Lisbon to Porto is about three hours by high-speed train. The countryside in between looks drowsy and contented. Olive trees, vines, palms, sluggish rivers, and neat white villages retrofitted with satellite dishes and power lines. To see it, you may need to fight out a polite duel of the airplane-armrest type, because every two rows of seats share a single window blind. Simply identify your opponent's intentions and weaknesses by studying the back of their head. Actually, I kept hitting the button accidentally with my knee, so I really owe an apology to someone with a high fade and a bumpy occiput.
The old quarter of Porto is beautiful and enormously confusing. My building claims to be on the city's oldest road, and it would take someone who does a lot more trip research to argue with it. It's in a tangle of steep and narrow medieval streets where rows of ancient houses crowd in on both sides, tourist apartments are cunningly hidden, and having Google Maps in front of your face is on par with being straight-up lost anywhere else. There's a lingering medieval feel that the graffiti and satellite dishes can't dispel. A woman in the street is chatting with someone leaning out of a third storey window. "I'm just going out for a dancing bear and a mess of pottage, do you need anything?"
My window looks out on the St. Lawrence Church, if you lean out and look left, and beneath is a flat roof on which, yesterday, a couple of young tourists were napping surrounded by their backpacks and water bottles. Across the Douro are the illuminated signs of port companies, and a short mazy walk away is the cathedral square, with a balustrade people sit on to watch the sunset and listen to lab-grown European Square Buskers sing mellow pop standards.
Gaia is the town across the river, and you can get to it by walking across the Ponte Dom Luis I, an iron arch bridge 45M above the water. Pedestrians on the upper deck use the sides and trolleys the middle, and there's no continuous barrier between them, so people can scarper from one side to the other like excited toddlers. How many Instagram accounts have fallen silent after a selfie from the middle of this bridge with a train in the near background?
The little piece of Gaia I saw had a pleasant park overlooking the Douro. Here, a woman in fuchsia pants and a fuchsia hat sang to the accompaniment of a muted trumpet. Across the road is a 16th century monastery, closed for renovations, but with a peaceful square where what I think was probably a very good guitarist played what I think was probably traditional music for quietly attentive tourists.
On my second day, I took the bus out to the Castel de Quiejo ("cheese castle", but the story is disappointingly dull), a small fortress out on the ocean, and walked back to town. There are surfers bobbing in the cove, jumping up from time to time to do what they can with the modest waves that come rolling in. The rest of the coast is mostly sandy beaches with a zone of boulders where the waves break, a long and peaceful walk except only for the cries of the gulls, who are never happy about anything. Many old men are fishing, each with several long rods clamped to a railing, and gulls in the water are pecking doubtfully at lost bait -- they may have evolved as stolen-french-fry specialists, but this adaptability is the key to their success.
On Friday afternoon, Porto, which has been wonderfully quiet, comes to life as tour groups descend on it for the weekend. Tuktuks, replica antique cars, and Segways swarm, candy stores and silly restaurants fling open their doors, human statues materialize, and there's a busker every ten metres, like bears on a salmon run. Winter weekdays, in hindsight, were the perfect time to be in Porto.
