Day 15 - To Agueda

We set off today with a totally clear, blue, sky and brilliant sunlight. As we tend to, we had decided to have breakfast on the trail. At the first village there was nothing available, but at the second village, Aguim, we had delicious sandwiches and coffees. The cafe was a little off the Camino track and we only found it by accident. They really need to put a sign on the Camino trail and they would get a lot of business. On through other places including Anadia, after we walked through a large, totally deserted sports and athletics complex. It had become a feature of this trip to suddenly come across large modern structures that seem to be completely unused and deserted, probably due to the economic crisis that hit Portugal a few years ago. 

We continued steadily, coming across various odd features from time to time.

Things like a very artistic garden arrangement

the two headed goat,

footballing lions

and the dragon goalkeeper.

Later we stopped for a coffee break at another small village, Alfaloas, where the cafe owner, very kindly, gave us a leaflet for an albergue for tonight, and showed us her book of comments from other pilgrims, also stamping our credentials. While we were there we were joined by the youngest pilgrim that we've met so far on this trip, a young lady called Ava. She was originally from Belgium but currently living in Norway, and obviously wanted a chat with someone. She is walking the Camino by herself and camping out every night. Not something either of us would like to do, even in better weather than we've been having. It must be pretty horrible in the rain we've had over the last week or so. I heard, about a week ago that it's been, officially, the wettest April in Portugal for many years. 

We had a few more kilometres of countryside before our lunch in the early afternoon, again at a very nice little cafe with a very welcoming owner, she actually gave us two very nice meringues on the house. 

Somewhere along the route we passed a rather surprising, very modern, structure. This is a communal wash house for the village with the water being supplied from the local stream.

It seems rather a throwback to mediaeval times, but it is obviously very new. We've seen many other similar structures before, most villages have them, but most look very old and unused.

The other item we saw was this Camino marker. One part of it shows the direction to take on the Camino, but the other gives the distance to Santiago de Compostela as 303kms.

As most guides quote a distance of just over 600km between Lisbon and Santiago it means that we are just about halfway there. By evening we definitely will be.

The guide we're using describes the next stage into Agueda as a long slog through an industrial area. That sums it up entirely. It was a hard uphill climb through factories and warehouses, followed by similar downhill stretch into the centre of Agueda, followed by another long, steep uphill stretch to our albergue. 

We soon checked in, the receptionist mentioning that another Englishman, Les, had already checked in.  Later, as I caught up with my laundry requirements, he and Barbara walked back down the hill to the local Lidl to get two bottles of wine and some nibbles for later in the evening. We also ordered some takeaways to be delivered as an evening meal. High living on the Camino - partly to celebrate the halfway point, mainly for the hell of it. We were also joined by Bernard, from Germany, whose English improved greatly as the evening wore on and the wine took effect. 

All of us were fairly tired and retired to our rooms by about 8:30, me to work on this blog and Barbara to catch up with The Archers on the BBC Radio iPlayer.

Day 14 - To Mealhada

After our none-walking day in Coimbra we returned, with somewhat of a vengeance, to the task of walking the Camino today. We were up and out by about 08:15. There were no breakfast facilities at our hotel, but we had coffee and a nibble at a small cafe just opposite. Getting out of Coimbra was somewhat difficult because, as so often happens on this Camino, there seems to be several routes. The first route we followed just seemed completely wrong, it was going in totally the wrong direction. Looking closely at the route shown on a map it seemed that it would like to take you all around the town and cathedral district that we'd looked at yesterday.  Eventually we found a satisfactory route, initially by the river and canal, past the station and eventually out into the country.

We strode out at a steady pace, overtaking some other pilgrims stopping on the way for coffees, etc as necessary.

At Santa Luzia a big market in the centre of the town was just finishing. All the stallholders were clearing away their stalls. It looked as if it had been a big event. We saw Erña and Jurgen, from Holland and Denmark, from time to time, near here. The route then followed a track through a eucalyptus forest.

Just as we rejoined a paved road, after several kilometres of forest track, we saw two pilgrims approaching us from the opposite direction. Initially we thought that either they or is were lost. Almost as quickly we realised that they were pilgrims, but heading towards Fatima, which is now well south of us. We confirmed that with a few words, each wishing the others a good Camino and went on our ways. These are the first Fatima pilgrims we have definitely seen.  We've seen plenty of signs pointing guards Fatima and some possible pilgrims, but these were definitely going there.

The new route we had just followed is to avoid an equally long walk totally avoiding the main road. It eventually took us into the smallish town of Mala, where we had delicious, freshly baked, sandwiches for lunch.

The last stretch was from Mala to Mealhada, which seemed to be fairly endless, very pretty through the various types of countryside but it took a long time. When we arrived at the Pension that we had chosen for the night we were told that it was full. That was a bit of a blow, as the next place was about 2km further on. However it turned out to be a far better place with very good facilities. We had a very good evening there, over a meal, with various other pilgrims. We had already come across most of them, but this was was the first time that we'd had time to talk together. Our group consisted of Barbara and myself, Les from Brighton, he's only walking as far as Porto. Louise from Perth, Australia, and is hoping to walk to Santiago, but is having some pretty severe foot problems, and Alex, the youngest of the group at 42. He originally came from Sao Paulo, in Brazil, but now lives in Berlin, Germany. He was hurrying along as he was meeting sometime in Porto in a few days time. We will, hopefully, continue plodding along all the way to Santiago.

Day 13 - Non-Camino Day In Coimbra

We'd decided a long time ago that we would spend a day in Coimbra. By coincidence our original schedule put us in Coimbra on our wedding anniversary, but because we effectively missed a day, way back, when we took a bus ride out of Tomar, we arrived in Coimbra a day earlier than scheduled. Nevertheless we had heard that it was a good city to spend some time in. We'd reserved our penthouse apartment for two nights allowing us to spend the day just looking around. 

I deliberately didn't head this blog as a "rest day" as any exploration of Coimbra is not restful. It is a very hilly city, rivaling Lisbon for steep streets and developments at many differing levels. The lower part of the city is mainly commercial, but with some interesting old buildings and the riverside. The higher levels are where there University of Coimbra is mainly situated. Many of the main university's older buildings were officially royal palaces and registered buildings but we're handed over to the university several centuries ago. The university is a very old establishment and highly regarded.

Enough waffle, let's have a look at some photos.

In the lower part of the town is the hotel we stayed at. Our penthouse is the one at the top with the balcony. 

We made our first encounter with some of the students who were doing a street performance to raise money for charity.

Many students, make and female, wear long cloaks around the than, often with black suite underneath, some sort of traditional uniform presumably.

The last photo is of Barbara in the library jail, you could be put in there, in the past, for damaging, losing or simply not returning a book on time. We visited the chapel, library and some function rooms all situated around a grand plaza high in the town.

 One of the things missing on this Camino compared with our first one, especially, is any decent graffit. Here in Coimbra we found some, the last one being official, it was just being refreshed as we were there

Day 12 - To Coimbra

We awoke this morning after a reasonable night's sleep, not brilliant in my case as the bed was very hard. We'd been made aware that the local church, just up the street, didn't have any bells on its belfry, just very large loudspeakers that played very distorted recordings of some real bells. Not just a simple doing-dong but a whole convoluted chain of clangs. This occurred every half an hour. Fortunately it stopped after clanging out it's 10pm noise. It did however start it's racket again at 6am, but we were awake by then.

No breakfast was provided at the hostel, another minus point, and none of the cafe-bars were open, so we started without breakfast. The weather was fine but looked rather suspect as we set out, fully prepared for rain.

We walked a nice trail to Zambujal, a small village full of welcoming Camino signs.

We carried on, along some very wet paths, again the tracks were flooded in places and some avoiding action had to be taken. We also had a few showers, needing our larger poncho raincoats, but this rarely lasted very long, but were heavy at the time. Eventually we simply left the coats hanging from our rucksacks and slipped in and out of them 'on-the-go', carrying them in that manner virtually to the end of our walk.

At one point, not long after we were overtaken by Joe, from Belfast, we had to cross a somewhat deeper and wider channel than previously and Barbara fell rather heavily, twisting her knee and ankle. Fortunately there were no ill-effects, and she continued walking without further problem for the rest of, a rather long, day. 

The route turned out to be rather hillier than we had really expected, but a long stretch was through a very delightful valley taking us into Conimbriga.

This is the site of a very important, apparently, Roman settlement. There's a big visitor's centre with a very good cafe, we both had delicious "Roman" toasted sandwiches and coffee. Here we meet with Joe again.  (I realise now that I haven't mentioned that he was the only other resident in last night's hostel, which was were we first met him). We're made good progress to Conimbriga, even with the hills and floods, so we decided to walk the full 30km to Coimbra. We were already a third of the way there already.

The rest of the trip was through little villages, up and down lots of hills of various sizes, often catching glimpses of what we took to be Coimbra in the distance.

In a small village, a few kms before Coimbra we were reminded, in a rather novel way that this section of the Camino de Santiago is also a pilgrim route towards Fatima. The two trails follow the same route but in opposite directions. The Camino is traditionally marked by bright yellow arrows, and you soon get used to look for yellow. The Fatima route is also marked by arrows, but they are blue, so I suppose that pilgrims on their way to Fatima's look for blue.  In the village we spotted a small white structure at the side of the road that effectively combined the two routes and their colours and at the same time, with two boots, the idea of walking somewhere.

The same village has a, very, small house that had the most impressive gatepost artefacts that I've seen for a long time.

As we approached the outer suburbs of Coimbra we crossed over a very wide and busy road. From the bridge we were on, we could see where the main road passed through a large gap in what looks to be a very high Roman aquaduct. We hope that this destruction wasn't done just to allow the modern road through, but it very much looked that way. 

The very last stage was down a very long cobbled road taking us down to river level in Coimbra. Hard on the legs at this late stage. We found a cafe, got long cold drinks, as it was quite warm by now, and looked at the guide books to decide where to stay. We'd already passed a large albergue, but that was way back up the hill, and we couldn't bear the thought of having to go down and back up the hill again every time we needed to on our proposed rest day, tomorrow. We decided to look for something more centrally located in the town. We found one listed in the guide that looked good, it was just over the bridge, near where we were at the time, and on the edge of the old town.

We crossed the bridge and quickly found the hotel, The Hotel Larbelo. It looked OK and was very handily placed for exploring the old town and university areas. We liked the look of it and we're soon checked in for two nights at a special pilgrim rate. Unfortunately this also included it being a penthouse room, on the third floor, with no lift. There are only 72 steps from the reception to our bedroom, great after a long day climbing and descending hills. 

We were soon installed, and took a needed, brief, rest. We'd walked 30kms over 9 hours of walking, including a few breaks. Soon afterwards, after a quick shower and change of clothes, we were out to hit the town. Not too easy on a Sunday evening, but we dined in style at the local Burger-King, both enjoying a good dose of junk food.

Day 11 - To Rabacal

After yesterday's wet, but bearable, day of walking we were rewarded with a fine evening. The clouds had broken by the time we went to bed and things looked promising. The weather forecast was still ominous, but the reality outside looked better. During the night both of us were woken from our slumbers by the sound of torrential rain. Not a good noise.

When we finally awoke the day didn't look too bad. There were lots of clouds, in 50 shades of grey, but it wasn't raining.

We took a chance and opted to leave off our weather-proofs. Because of the uncertainness of the weather currently we are only planning to walk relatively short distances each day. This is also, to some degree, determined by the availability of suitable stopping places. We don't really want to faced with, say, a twelve to fourteen kilometres trek, in the sort of rain we've been having, simply because there is no available accommodation in between. Today we have booked to stay at the Casa de Tourisma in Rabaçal about 15km away.

We started with a steady climb out of Ansiao and we're soon into a forested area, following a good track. It was obvious that there had been a lot of rain last night but the going was remarkably good.

The track was mainly gravel and other small to medium sized stones which had drained amazingly well, allowing us to make good progress.

In our Camino tradition we hadn't bothered with breakfast at the hotel, mainly because they only served it from 9:00 onwards, by which time we were well along our route. We passed through several very small villages, all in very pleasant walking conditions, eventually meeting with a main road and a cafe. Breakfast time we thought. Inside the cafe we were greeted by Brigitte and Pascal who had arrived just before us and we're also breakfasting there.

We chatted in French for a while and even took photographs of each other before they departed

I mentioned that we had decided not to wear our waterproofs when we started, but we still had our windproof jackets on, as initially it was a little chilly. By now though we needed to take off these as the sun was becoming quite warm.  Amazingly after last night's rain, the weather was getting better and better. All the little streams were flowing rapidly but we still haven't been troubled by rain. That is until we neared the small town of Junqueria.

The guide says that the track goes near, but not through, the town and the path was taking us off to the side until we met our first problem of the day. The track we should have taken was completely flooded. We'd noticed that the fields, mainly vineyards, around here often had large flooded zones, but this time a flood zone extended completely across our track.

We walked right up to it to see if we could somehow get through. It was impossible, the water even at the edge, was more than deep enough to completely cover our boots, further onwards it looked to be substantially deeper. Time to look at the GPS mapping. Fortunately there was an alternative route available along a nearby road. This was hardly any longer than our planned track and we could see that it was unaffected by the flood.

After this little diversion we encounter no other problems partly because at a small village further on when we stopped for a short coffee break, a local guy, who ran the cafe advised us to ignore the official route, across country, and stick to the road. The official route, he said was much longer, and likely to be affected by the flooding. Taking his advice we started on the road, which wasn't very busy, soon making it to our destination of Rabaçal.

In Rabaçal we encountered our French companions again. Brigitte and Pascal had stuck religiously to the route, including fording the flood we encountered, and some others later in the off-road section we had avoided. They said that in some places the water was nearly knee-deep. We were glad of the advice we had been given earlier.

Not only had we managed to avoid all the floods, but we had walked the whole of our distance for today without a drop of rain. In fact it was a rather warm walk eventually.

We soon found our lodging for tonight, it is situated on the main street of Rabaçal immediately next door to the town museum. A small guide book we are using says that if the door is locked, which it was, we needed to go to the museum next door and ask them to contact the correct person. The museum was closed when we arrived, we had to wait for 45 minutes in the bar opposite until the museum eventually opened. The museum lady duly contacted the "appropriate person" by phone and some while later a woman arrived to let us in.

This lady didn't seem very pleased with having to come to the hostel to let us in, she was rather terse and with little to say other than taking our money and passport details, and grudgingly stamping our credentials, before leaving again.

The place is a rather fine hostel with about 20 nice rooms, but we were the only residents. We soon settled in, but also soon discovered that there was no hot water. We had been told that we would have to run the hot tap for a few minutes before we could expect hot water. We tried, but after about 10 to 15 minutes running and still no hot water we decided something was wrong. Back to the museum to ask the lady there to contact the hostel lady with the news. (There was a contact number posted at the entrance but nobody ever answered it).

We had to wait for about 45 minutes, and pestered the museum lady again before any action was taken. The hostel lady at last returned and obviously had decided that we were calling her in a wild goose chase, because we couldn't deal with a small delay in getting hot water. However when she tried, and only got cold water she realised that something was actually wrong. She then rang someone else and a while later a couple of blokes arrived, did something, and got the system working. All this messing about took about two hours before we could have a shower, of even a decent wash. All of this was rather strange as we've been constantly amazed at the hospitality of all the Portuguese people we have met. They've even made light of our childish attempts at even the simplest Portuguese phrase, "It's a hard language, don't worry about it" had been the general response. It was so out of character of the Portuguese people in general.

We did eventually get the hot water and our showers, the room was warm and eventually we had a good night's rest. Tomorrow we are planning to have a long day. Today was very interesting but a rather short walk and the afternoon seemed to be wasted. If we hadn't stopped here though we would have had to walk a long way extra to the next available place. 

Tomorrow we aim to walk all the way to Coimbra, which is about 30kms (19mls). We hope to be able to do it as we want to spend a day there looking around what promises to be a very interesting university city. If, by any chance, we can't manage the whole 30km there is an alternative place to stay at about 20kms, and we know that we can walk that far without problems. Here's hoping!

At Rabacal - No internet.

As the heading says, we are at a small town called Rabacal, staying in a local authority albergue, which is quite nice.

But neither the albergue, or the bar across the road have any Internet connection. Additionally the local mobile phone coverage is just about nil, so I can't even use our local "hot-spot" facility on our extra Portuguese registered mobile-phone.

The only link available is from the local museum next door. That can only be accessed, by literally standing in the middle of the road outside. Not a busy road, by any means, but not the place to stand for more than a minute or so. So that rules out long text pieces and photographs.

It will all have to wait until tomorrow when, hopefully, we may have a better link.

Keep watching.........

Day 10 - To Ansiao

Yesterday evening turned out to be quite a party. In the last blog I left you hanging with the exciting news that our washing had just been returned, but we were then still on our own in the albergue. All was soon to change.

Later in the evening, as a reply to a comment, I put -

Since I wrote and published tonight's blog the place has become very busy, initially there was only Barbara and myself now at 22:20 there are at least eight people staying here. That's about three times as many as we've met since we started. I'm not sure where everyone has suddenly appeared from, but there's a much nicer atmosphere all of a sudden. The weather forecast is still bad though.

It was like the United Nations. We are from the U.K., there was a man from The Irish Republic, a lady from Australia, a couple from Denmark and another couple from Belgium. All steaming gently in front of the very cosy wood-burner. All except us had travelled far yesterday, much further than us, and they're all planning on traveling onwards much further than we are. The couple from Belgium are cyclists. They had cycled something like 100km yesterday and were planning in flying out from Porto in only a couple of days time, so they’ll be cycling a long way again on each of the next few days

Carlos was very busy ensuring everyone was happy and doing his admin. Everyone admired his very special Credential stamp. To add to the fun he presented each person, as they were settling in, a small glass of 10 year old, very strong, Port-wine. He then left the bottle on the table to be finished by anyone who wanted more. It didn't last long. It was a very cosy evening, very reminiscent of evenings we've had on the Spanish route in the past.

This morning was, as expected, fairly busy as everyone collected together their boots, socks, coats etc that had been drying-out overnight, and made ready to go. The weather, as we expected, was rain. Nowhere as heavy as yesterday, thankfully. We decided to walk wearing our wind/shower resistant jackets, but having out larger poncho-style raincoats available if needed. This turned out to be a good choice as, although the rain never actually stopped all morning, it stayed reasonably light. It was only at the very end of our walk that we found that we were really getting wet. By then we had arrived at our lodgings for tonight.

Carlos had promised that today's route, and the next few days, were to be very scenic and interesting. Such was the case, there was a great variety of interest all throughout the walk. We spotted or first bluebells, and some whitebells?, the first we've seen this year.

On a sunny day it would have been delightful. The whole area is, apparently, a very popular walking region, with many different walking trails being promoted in several detailed maps available in the town. 

In one or two places we saw what seemed to be entrances to very dark caves, we couldn't decide if they were man-made or natural but none looked inviting.

All of our route was on good surfaces, some tarmac roads, some hard gravel trails and occasionally narrow, more rural trails. We came across very little mud, generally the surfaces were good. Initially we had a longish uphill climb with the remainder being gently downhill.

In one village we had two unusual events, the first was that our road was partly blocked by small landslip, caused probably by the sustained rainfall.

Not surprising, as in several places we've passed streams of rainwater running down the hillsides carrying quantities of small to medium stones in with the water. 

The other event was nearby, Barbara was walking a short distance ahead of me when a dog appeared from building and proceeded to snap and bark at her. 

Barbara simply ignored it and it eventually got the message and turned it's attentions on me. I didn't ignore it but shouted and growled back at it, with some degree of annoyance, at that it ran back where it came from. We've seen a lot of dogs, and heard far more, throughout Portugal. 

The Portuguese seem to like having lots of dogs around, not to our taste though.

Ansiao is a reasonably large town nestling in the valley of the Nabao River, the same river that flows through Tomar, that town we had a rest day at a couple of days ago. The River here is much smaller and, looking at the map, it seems as if the river’s source is  only a mile or two up in the hills nearby.

Our lodgings for tonight are at a small hotel just out of the Ansiao town centre. We saw a little of the town as we passed through. By the time we arrived there we'd walked continuously for about three and a half hours, so when we spotted a rather nice looking cafe/shop we tumbled straight in. It was the first place today that not only provided the possibility of a hot drink and good food but also the first place to sit. I've mentioned before that the one facility that is missing on virtually all long walking routes is any form of place to sit. It is not unusual to walk all day and not be able to sit on anything but the ground. Very few benches of even low walls.

The cafe was very nice with an excellent selection of good food available. We opted for a large piece of pizza each with a hot drink. We were joined but our Australian lady, who was walking on her own, and also met the Irish man who was just leaving as we arrived. He asked if we had seen the other male pilgrim in the town. We had just done so, but he was walking away from us at the time. He was obviously a pilgrim, but not someone that we had seen before. He, noticeably, carried a very long, fork-ended, wooden staff, very distinctive. Shortly afterwards he came into the cafe and sat down just nearby. We soon got into conversation, Barbara more than me, as it turned out that he was French, and Barbara was able to talk to him, for a short time, in French.

He was on a completely different trip than us, or for that matter, any of the other people we've met so far. He had left Paris some months ago and walked all the way to Santiago de Compostela. Having arrived there he was now walking on to Fatima to the shrine there. So he is walking south just as we are walking north. What an adventure!

Tonight's hotel is very nice with, as always so far in Portugal, very pleasant and helpful staff. The strange thing about it though is that, as we were being shown to our room it was almost like visiting the “haunted house”. It is quite a big building and all the internal corridors are almost completely dark, no lights on anywhere. The woman showing us to the room was obviously used to this arrangement, but we were soon almost lost. Later, after changing and settling in, we went back down to the reception/bar to complete our registration and had to take a torch with us to find the way. Very strange. There is a very efficient, and very hot, radiator in the room which at the moment is doing great service in drying out out clothes ready for tomorrow, outside it is, strangely very sunny. That wasn't forecast at all, but very nice.

This evening we had arranged to eat in the restaurant at 7:30. When we went down the only other people in the rather large restaurant were a couple who I immediately thought were other pilgrims. So it turned out, Brigitte and Pasqual are from near Bordeaux, France. They invited us to sit at their table. They only speak a little English, I speak a (very) little French, but Barbara is fairly fluent in French, with heavy Spanish influences at the moment. The hotel/restaurant manager only speaks Portuguese, none of us do. Nevertheless we had a very good and interesting evening comparing routes and guide books, and joking with the restaurant manager. They started from Lisbon, as we did, but they have travelled here via Fatima, and are aiming to walk to Santiago. They were planning on walking further than us tomorrow, everyone does, but after seeing our guidebook, which shows places to stop that their guide didn't, they may stop earlier than the originally planned. We may see some more of them later perhaps.