Well, as promised, here we are in Portugal's capital city which has given us a very agreeable first impression. Devastated almost totally by the earthquake of 1755, it took the opportunity to rebuild to a completely different layout with streets on a straight grid system with plenty of open space, parks and huge squares with statues, monuments and fountains. It is much greener and cleaner than the Algarve and has a very cosmopolitan atmosphere with many people, mainly young and black, from former Portuguese colonies. There are many university students and it is not an obvious spot for tourists. Huge municipal and private office buildings are to be found in the main older part of the town on the flat area facing the river Tejo which is enormously wide. The bridge our bus took across the river and into the city is the longest I think I've ever crossed. It must be several kilometres in length with water stretching away on both sides, the banks just distantly visible. From the oldest central areas streets rise steeply into the hills of the city where the older buildings generally survived the earthquake. This area can be reached by trams which glide up the steep streets on metal rails. Or you can struggle up with a pile of shopping you've just acquired, following Ian, map in hand, in hot pursuit of the remains of a Roman theatre which is somewhere nearby. There is also an excellent, fast, clean, efficient and cheap underground system which we explored to get us back to our pleasant hotel at 30 euros a night near the bus station. Ian has just discovered there is no hot water for the shower, so perhaps it's not so good.
So this morning we said goodbye to our lovely landlady in Lagos who signed to us that if we ever came again we were to stay with her and, raising her arms to heaven as if in prayer, told us her name was Maria-Jesus.
The journey to Lisbon started by taking one and a half hours calling at all the little towns along the coast collecting people for Lisbon. We pretty well ended up back in Faro and by then were further from our destination than before we started. However a new motorway now runs south from Lisbon and, once on that, we made rapid progress, reaching Lisbon around 2:30 pm about four hours in total.
The route passed through the Sierra de la Monchique which was quite pretty, very deserted with little sandy tracks going up and along the crests of the many small hills, with isolated red tiled buildings scattered thinly across the countryside. Trees have been planted in lines around the contours of the hills, otherwise there was just scrub. The further north we went, the greener the countryside and the more care taken of it. Some areas have been cleared of the many stones found in the soil. Dry stone walls had been constructed within which citrus fruits, vines and vegetables were growing. The roadside litter and rubbish of the south disappeared and the landscape, while still rather uninspiring, looked cared for. As it remained pretty flat and boring I fell asleep.
Ian then woke me as we approached Lisbon to see the amazing bridge across the Rio Tejo, then we passed the airport and made our way into the city along straight, wide, bright tree-lined roads edged by huge expensive homes in pink, white or yellow rendering. There is no graffiti and no litter in this city. It is clean, fresh and bright, though there is still heavy traffic, parking looks impossible, and double parking seems the norm. Struggling from the bus station in search of accommodation, we chanced upon the Residence Ideal, just a few minutes walk from the bus station. A charming young lady with perfect English welcomed us, offering a double room with an ensuite bathroom for 45 euros. The bathroom and toilet had glass doors; it must be a Portuguese thing. Anyway we said we needed something cheaper, so we have a nice clean room on the front, but the road is quieter than Seville and tree-lined. The toilets are at the far end of a long corridor in the shared bathroom, which is a nuisance, but we didn't feel like lugging cases around in the hot sunshine to find somewhere more suitable.
We walked down into the main city centre. It was a long way but gave us a chance to get our bearings and appreciate just how nicely the city has been developed. We had a very expensive beer and sandwich on the Square Prior de Figuera, but it was nice in the shade, watching all the nations of the world go by, looking up at the castle battlements on one of the hills of the town. I feel Lisbon tries to emulate Paris. In many ways it does an excellent job, but it is actually cleaner and smarter and doesn't quite capture that feel; very pleasant nonetheless. We walked down to the river, explored the streets and squares and went to an art exhibition about sport in cartoon caricature, held in the smart building of the Ministry of Finance. We visited the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha, only the façade of which dates from before the earthquake. Then we explored the old buildings and narrow streets of the area leading up to the Castle, the only area to have survived intact from the earthquake. This was a pleasant district, reserved for the local folk, full of little alleys and interesting looking flights of cobbled stairways. Eventually we reached the castle with its magnificent views over the city and all its bright red roofs and splashes of colour where public gardens were to be found.
Finally we descended to the town again and stopped for supper in one of the many little restaurants in the theatre area of the town, which is now mostly pedestrianized. We had a nice mixed salad followed by a chicken which we shared, with chips. We also had a bottle of water and a half bottle of red wine. The restaurant wasn't terribly busy and there was a surfeit of white-jacketed waiters, each one intent of making our stay perfect. It was quite over the top and rather spoilt our meal having them hovering around and almost fighting to be the one to top up our water glass again. However, the food was good and the chicken cooked to perfection. The bill was 19.50 euros and we were not charged for the cover, which we pointedly left untouched. We then found the metro back to our hotel where we were both eager for sleep. Our colds are still very nasty and walking around is tiring.
Wednesday 2 October 2002
It had been raining slightly during the night and the day was overcast and cooler. We decided to visit the old town of Sintra about 25 kilometres from Lisbon. So today we explored the Portuguese trains. We worked out the station we needed, walked there, bought tickets, worked out the time and platform number and where we needed to change trains. We were however completely floored when it came to finding where they hidden the platform. I have begun to wonder better there was a Portuguese version of the Hogwarts Express on a platform that only materialized when we walked hard into one of the shiny granite-faced columns of the station concourse. We eventually located it at the far end of platform 2, along a couple of moving pavements and over a bridge.
The train went for miles through the hinterland of Lisbon amongst endless blocks of flats with washing on the balconies, squashed tightly together rising up the flanks of the hills surrounding the city. There was no grass or open spaces for children to play; these areas were filled with rubbish and covered in graffiti. Admittedly much of the graffiti was artistic rather than obscene, but gave a very seedy appearance to the suburbs. People were living in plastic covered shacks alongside the railway lines at one point, using the track itself as their route into town.
We changed trains at Cacém, where the only way from platform to platform was across the track. There were five platforms and people were crossing in front of moving trains. Lots of people were wandering along the tracks as everyday shortcuts home, simply stepping aside as the trains passed. Everywhere seems sad and poor quality after the contrast with Lisbon, a city very much on the move, chic, modern and cosmopolitan.
On the train we were approached by a lad of about ten with a red skin condition covering part of his face. He handed us a leaflet in Portuguese stating he had cancer and needed expensive hospital treatment. We have become very aware of the many different ways people have of begging and took our lead from other travellers who said no and returned his card. It happens so many times each day, and we always feel guilty saying no. We don't understand the support situation for immigrants or the homeless and handicapped, so it's difficult to know who is genuine and who is exploiting the situation. We have had gypsies, Romanian and Kosovan refugees, men with one leg, women with babies, very poor quality singers and musicians. Sad looking men keep asking for cigarettes and children are sent over by parents to plead for money. But maybe it's just as bad in London and we just don't notice. There are some scruffy, dirty areas with graffiti and rubbish around the stations in south London and plenty of begging too. We have not been greatly aware of alcohol or drug problems here. Mind you, our room is opposite the Ministry of Health building and next to the centre for drug dependence and detoxification. Generally we feel quite safe walking about in Lisbon.
When we arrived in Sintra I was completely and immediately astonished. It is a lovely old town, unaffected by the 1755 earthquake, being built on granite rather than limestone, which might explain it. The countryside is one of high wooded hills and deep cool valleys full of green vegetation. The streets are a network of cobbled alleys lined with old, slightly shabby buildings with terraces for outside cafes. There is a happy, relaxed atmosphere and everywhere you look there is something interesting to watch or exciting to investigate. The old town is on one hill, with the station and slightly more modern parts spread over two other hills, so it is quite tiring to walk around and we were grateful for the cooler weather.
We walked from the terminus station, whose approach road was being dug up with a tangle of uprooted tram tracks, passed the neo-Arabic town hall down into a valley and then round the town walls, emerging in the main square in front of the late gothic Sintra National Palace with its two distinctive conical white chimneys which have become the symbol of the national park in this World Heritage Site. The palace proved to be closed so we contented ourselves with a delicious coffee on a terrace on the square, contemplating the ruins of the Moorish castle a very long way above the town. A bus appeared, very crowded and with a cheerful driver who sold us two day tickets. We held on for dear life as the bus corkscrewed its way up six kilometres through wooded hillsides, stopping at a ticket booth.
We passed through a heavy wooden turnstile into a wonderfully atmospheric place. Damp, green, with massive granite rocks covered with moss, trees starting to drop their leaves onto winding paths which allowed glimpses of the town below and the castle walls above.
The banqueting hall was lit by a chandelier with 72 candles, helped out by four statues of Turks each bearing another 25. There was an Indian room with elaborately carved teak furniture, a legacy of Goa, a Meissen room with mirrors, lamp stands and other furniture made of Dresden porcelain, an import of a homesick German prince. The apartments of the King, the Queen and Prince Carlos could be seen fully furnished, the last including sensuous wall paintings he had executed. Some of the apartments were quite intimate and boasted a number of technical Innovations, a very early telephone exchange, baths with elaborate shower fixtures, a delightful range of lavatories some of them veritable thrones with armrests, elaborate back or tiled surrounds. The main rooms were arranged in two floors around the original colonnaded courtyard or cloisters which had been decorated with patterned tiles. The views were magnificent, and a walkway has been built around the entire site precariously teetering on the edge of the rocks, at times permitting the site of, amongst other things, the Moorish castle and an enormous statue of the architect perched on a distant crag. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, except for the nagging worry that one person could lavish so much money on such an extravagant folly. Still, the world can admire it now, so it is no different from the theme parks, also built at large expense.
We caught the bus down and wandered around the historic town with its steep streets and shops selling local handicrafts and souvenirs, eventually catching the train back into Rossi Station which also boasts a magnificent Manueline façade.
Thanks again Ian; I was too exhausted to write this last night and anyway he and does the cultural bits better. The interior of Palacio Pena was beautiful, extravagant, furnished with wonderful pieces of its time, the 1860s. Everything from the cutlery and porcelain to the fabrics and furniture had been a special commissioned and was wonderful. The outside was a total hoot, a wonderful eclectic mix of everything that's fun in architecture. The nearest local equivalent is perhaps Castle Drogo for a modern castle in a beautiful setting coupled with the Prince Regent’s palace in Brighton for innovations in interior design and style, and a Walt Disney Fantasy world castle as far as the external appearance was concerned. The top of the craggy hill on which it is constructed has been worked into the walls and foundations, so great granite tors and outcrops suddenly meet tiled or brightly stuccoed walls.
The views both from here and the Moorish Castle nearby were stupendous. They looked down over the steep, thickly wooded hillside to the plain below, stretching flat way into the distance to the sea, scattered with the red tiled roofs of dozens of little towns. Up here it was more like a German fairy-tale castle and easy to realize it was all the creation of a homesick German who had found somewhere that reminded him of home. As I said, the whole day felt as if we had been transported out of Portugal to a town and countryside somewhere in Eastern Europe, the Saxon Alps or Visegrád in Hungary. This feeling was added to by being in conversation with a German couple and sharing bus seats with four Hungarians. Back in Lisbon, we took the funicular tramway up a steep cobbled road lined with houses to reach the high level of the town. The tramcar was beautifully old and rattly, with varnished wooden seats. We had really only gone for the ride but decided to explore all the little residential backstreets and tiny shops, printers, furniture restorers, bookshops and mini-shops selling fruit and basic food stuffs. We discovered a left-wing bookshop with an exhibition area, meeting room, café and video and CD section hidden unobtrusively in a corner behind a plain door. We followed after a couple of students, out of curiosity. I wonder what's behind some of the other doors we passed by.
Back down in the town we saw a very simple looking restaurant away from the main tourist area so tried it. It was full of local people watching football on TV at the bar for eating at the surrounding tables. They were all Portuguese and we worked out the menu without too much trouble, ordering in Portuguese a mixed salad with one cheese and one sausage omelette, chips, wine and water, followed by a huge slice of melon each. It all worked perfectly, with several chuckles on both sides. We greatly enjoyed the experience and watching the local folk greet each other or sit chatting and cheering the match. The bill was 16 euros and that was no cover charge. We weren't even offered olives, cheeses and so on that we didn't want; they had to be requested. Then home on the underground again, so clean and shining, relaxed, unthreatening with classical music playing and video cameras where you can see the whole platform from any angle as you pass by the shiny glass computerized control office on the platform showing where the trains are on the system and when they'll be arriving. And so home, weary for a shower and bed.
Thursday 3 October 2002. Lisbon.
This morning we woke early, our sleep having been punctuated by the delivery of a large number of very clanking things in the middle of the night. We purchased our tickets for Faro for 8:30 on Friday morning at 14.50 euros each, and had coffee and a roll at the station snack bar served by a young man, delighted to show off his limited English. It disappeared entirely when we asked what time he closed but a customer helped out. No chance of a snack there tomorrow evening but, leaving the bus station, we stumbled across the best local supermarket we have found so far in Portugal. It would have been useful to have found it earlier as shops are so limited in what they stock but we obtained a good range of provisions for today.
We purchased a freedom ticket for bus/tram/metro for 2.60 euros at the Saldanha metro station and got off at Baixa. An endless escalator disgorged us into the Largo Trinidade Coelho which meant that, after briefly inspecting the massive square with the beautiful church of São Roque, we had to make our way down again on foot to the Baixa, where we picked up a modern tram to Belém. Our seat behind the driver gave us a quick lesson on how to manage one of these air-conditioned articulated monsters. We also discovered the problems of being unable to steer as they waited for vehicles double parked for delivery or taxis collecting fares. Eventually we arrived, after a ride along the river front, before of the large white wedding cake of the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos, created in the first years of the 16th century by King Manuel I.
Typically, the cloisters were closed in preparation for the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the monastery. It was built to celebrate the discovery of the route around Africa to India by Vasco de Gama. No expense was spared; taxes were diverted to the undertaking and the architects virtually created the elaborate Manueline style, a cross between gothic and Renaissance which covered the columns with elaborate foliage and surrounded windows with intricate strap-work and entwined ropes. The chapel of the monastery was intended as a pantheon for the royal family, and the classical lines of the chapels contrasted with all this florid decoration. The sarcophagi were borne aloft on the backs of elephants, a reminder of India, and the chapels were decorated with mannerist paintings. All this was admired by thousands of tourists who set up a buzz of noise which made the “Silencio” notices look rather pathetic. They photographed each other in front of the tombs of Vasco de Gama and the national poet Camões whose Manueline revival tombs were completed in 1894. But even the crowds of tourists failed to dampen the impressive nature of the building, an expression of a small nation’s pride and self-confidence.
We left the Monastery and crossed the square in front to the monument erected to the Portuguese discoverers in 1960 for the 400th anniversary of the death of Henry the Navigator. In the shape of an enormous caravel with two dozen historical figures considerably larger than life lining each side behind Henry the Navigator, the whole structure overlooked the Tejo estuary.
We wandered over the enormous wind rose in the paving, behind which there was a map of the world inlaid in stone, highlighting areas of Portuguese influence. Then we went downstream along the riverfront for about one kilometre to where the white tower of Belém stood in the water by the shore, connected by a footbridge.
We ate our lunch on the shore facing the tower, then passed through gardens to explore the suburb of Belém, our main discovery there being a place to consume two orange juices to counteract the effects of what had turned out to be a hot and sultry day. We both felt exhausted lugging the rucksack full of books, cameras, water and shopping, so we caught the tram back to the centre of Lisbon, but were obliged to stand most of the way. It was however air conditioned which was sheer heaven. Having passes to the public transport system and feeling very weary, we decided to ride on the really old trams which still rattle and wheeze their way around the same unaltered circuit of the city that they have done for the past 100 plus years. They are quite small with varnished wooden seats, the air conditioning consists of windows that lift right up out of the way all round so the air passes straight through. It is not very safe though, and the streets are so narrow that at times that the trams passed within an inch of the walls of the houses lining the street, so you have to keep your elbows well tucked in. It is a wonderful time warp, an experience both concerning the tram itself, and its setting amidst the tightly packed streets of old grey shops and houses with very steep narrow cobbled streets along which the tracks were laid. Bends that seemed impossible were negotiated through tiny squares or corners with trees under which local people sat in groups, playing cards or taking a drink and past huge old churches washed in white, pink or yellow. It was a very vibrant area, a bit run down through age but an active living part of the city.
The tram struggled its way endlessly up and down the nearby hills that form part of the city. Kids returning from school shouted to friends on the narrow pavements, who then ran along beside the tram until it got too narrow or they encountered someone standing in their doorway and there was no room to pass, so close was the tram to the walls. Dogs, old folk, everyone just wandered out in front. Whenever there was room for a vehicle, it had been left, allowing perhaps half an inch of clearance for the tram. Frequently vehicles parked on the track itself, so we had to wait, the driver ringing impatiently until an owner would rush out from a nearby doorway and drive off ahead of us. Sometimes we would see steep views down to the river or the town as we slithered down, the brakes screeching and the body of the tram, crowded with travellers, shrieking and groaning in protest. At other times we be pointing up a hill at such a steep angle you expected to sliver back down. Then we would need to stop because of an obstruction or a very sharp bend. Sometimes the driver had to get out and manually shift the points with an iron spike.
And the driver! We had a pretty young lass of about our daughter Kate’s age sitting up front on a wooden stool, working a combination of levers and illuminated buttons. The latter, I guess, were an addition to conform to modern day safety requirements. I wonder if the drivers get repetitive strain injury moving the lever around all the time to precisely regulate the tram’s speed. Would I trust riding on a tram with my daughter at the wheel – or rather the lever? Yet we had complete confidence in this young lass, so patient and competent.
We got off one tram near the castle of Saint George at a pretty square with outside tables where folk sat drinking. There was a pretty flowering garden overlooking the Rio Tejo and the huge suspension bridge. Steep streets, too narrow for the tram, lured us even higher. It was such a cool place after the enormous heat of the flat area of the lower town. Trees stood in squares, there was an ancient house, the huge old army barracks very attractive in style, a former Augustinian convent. Washing was hanging out to dry, dogs snoozing, old men tottering along with sticks or sitting in doorways. We saw one old man, blind, listening to his little radio held in his hands. There was a wonderful view down onto the red roofs of Lisbon, a stretch of the river, and across to the high crenelations of the castle walls. The hilltop on which the castle stands provides a splash of natural green colour in a landscape otherwise completely covered by buildings and cobbled roads. We visited a really huge baroque church Nossa Senhora da Graça, cool and peaceful but absolutely enormous, with huge side aisles with statues and dark paintings, a painted ceiling, carved marble columns, and windows with 18th century decoration.
Our tram ride continued to the terminus at the Jardim de Estrela where we wandered beneath trees in the cool of the evening. The writer Henry Fielding is buried nearby in the English Cemetery of the Church of Saint George. He died in Lisbon in 1754.
We returned down to the town centre on the tram, then caught the pristine modern metro back to our area at Saldhana. We picked up some quiche and salad at a supermarket we discovered and returned exhausted to our room where we ate and consumed the best part of a bottle of Portuguese red wine.
Friday 4 October 2002.
Our last day. We fly home from Faro at 7:30 a.m. tomorrow. We have tickets for the 8:30 p.m. bus to Faro and plan to sleep on it until we arrive at half past midnight. Then we'll need to find a taxi to the airport and kill four or five hours there until check-in time.
Ian worked out a route from our hotel to the metro line that went out to the Parque das Nações, a huge area opened to celebrate a trade fair in 1998 and presumably funded with European Community subsidies. The train was crammed with students from the University of Lisbon, mainly wearing jeans and pale blue shirts or t-shirts and trainers. Some were more smartly dressed and more huge black cloaks, not very practical in 30 degrees of heat. The cloaks were all lined with cloth badges of places they visited, other European universities and even football clubs. However they would have been hidden during any ceremonial occasions at the university. We later saw the students, about 50 or 60 of them, around the Parque das Nações and asked what they were doing. The lass Ian asked explained that the ones in cloaks were third-year students and the others were first and second year ones. I gather it was their version of freshers’ week and the new students were being made to feel at home by being introduced to university life. The lass explained in delightful English “we are playing with them”. It certainly seemed a curious way of playing. Two male students stood on the grass while two female ones knelt in front and had a race to see which of them could first thread an object up from the bottom of one of the trouser legs and out at the waistband. Both teams were having difficulty at the later stages, but were cheered on by all the other students sitting watching on the grass around.
The Parque das Nações is reached by a specially built metro station Gare do Oriente, itself a stunning sight in polished marble, a huge concourse with vast arches on several levels with escalators and a permanent team of cleaners polishing the floors. Stalls displayed and sold Portuguese produce, and eating off the floor could be a significantly more hygienic experience and from some of the terrace tables in other parts of the city. From the station a huge open space led across to the ultimate in modern shopping malls. Alternatively there are aerial walkways across with views across the park to the Rio Tejo and the enormously long and structurally beautiful and impressive bridge across which we travelled to reach Lisbon on our arrival.
The Vasco de Gama shopping centre is also constructed in shining marble tiles with white with escalators and smart walkways to reach the different levels. The shops are all very chic with names like Gucci, Springfield or Pierre Cardin. There were plenty of people window shopping but not so many buying. It is a mystery to us how the economy of a country runs. Never have we seen such a lavish complex as the one at the Parque das Nações. It makes La Défense in Paris seem a shabby, dirty and dated area and la Grande Arche not so special compared to the gleaming white structures in Portuguese marble to be seen here. The whole Vasco da Gama shopping precinct is shaped like a huge caravel with a silver white delicate structure like a ship's prow at one end. The whole complex is covered by a glass dome with water constantly flowing over it to keep the inside cool. It is also very popular with the white gulls from the river who love to paddle in the constantly trickling water. The shadows and the reflected light of the sun on the water causes an interesting effect of light shimmering over the inside of the complex which is really very pleasant. I guess too the constant water keeps the glass clean.
One entire floor of the centre is given over to restaurants, all are chic and spotless, and also seen good value for money. We lunched at a salad restaurant overlooking the river, consuming a huge plate of lovely fresh salad vegetables plus peaches and grapes with chicken and egg for 6.50 euros each, a very pleasant experience. Beyond the Vasco da Gama centre you enter the Parque das Nações itself. It wasn't very busy during the day in October but all the bars and restaurants inside were ready to serve thousands. I believe it gets much busier at night and at weekends and is open until midnight. But the day was very hot, despite the time of year, so we hugged the shade as we made our way through the concrete and marble park, past many rectangular lakes, some with fountains, and all alive with many thousands of dragonflies, linked in pairs mating over the water, dipping their tails into the surface of the lake, skimming around as if they will one creature with two sets of wings. They move so fast that it is impossible to see them clearly. There are quite harmless and, unlike our English wasps, so wrapped up in what they are doing that they have no interest whatsoever in hanging around pestering people. The park stretches for a couple of kilometres along the bank of the Rio Tejo.
It is still being developed as the greatest building project in Portugal and beats anything we've seen elsewhere in Europe. It really makes our government’s attempts at creating the Millennium Dome look laughable. Now we wonder what to do with that scrappy little site. Here there are museums, exhibition galleries, the largest oceanarium in Europe, a cable car ride from one end of the park to the other along with banks of the Rio Tejo, bikes for hire to cycle around the complex. There is a science or knowledge pavilion with interactive science and technology displays the huge Vasco de Gama tower, the highest building in Lisbon with views over the city from the restaurant at the top. There is an amusement park, called the Sadrenalin park, a virtual reality pavilion about the Life of Luís de Camões, the national poet of Portugal. And visible from anywhere on the site of course is the incredible bridge, the artery for much of the city’s transport. Right along the riverfront there are attractive gardens reflecting the Portuguese interests overseas. There are plants from all three areas represented, all neatly labelled and we wandered through some of these. That for the Azores for example has paths of volcanic lava from Madeira passing beneath shady banana leaves surrounded by palms and exotic plants. There were even a couple of dragon trees there. We walked the stepping stones through the water gardens, shallow lakes with terrapins and fishes. We played with the water prism, a large triangular glass-sided cylinder filled with water. It could be moved and angled in such a way that everything around seen through the prism became rainbow hued, a really pretty effect. We walked under, round and between endless numbers of fountains, played with interactive sculptures which made sounds or carried water, and found a life-sized statue of a white giraffe admiring itself in a mirror. There is a section especially for children and we watched the class of around twenty children aged four or five, each identically dressed in check overalls and luminous yellow workmen's jackets and each wearing orange safety helmets, working together cooperatively on a building site with a truck on rails, winches, a crane, scaffolding and polystyrene bricks It was very amusing watching them decide who would do what and what needed to be done. They loved it and they looked so cute, just like little figures from a Lego set. All in all it was a brilliant time and we were both so glad we went, although we nearly didn't as we didn't expect it to be our scene. We did not go into the oceanarium or on the cable car but with hindsight we should have done both. We were anxious to see as much of his Lisbon as possible while we were there.
So, we returned to the centre of town. It was really close and humid and the park of Edward VII seemed a good place to go. In fact it proved to be made up of a large number of walkways offering little or no shade. We both felt hot, bothered and exhausted, so we knew we would hate walking around the exposed gardens. By now it was 4:00 p.m. and busy with the build-up to the weekend. Buses and trams were all packed and the bus pass we had was rejected when we tried to use it at the Elevador de Santa Justa, the glorious iron structure intended to lift passengers from one street level to another. It was designed by a disciple of Eiffel and looked great fun.
However, because of building works on the street above, it was just taking people up to the restaurant of the top and didn't seem worth paying out four euros for the ride, so we walked around to the little old funicular of Elevador da Glória which took us up to the São Pedro de Alcântara viewpoint from a shady park back across the city.
The air here was much cooler and the old streets full of the unexpected. We spent a while exploring and finally arrived at a little park at the top surrounded by old shops and houses. In the park is an enormously wide tree but not very high. It is evergreen and its branches are supported on an iron framework beneath which are scattered dozens of benches where people shelter from the heat and read or chat as children play. Here too is a museum about water which recounts the history of the building of the hugely impressive old aqueduct which brought Lisbon its first fresh drinking water from the hills towards Sintra around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. There is also a huge underground reservoir here but unfortunately for us it was closed. So we contented ourselves with a coffee in the park and went to seek out the botanical gardens.
The entrance turned out to be in a sadly decayed, rundown area of abandoned large old houses and it all looked very closed although we could see avenues of interesting trees through the rusty iron gates which stated on a very old-looking label that the park was open. However the gates were well and truly locked and there was nobody around. So we made our way back down to the town and returned to Saldanha with the metro.
Here we investigated a couple of the marble shopping palaces with chic bistros and restaurants in the basements and smart shops selling fountain pens and cufflinks on the entrance floor. Above were offices on six or seven floors. The building was air conditioned and returning to the street meant being hit by a wall of heat even at 7:00 p.m. We had left our luggage with the lass at our hotel who had kindly agreed to mind it for the day. We went to the supermarket and purchased salads, cooked meats, yogurts and rolls for a picnic on the bus to Faro, then collected our luggage and humped it to the bus station teaming with students returning home for the weekend. It was a good job we had already purchased our tickets. We left Lisbon twinkling and glittering behind us at 8:30 p.m. recrossing the 10 km bridge away from the city the Parque das Nações a blaze of light along the riverside.
The journey should have taken four hours but the driver must have lived in Faro and had the weekend off because three hours later we drove into the bus station opposite the hotel we had used when we arrived two weeks previously. It was a very strange feeling seeing a town we had never really expected to see again. We shared a taxi out to the airport with a couple of Russians from Moscow who had also been on the bus back from Lisbon. They did a runner as soon as we reached the airport the leaving Ian to play pay the bill, only ten euros in total fortunately. Later they reappeared as if nothing had happened but made no suggestion of sharing the cost.
The four of us were the only people at the airport, everyone else being on packaged tours and collected from their hotels at 5:00 a.m. We slept fitfully on cold metal benches covered in flies, locked into the building. If we had arrived much later we would have been locked outside until 5:30 a.m.
From then on we had an uneventful journey home, arriving back in Exeter at about 11:00 a.m. yesterday, and I am writing up about our final day in our own green garden beneath a parasol in a sunshine as bright as we've had in Portugal, softened by the colours of the trees changing for autumn in pretty mix of browns, rusts, oranges, yellows and the green of the pines. Silver birch leaves are scattered across the lawn and all is totally peaceful, a complete contrast to the permanent noise of the last couple of weeks. Birds are singing continuously as they flutter amongst the shrubs, and squirrels scamper along the bough of the copper beach tree before they leap the gap to the branch of the birch on the other side of the lawn. We are so lucky to have such a lovely garden to where we can come home.
