Much of the abandoned rubble and rubbish had been sifted through by this community to enlarge and improve their home, most of which were covered in plastic sheeting and festooned with washing. It never occurred to us at the time what they do for water, cooking or heating. Most had TV aerials so electricity, I suppose, is supplied, but doing so is surely an acceptance by the state that such squalor is acceptable. People, usually young men, stood about talking, and somehow it all seemed a little frightening, even threatening. We had intended following one of the little embankments across the salt pans to cut across the mud flats back to the old town of Faro but felt decidedly conspicuous in such a poverty-ridden setting some distance from other people, so we turned and made our way back to the main road and the old town, passing dead cats, and frogs leaping into fetid, slimy ditches on the way, presumably no longer sought water this far back. It was certainly a different viewer of the country from that generally seen by tourists.
We returned to our room for a shower and a rest; it is exhausting walking around towns all day in 24 degrees of heat. Then, having emptied our wine bottle, we went out in search of supper. We opted for a simple inexpensive restaurant mainly because we loved the name Restaurante Fim do Mundo - the restaurant at the end of the world or, as we prefer to call it, the restaurant at the end of the universe (Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy). The menu was certainly out of this world, if the translation into English was anything to go by. I spent time some time debating whether to order boiled horse, it sounded so appetizing. However I was non-plussed that it was included under the fish section, and I had a horrid fear of being presented with a plateful of tiny cooked seahorses. So I opted, as did Ian, for tuna steaks, a lovely meal with salad and potatoes for five euros each. We also had a carafe of Portuguese wine which, although house wine, was truly wonderful, deep red and very smooth, it cost us two euros for both of us. Our total bill was well under £10 including tapas of bread butter and olives followed by huge slice of chilled melon and two spoons. The waiter was a pleasant older man who seemed amazed at our gesticulations and efforts to get by in Portuguese. He also understood everything we wanted exactly, and didn't bet an eyelid at our endeavours to explain about sharing the melon and needing an extra spoon.
