# Pasteis de Nata: 0, Distance Walked: 15.3km, # Floors Climbed: 161
The hotel I stayed in last night was a converted farm house. The breakfast room was the original (huge) farmhouse kitchen. There was just one big long table. Breakfast started at 8am. By 8:10am the table was full of hikers. The surfers wandered down much later and had to sit in the courtyard outside.
I sat with Florian at breakfast. While he is normally a very chatty person, he is decently quiet first thing in the morning.
I asked the hotel staff if it was OK to make a sandwich for lunch using ingredients from the breakfast buffet. I was sure it was (it said so in the notes in the room) but I wanted to confirm before I started helping myself. This started a flurry of sandwich making. Although I did notice the young woman next to me furtively wrapping up half her breakfast and stuffing it in her bag. She saved a whole 2 euros and 50 cents.
The walk today was quite short. The first part was along the coastline with a fair amount of up and down. The scenery was, as always, spectacular.
The 2nd half was just a straight shot south along an inland path to Vila do Bispo. Florian had pointed out there was a circular path north out of Vila do Bispo that overlapped a little with our route before heading west to the coast and then south and finally east back to town. He proposed taking that loop as it would be better scenery and only add an extra 5km to the day. I got to the turn-off west to the coast and thought about it, but my feet voted no. I'm glad they did as when I got here and checked the map more closely it was more like an extra 8km - and most of that would have been on loose sand. Florian did it though. Mind you, he started his holiday by riding his bicycle from his home in Germany to Porto.
I got here at about 2pm and stopped at a cafe for a drink and some (more) lunch. I ordered a toasted tuna sandwich - mainly because I knew the words in Portuguese for that. It was the first sandwich I've had here with more than the named ingredients in it. In addition to tuna it had lettuce, tomato and onion and the bread had been buttered!
The cafe had these fabulous coffee cups. They are for serving coffee to multiple bogans. Bogan clearly being a masculine word.
After I'd been in the cafe for about 1/2 an hour the nameless American also came in. He'd set out much later than I had but walks faster than me. He joined me for a drink. About another 30 minutes later Florian showed up and joined us. We all sat around drinking beer until 4pm when we could check in to our hotel. We are all staying in the same place tonight.
My room opens onto a shared balcony. Someone had washed their hiking gear and draped it over chairs to dry. It is very windy today. I saw a man, wrapped in just a towel, rushing around the balcony trying to save his laundry before it blew away. I'm reasonably sure it was Florian but I wasn't wearing my glasses and didn't plan on looking closer.
For dinner I ignored Ricardo's suggestions and once again located the hippy/veggie restaurant in town. I could see they had a proper pizza oven (not wood fired sadly) so I risked a pizza. The toppings were Good (capers, olives, oregano and burrata) but the base was merely Decent. It was made with some sort of healthy wholemeal flour and didn't have the right consistency at all.
For dessert I had a Black Baba which was Absolutely Delicious. It was a variant on a rum baba where the super light sponge was made with, I'm guessing, charcoal as it was black. It was soaked in a local rum equivalent and absolutely stuffed with a large spoonful of marscapone that was flavoured with local honey, more local rum and blackberries.
Tomorrow is my last day of hiking, then it is off to Lisbon for general sightseeing. My feet and ankles will be happy. The weather forecast for Lisbon is high 20s. I'll finally get to wear those dresses and shorts that I packed.
No comments:
Post a Comment