Porto was quiet on Saturday morning; loud noises would have been bad for its headache. A lonely saxophonist at the cathedral played the no-tourist blues. "Gray yogurt" said the graffiti on a derelict building next door.
Portuguese train stations are quiet, slightly dowdy, and not too useful. This may be the price paid for an aversion to retail chains; compare London stations, for example, which are bright carnivals of hurried commerce. Portuguese stations have grubby cafes and bookstores. Bookstores are regarded as essential, and seem to be included as automatically as washrooms and ticket counters. But if you don't read Portuguese, there's not much to do besides check out the snack machines and then wait on the platform wondering if you should have pulled the trigger on that Kinder bar.
This train is an older, slower one, with ads for a Shrek musical. It passes a series of ruined red-brick factories on its way south, and then, in Lisbon, I have to transfer to a bus. There's a universal rule that bus stations have to be bleak. Going straight from a train station to a bus station is a lesson in class differences. Every attempt to make this one cheerier or more useful somehow backfired. The bookstore is just a section of pavement, and is closed, and the children's play area is empty and forlorn. The air is mostly exhaust and cigarette smoke. A young man hovers over his girlfriend, who's lying down on a bench and coughing weakly like someone dying of some 19th century disease of poverty.
Porto Covo, two long hours away, is like all the seaside villages in Alentejo: white buildings with colourful trim, quiet now in winter. A night here in a chilly motel, and then I walk down to the water and turn left onto the Rota Vicentina.
Useful information about the rota
Unhelpfulness is a core value of this blog, but so is inconsistency, so here is some actual information about the route. There seem to be two Fishermen's Trails, a "historic" one, and this one, which runs along the clifftops and takes in the coastline and the tourist villages. I don't know that the new one was ever popular with fishermen ("nope, no fish in this wine bar, either"), but it is spectacular. I did it at the beginning of February; the weather was good (mostly dry, temperatures of 10-20 degrees Celsius), and I saw only a handful of other hikers each day. Doing it in the summer would be awful. I booked the hike through a company, recommended by a friend, that handles accommodation and luggage transfers and gives you maps and GPS files. This is all very handy, but it would also be easy enough to arrange it all yourself.
I did a 'highlights' version with 4 stages of 18-20km each: Porto Covo to Vila Nova de Milfontes; to Almograve; to Zumbujeira do Mar; to Odexeixe. The trail is clearly marked with blue-and-green blazes (though there are a few places where checking a map or GPS route is reassuring). It's mostly a hands-in-pockets stroll, but there are one or two spots where there's a bit of exposure, a few steep-ish climbs and descents, and a lot of loose sand (particularly from Porto Covo to Vila Nova), which is tiring. There are some short stretches of roadside walking, but they're not too bad, except maybe for a very short section just south of Vila Nova, where for a couple of hundred metres you're either on the road or in a sloping concrete gutter.
Drivel about the Rota
Day 1. The trail runs mostly along clifftops overlooking dramatic coves, some with beaches, some full of slabs fallen from the cliffs you're walking on, some with jagged outcrops where ancient cataclysms folded up the rock layers, turned them sideways, and shoved them upwards. Along the beaches, seabirds wait patiently in little groups and the occasional surfer bobs in the waves. The trail crosses a parking lot where more surfers are rocking up, some in sensible commuter cars and others in tricked-out nomad vans.
This is your first and best chance to chuck the hike and drop into a surf-bum lifestyle, a surfer cult, or a Point Break-type surfing-and-crime gang. If you don't answer those calls, the rest of your day will be trudging through loose sand. Late in the day, when the sun is hot and you're plodding uphill, it's any lost-in-the-desert movie scene, and you cast about in vain for oases or friendly Bedouin. There are occasional other hikers: local people out for a walk; young German women in pairs; frail-looking older women with trekking poles clicking gamely along; middle-aged men with glasses and DSLRs.
After five or six hours, I get to the outskirts of Vila Nova de Milfontes. I wave to a little kid leaning out a car window looking at me, and he gives me the finger. I've now had little kids flip me off for no reason on three continents. I wonder what the record is. It probably turns on technicalities like age limits and Antarctic overwintering rules. Anyway, I should say that this little bastard is the only unfriendly person I came across.
Vila Nova seems like the largest and fastest-growing of the otherwise identical towns along the trail. You walk into an eerie, silent quarter of new homes laid out neatly along new streets. Once the town greeter has moved on, justifiably satisfied with his work, the only sign of life is a girl skateboarding back and forth along the road. It turns out to be a bit of a slog to the guesthouse, and, because the hike is technically over, it's a slog you don't really mentally budget for. Luckily, this place, the Blue Guide House (or Blue Guide? Or Blue House?) is quite good, with a breakfast that rises way above the local bread-and-cheese standard.
Day 2. The booking company I used couldn't find me a place in Almograve, so a guide drove me there to walk back to Vila Nova. He talks about bureaucracy, lobbying, agribusiness, where the most annoying tourists are from, white storks, how bananas Vila Nova is in summer, and about how the mapped start of this stage is lame because the trail would otherwise have too much 'level 3 danger' to qualify for accreditation or other. He points out a better route. This isn't much of a vote of confidence, because the level 3 danger is walking down a slope, crossing a shallow stream, and walking up the other side. Are there two levels of danger below this? Demoralizingly poor breakfasts? Rude children? Possibility of getting your hair mussed? He also mentions that I'm being tracked by infrared for an environmental impact study. I review all the things I did the day before, and am satisfied I had good reasons for jumping up and down on those endangered plants. Also, fishing with grenades is just so much faster.
A surf school, closed for the season, painted with surfer wisdom about traveling your own road. A tranquil fishing village of white buildings and blue trim. Old men fixing crab traps in a garage, a woman tottering along with a bucket, laundry waving in the breeze, sullen youths watching you from a balcony, and a rooster crowing insanely like its insane forefathers before it. The trail leaves the cliffs every so often to take you through patches of forest and flopped-over cane thickets you have to stoop under. There are horseshoe tracks in the sand (in Ontario, I would think, "what a cunning bear to disguise its tracks like that"). Then riders come nodding along, and soon after there's a horse-y agristay and fields and stables where horses side-eye you as you pass.
The trail descends boat ramps where tiny fishing vessels and piles of crab traps (fish traps? Lobster traps?) are stored. On the drive, the guide explained that local fishing is kept strictly artisanal and local. Almost everything is. The villages have no international chains, no large hotels, no incongruous modern buildings. The surf schools are humble and homespun; none of the nightmarish modern surfer factories with their soot-belching smokestacks and bleak parade grounds where platoons of identically shaggy students chant surfer credos.
Here and there, slopes of loose rock lead temptingly down to the cliff edge, whispering "wouldn't you get a much better picture from down here?" On the height across the river from Vila Nova are harvested cork trees spray-painted with the number 9 and a cluster of abandoned buildings. Most are old stone structures littered with broken terracotta tiles from their caved-in roofs, but one is a two-storey house that was clearly very stylish in the 1940s. It's been bricked up, but someone has dug a human-sized mouse hole in the front; inside are the graffiti murals and litter you expect. I just look inside, partly because I don't want to fall through a rotten floor or surprise anyone, mostly because I'm not willing, at this point in the day, to climb stairs for any reason. On the side of the house is a mural of a nude, pregnant Eve with a python-sized serpent draped over her shoulders.
Warning signs and once-informative plaques along the trail have been bleached white by the sun and covered up in stickers and Sharpie writing. The trail is mostly empty, but it gets almost congested towards the end of the day, with three of us within sight. Should I pass the walker ahead? I'm coming for you, old man... you can't keep this pace up forever... fine, we'll see what the drug tests show.
My lodging in Zambujeira is behind a locked door to which a slip of paper with a phone number has been taped. Not what you look forward to after a six-hour walk, but I search international dialing rules and eventually an odd man whose pants are too long lets me in. This place went for, and comprehensively nailed, a kind of 50s American beachfront motel aesthetic. The sign is faded, the furniture turquoise. In the bathroom are wrapped soaps and two mysterious vials that say "Enjoy Your Life". There's some unreadably tiny writing on the back. "Bath gel"? "Veterinary de-worming solution"? I wash my hair with Enjoy Your Life, look up local restaurants, and then go to bed and don't move for ten hours.
Day 4. Breakfast in Zambujeira do Mar is in the restaurant downstairs. It's served by an elderly man who speaks no English, and I am his only guest. He brings bread, cheese, coffee, juice, and a container of yogurt. I delight him with my horrible Spanish, and he wishes me, I think, a pleasant walk, gesturing to the rain outside and making a little walking motion with his fingers.
Immediately, there are orange peels on the path; I'm again on the trail of the orangepeel bandit. There are more traces throughout the day, but (to avoid unnecessary suspense) I never quite run her to ground. A close look shows that some of the peels -- though the lab results aren't yet in -- seem much older than a day, suggesting that she's not working alone.
Light rain persists into late morning, and the trail keeps climbing up spurs of loose rock and descending into muddy valleys where the vegetation is thick and laced with strands of thorns. I run into a hiker, and we warn each other that the trail ahead is muddy. His side turns out to be much worse. I straddle mud puddles, pick my way across them on wobbly rocks, and risk it all by crossing them with heroic leaps (by "it all" I mean "getting quite muddy").
The trail detours because (the sign says) of landslide risk. It runs inland, skirts electric fences around a cow pasture, and then runs along a quiet road for a while before turning into a farming region of dirt roads and some large agribusiness with rows of arched white covers and an open field where a lone goose sentries mindlessly back and forth. Then it's back to the ocean and another series of breathtaking coves and their attendant storks.
The trail reaches Praia de Odeceixe, turns east, and runs between a slow river and shale cliffs with gullies filled with crumbs of rock. It dumps you onto a road again, a quiet one that winds unhurriedly towards Odeceixe itself, skirting fields that exude rich agricultural smells. Lambs tumble after their mothers and roosters and dogs contend in pointless noisiness. Will I be here long enough to present my proposal to the town council to personally strangle all the roosters? Odeceixe, just a hair inside the Algarve, is a sleepy farming town waking up to the possibilities of tourism. It has a historic windmill, a pizzeria, a sushi restaurant, and a Hollywood-type sign on the road into town. Most of it is closed for the season, and the rest is closed for siesta.
The guesthouse here is another little adventure: the door is open, my carry-on sits in the hall, but no one answers the bell or the phone. Finally, a tiny, grandmotherly woman comes downstairs and discovers me. She speaks no English, so becomes the second senior of the day to be dazzled by my Spanguegese. Maybe I should have gone out looking for more. She offers a choice of small, scrupulously clean rooms mostly filled by iron bedsteads. Because the room is frio, she goes across the hall and comes back dragging a small electric heater, which she fusses into life. The place feels historic -- like how the budget traveler would have existed a century ago -- and has an extremely hot shower that could strip the paint from a tractor.
