It is now Thursday 24 February and only two more days to go before I start my trek back to the Quercy. This is the first day of rain since I’ve been here, which has given me a chance to catch up on the Blog. I can’t complain as I’ve been here seven weeks and the daytime temperatures have consistently been in the high teens and often over 20. It looks like the freezing cold weather back home is finally over so not a bad time to be heading North.
For the second part of my stay I was joined by my sister Sara, who flew over for 10 days but decided not to share my little apartment, preferring to stay in a five star hotel on the beach instead.
As usual when I get together with my sister, we manage to get A LOT of exercise and during the course of her stay we averaged over 40,000 steps per day. This started with a morning run on the beach (which I have done every day I’ve been here), usually followed by a very long walk in the afternoon or a trip out on mountain bikes. I think she had ideas of lounging on a sun bed by the pool but in the end the holiday became a kind of “boot camp” by the sea – very enjoyable but admittedly quite tiring. We had two favourite walking routes – one out to the West across the marshes taking in the ruins of a Roman Villa, the other one was to the East along the beach (tide permitting) to the harbour at Portimao and our favourite destination – an ice cream stall. The ice cream cones were cheap, very tasty (mint choc chip) and enormous..
As the walk to the ice cream kiosk was rather long we managed to find a beach restaurant to use as a refreshment stop near the half way point..
We managed a few meals out with Tim and Helen, when we could fit them in to our busy exercise schedule…
On one of the beach walks we decided to be a bit more adventurous and try to follow the line of the cliffs as closely as possible. Not really recommended as the cliffs are badly eroded and unstable – with lots of danger signs for good measure. A bit of rock climbing was an interesting addition to the training regime though…
On one of the beach walks we came across one of the “stone piles” that are quite common (don’t know if they have a name – cairns?) – basically a stack of rocks created by a passing tourist. However, this particular stack was one of the most impressive I’ve seen. Usually they are just a pile of rocks in decreasing sizes, balanced on each other, but this one had small pieces inserted to hold the whole thing together.
Sara and I stood there admiring it for a while and she became convinced that it was not free standing and must be glued together in some way – so scrambled up to take a closer look. As children we were taught to “look with your eyes not your hands”, but Sara completely ignored this lesson and lifted the top stone to see if it was held by anything more than gravity (it wasn’t). Unfortunately this destabilised the stack and the whole thing started to totter and collapse, the next picture shows her trying to hold it all together shortly before it became a very small pile of rocks…
Once Sara had gone home for a rest I was back into my daily routine of a beach run, followed by breakfast of coffee and a Pastel de Nata at the Plaza cafe opposite the apartment.
In the afternoon I would typically head out onto the trails to the North on my motorbike or mountain bike. My favourite destination was Monchique – up in the hills about 30Km North of Alvor, which took about an hour and a half on my (electric) mountain bike. It wouldn’t be possible to climb some of the hills without electrical assistance. Tim rented an electric bike from Tic Tac Cycles and joined me on one occasion, but he had a puncture en route and it took us four hours to get there.
I was very impressed with the performance of Tim’s bike – he used a lot less battery than I did and managed to get up one hill that I had attempted and failed to get up several times on my bike. His rental bike was a KTM hardtail with a 250W centre drive motor and 400Wh battery. Mine is a home built electric conversion from a Trek full suspension bike with an OZO 1000W hub motor and 1000Wh battery – so on paper it should have been faster, run further and been able to climb better. As it turned out they were quite evenly matched with the KTM apparently much more efficient on battery use. Of course it may just be that Tim just has more cycling ability than I have – I needed to find out !
So I rented another KTM bike from Tic Tac to do the Monchique route and get a back to back comparison with my own bike. The results were very interesting, but I won’t bore you with all the details here. Suffice to say that the bikes were quite evenly matched but the KTM only used one third of the battery power needed by my Trek, and it managed to get up the tricky hill.
Once you get North of the motorway (and avoid the golf courses and solar farm) there are trails going everywhere. I had been spending quite a bit of time in the evenings plotting out and validating routes using Google Earth for me to explore the next day. As time went on I tended to stick to my favourite routes – usually involving a cafe as a destination. Most of the off road tracks are perfectly manageable and are really forestry tracks. However, some of them ae very much steeper and trickier due to the loose rocks or ruts. I didn’t intentionally try any of these on the mountain bike, but did test myself on a few with the motorbike. This particular hill is en route to Monchique and is pretty challenging although I did manage it…
Since I have been here I haven’t really used the car at all or been very far afield, so one day I decided to head out West to the Atlantic coast in the car and visited the fort at Sagres – just about the most south-westerly point in mainland Europe. The whole area seemed to be dedicated to surfing and with good resaon as they have some amazing surf beaches…
In the evenings, when not plotting routes or going out to dinner with Tim and Helen I did manage to read a small amount of one of the books I brought with me. My apartment was actually quite cold and dark in the late afternoon and evening so I often took the opportunity to get out and watch the sunset over the harbour…
Tim and Helen have been spending the Winter out here for many years and have made great progress with their Portuguese language skills – I can just about manage the usual please, thank you and can I have the bill. However, I did see an old Clio parked at the side of the road with some writing on the side window that I think I could translate…
Oh yes and I need to mention the Lemon Tea… I stopped having caffeine in the middle of last year and have been pleasantly surprised at the range of herbal teas available. Helen did mention once that I should try putting a bit of lemon rind in a cup of hot water to make a nice refreshing drink. I never got around to trying it and had assumed it would have very little flavour – how wrong I was ! It is now one of my staple brews, supplemented by a bit of ginger and turmeric…
Well that’s about it for this year, we’ll have to see what next year brings and whether I can make it back to Morocco. Until next time…
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