Sabbatical 2001-2 : Salema : days 69-72

It's a hot lazy afternoon here in the dry, sunny Algarve. We started the day slowly, went for a sun bathe and swim at midday, then a lazy lunch, and now Rochelle is resting, Chad's probably at the internet café, and Sienna and I are sitting at a shady table writing companionably in our journals, trying to get caught up ...

Toward the end of our last day in Coimbra, Rochelle, Sienna, and I went to the train station to arrange for our onward trip, knowing it wouldn't be easy. Fortunately for us, we got a young woman behind the ticket window who spoke good English, and although it was clear that (1) she had never been to the Algarve, and (2) as a true northerner she couldn't imagine why anyone would want to go there, nevertheless she worked with us to find the best -- turned out to be only -- way to do the trip in one day, and to secure us tickets. "Thank you for speaking English," I said to her. "I'm too stupid to be able to speak to you properly in Portuguese." "Yes," she replied, "but you could learn..."

We left Coimbra gently, but the ensuing travel day was a long and complicated one. The 9:04 commuter train rattled us a couple of kilometers to the high speed station, and we had barely dragged our bags to the right platform when the red-white-and-blue Alfa Pendicular streaked in from the north. We found our seats and settled down for the easiest part of the trip, about two hours to Lisboa, where we stashed our bags in lockers and set out along Lisboa's riverine fringes in search of lunch. We found a lovely workmen's café where we were well taken care of, enjoying omelettes and beers and olives.

In Portugal one is often brought bread, olives, and spreads (anchovy, fish, nut, veggie) at the beginning of the meal, and billed for what one uses at the end. This comes as a surprise to some travelers, but seems perfectly sensible to us once we learned the rules. We experienced a new wrinkle in the workmen's café: we gobbled up our salad, and were promptly brought another without being asked. About this time Chad reappeared, having abandoned his search for an internet café, and so we made him a plate and started in on the second salad which we had originally thought to leave untouched. Perfect!

Lisboa is on the wide estuary of the Rio Tejos, and trains south to the Algarve leave from Barreiros on the southern bank, ten kilometers away from downtown Lisboa. We retrieved our baggage and taxied to Fluvial, from whence the ferries to Barreiros depart.

Our Alfa Pendicular fast train stopped briefly in the incredibly cute railroad station at Santarém -- too briefly for me to get out the camera. Moorish windows and facade, roman columns, Portuguese azulejos (including at least one Virgin but also a farmer hoeing crops) and a perfectly maintained little flower garden. Parts of this country, particularly in the rural highlands, are incredibly neat and tidy. Freshly whitewashed small houses, magnificently groomed vineyards, corn fields, orchards -- time is easy, and I imagine no one hurries or slacks off, and, since it has been just this way time out of mind, it's all orderly and beautiful.

We continued south to Tunes, arriving thirty minutes after our onward train to Lagos had left. We waited for the next one patiently, knowing that we had probably also missed our arranged taxi ride from Lagos to Salema. When travelling in places like this one must have great faith in the Travel Gods. Finally, eleven hours after leaving Coimbra, we arrived in Lagos, where we engaged in the interesting past-time of finding a taxi in a place where there appear to be none and no one speaks enough English to help much ... but wait, the lady at the ticket window has a phone number ... and, the eternal travel miracle, the man who answered understood my Spanish enough to agree to come drive us to our next home in Salema.

We arrived just at sundown, barely conforming to our travel rule of arriving in a new place before dark. Our wonderful ex-patriot British host, John, pointed us to the right restaurant and even the right fish to order, and, after a beer, we felt almost human again.

There really isn't much to write about Salema. It's very near "the end of the world," the southwestern point of the Iberian peninsula where navigators agreed that the land stopped and, shortly thereafter, the water stopped, too. Anyone foolish enough to sail over the edge would surely perish. Prince Henry the Navigator built a school and observatory there to gather accounts of the edge, and some of his students, Vasco de Gama and Ferdinand Magellan in particular, went on to prove the world to be a sphere.

But that's not why we came. We came for a vacation from our travels. Rochelle and I had been travelling on the two-day plan for six cycles now, two nights each in Chenonceaux, Paris, San Sebastian, Santiago de Compostela, Porto, and finally Coimbra, with Sienna and Chad along for the last five; we were ready for a longer stay in a place where we could vegetate, soak up some rays and good food, get our clothes washed, read a book, and catch up with our journals. Salema served us perfectly, but I'm afraid our experience didn't produce many words or pictures!

After a nearly perfect first day, and the extraordinary pleasure of a second slow-moving morning without any need to pack and catch transport, we're mellowing out nicely. Sienna's almost caught up with her journal, Rochelle's run out of people to send postcards to, and I'm only one city behind in my journal. Time to leave! NOT!! Two more days here; what luxury...

Post office on wheels

Salema is a wonderful little village island in the midst of a dry and mostly desolate peninsula. Back toward Tunes there are olives and oranges in orderly rows on prosperous but low-key farms, but here there are mostly only Germans and Brits on vacation or retired. Nevertheless, fish and vegetable trucks roll in and beep the start of the day every morning, and the red traveling Correios (post office) drops in every weekday afternoon.

Unfortunately, Chad didn't really agree about the perfection of our accommodations, and in fairness he drew the short stick in terms of rooms. He jumped ship after one night, and got himself a room at the hotel across the way (at his own expense). We saw him for meals, and once or twice during the day for walks or beach time, which seemed a good arrangement -- he probably needed a vacation from us. I applaud him for taking responsibility for his own well-being.

In keeping with our experience that there are only 400 people in the world, at breakfast our first day a friendly and very familiar woman asked, "Are you Michael Potts?" She turned out to be Toni Illick -- I hope I'm spelling her name right -- and right behind her was her partner Doug Ferguson, two loyal partisans in the Caspar conspiracy. We enjoyed dinner with them the next evening, and there Tony told us about the Portuguese paleontologist who had shown her the Dinosaur prints.

Now dinosaur footprints aren't something one encounters on every beach in Portugal. Tony and Doug had tramped around northern Spain looking for some reputed to be there, and here we'd all stumbled onto some practically by accident. She carefully described their whereabouts -- by this time it was too dark -- and the next day, our last day in Salema, we took a short walk down the beach to see if we could find them

They couldn't have been much more obvious!

On a rock shelf just in back of the beach, a string of several well demarcated imprints showing the classic three-toed gait, about a human pace apart, deeply indented into the sandstone.

On the exposed hill one could see that the harder rock was overlaid by a softer layer, probably deposited by a storm shortly after the dinosaur had walked across the mud. A Portuguese fellow took time off from photographing his topless girlfriend long enough to scratch his head in wonder.

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Salema It's a hot lazy afternoon here in the dry, sunny Algarve. We started the day slowly, went for a sun bathe and swim at midday, then a lazy lunch, and now Rochelle is resting, Chad's probably at the internet café, and Sienna and I are sitting at a shady table writing companionably in our journals, trying to get caught up ...

Dinosaur footprints	Now dinosaur footprints aren't something one encounters on every beach in Portugal. Tony and Doug had tramped around northern Spain looking for some reputed to be there, and here we'd all stumbled onto some practically by accident. She carefully described their whereabouts -- by this time it was too dark -- and the next day, our last day in Salema, we took a short walk down the beach to see if we could find them
They couldn't have been much more obvious! On a rock shelf just in back of the beach, a string of several well demarcated imprints showing the classic three-toed gait, about a human pace apart, deeply indented into the sandstone.
	On the exposed hill one could see that the harder rock was overlaid by a softer layer, probably deposited by a storm shortly after the dinosaur had walked across the mud. A Portuguese fellow took time off from photographing his topless girlfriend long enough to scratch his head in wonder.

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