The Great Iberian Road Trip, Days 38-42: Going South

 

The week at Penacova was quite uneventful and made a change to the hectic activities of the previous month. The last couple of days we spent at the river beach, and visiting some historical windmills of the Quixotic kind. Penacova and the region is beautiful but there are a few things about this area that seemed a little odd.

Penacova doesn’t have a very large population – 15,000 people live there – but it is quite spread out, and there didn’t seem to be much of a centre. The main supermarket was up a hill out of town, a bank was located in an ordinary house with a gate and a small garden, the fire service was located in a side street at the top of the town, and there were other commercial establishments spread out everywhere. But no centre. We stumbled upon a great little café on the opposite side of the valley to us, at the very top. The view was tremendous, but there was nearly nobody in it. They even had a kids’ corner and the guy who ran it had some serious music equipment. If this were in any other place, it would have been crammed full of visitors. But this being Penacova, it had two local guys in there getting drunk and talking politics.

I asked our hostess why it seemed that every café we had passed was full of men of a certain age. There was this semi-toxic masculinity floating around bars and cafés in the town. She said it was just the way it was in rural Portugal, which I found to be quite sad really. Another thing I found a little strange was the lack of pavements. Everyone was walking along the side of the roads between the parked cars to get anywhere.

On Friday 9 August, we left Penacova for the relatively warmer city of Setúbal, about half an hour south of Lisbon. On the way, we decided to make a stop in Fatima, the home of That Other Miracle, and if there was time, go to Óbidos, a well-preserved medieval town half way. Passing Fatima, it became obvious that this wasn’t really going to be worthwhile. It seemed to be just a provincial town dining out on some obscure and eminently implausible happening many years ago.

So we headed to Óbidos, and it was not a mistake. Despite the massive car park next to a sixteenth-century aqueduct, and the streets full of tourists, it was a really lovely place to go for a walk and for some food. We encountered French, British, American, Scandinavian, Flemish, Dutch, Japanese, Danish, Brazilian, Italian, Chinese, Spanish and Indian people, so it had quite a reputation.

The children were getting a bit ratty from the constant meandering of the roads, so we started looking out for a place to eat. Dainoris was the worst – he can be really morose with his constant bleating, taking the joy out of the adventure, word by cheerless word. We looked at a few menus around the place and they all seemed appetising. One of the serving staff in a place we chose said “the waiting time for dishes is up to 45 minutes, so with your hungry children, better keep on looking!”

This was the kindest and best advice of the day.

Another hundred metres further on, we stumbled upon a splendid restaurant with a pretty reasonably priced menu, considering it was in a prime part of town. It took a while for anyone to come to our table though, as the guy running this place seemed to have all the time in the world to chat to everyone. But order we did, and the food came about half an hour later, so we didn’t really save much time, but at least we were outside on a terrace, and it all looked really good.

We weren’t disappointed – my mixed grill was superb, with pieces of pork belly, beef steak cuts and crunchy vegetables. The children had a sausage medley, including one new to my repertoire: the farinheira, as the name suggests a floury affair, it was orange in hue and had the texture of mashed potato. It’s one I will keep my eye on. Bonny Bee had a splendid chicken steak in honey and mustard sauce, which I would have taken if we were to return.

The children hardly ate their sausages, preferring the blandness of their chips and a few bites of the rest. I wasn’t going to leave such an array of deliciousness there, so I did my best to eat it all. Two meat dishes. This was the most I had eaten in about two years and when I weighed myself later, I had put on quite a lot in one day.

After an equally splendid dessert and coffee, we headed off to the ramparts of Óbidos which surrounded the entire town and were totally walkable, although when we hit an area without safety barriers, we turned around and went back.

The journey to Setúbal was pleasant and hilly, then the colossal Vasco Da Gama Bridge across the River Tagus, as spectacular as its counterpart over the Great Belt in Denmark from Fyn island to Sjaelland, but about a tenth of the price to cross.

Arriving in Setúbal, having sent our hosts a message that we would be there at about 5 or quarter past, I parked in a scorchingly sunny location on a street that had seen better days. I walked around the building where the person letting us in was apparently going to wait. There was a woman standing there busy on her phone, with her daughter of about 12, but she didn’t acknowledge me and so I presumed she wasn’t the one who would be waiting for somebody who looked like a northern European carrying a mobile phone and a bag, and standing in the shade anticipating somebody to guide him to his apartment.

We ignored each other for a good couple of minutes more, until I decided she might be the one. I said her name (I forget what it was now), and she said yes. After I had rolled my eyes so far around my head that they had taken a look at my brain, she said to follow her. I asked her to wait a couple of minutes while I got the others, and we went upstairs. She was nice, but unlike all the other hosts on our journey so far, she didn’t really have the instinct for guest care. She showed us a few ins and outs in the apartment, and then she left.

So far, there are a few things I need to get off my shoulders, lest I write a scathing review: this place is listed as a loft, although it’s like calling our storage container a mobile home, or our compact Kia Niro a camper van. Anyway, it’s adequate for ten days, but if I had a choice, I would leave a few days earlier and spend the time in a few other places on our way to the next destination.

I went to the supermarket, which is in a side street just across the main road so that we had a few provisions, and after lunch on Saturday 10 August, we took a trip into the centre of town. Setúbal is a nice enough town – quiet, apparently, by Portuguese standards – although the first night was marred by a nearby student house where a party was going on. The place is jammed full of cars, parked in every single conceivable gap, but there were nearly no people around. The centre is completely pedestrianised, which accounts for the pile-up of vehicles and the empty streets: apparently everyone was at the beaches. To get there, you take the buses provided, because they’re all out west of town. I had heard it was easier than driving.

The kids had been hankering for dessert after I had cooked dinner. Portugal does one thing right, and that’s cakes. We sat at a café next to the town’s fountains and had something sweet before the kids asked to play boats with their rubber sandals in the fountain pools. The next thing we know, they’re all inside the waters splashing around like a bunch of chimpanzees in clothes. Mortification was the first feeling, followed by anger, then a slow acceptance that actually this was a logical step considering it was above 30.

When we managed to fish them out, their clothes were soaking all the way through. “I’m cold”, “I’m all wet!” came the cries. I wonder why… anyway, they needed some new clothes, so I wrung out their shirts and dresses, and we headed for the quiet labyrinthine streets of the centre where we found Bonny Bee a new dress and stumbled upon a lovely boutique full of children’s clothes. The sale was on, so we didn’t hold back.

We drove out of the town in the early evening to take a look at the scenery further west. And then it became clear why the non-pedestrian centre of Setúbal was plagued by cars: the winding roads leading to a number of bays, coves and beaches were littered with parked vehicles of all kinds. This stretch of road had 70kph speed limit in parts, but because of the precariously abandoned cars left on the side of the road, and the sheer number of people walking to them, we could barely reach 30kph.

A little further on was an abandoned fortress overlooking the river mouth. What a glorious sight – cargo ships, sand banks like atolls, tourist villages, bridges, beaches, forests, mountains, towns and much more as far as the eye could see. We had had our first little adventure in this area, and there were hopefully more to come.

However, on that Saturday evening, I started to feel unwell to the extent I couldn’t open my eyes and I had a nosebleed and headache. Time would tell if this was something nastier than just fatigue.

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