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.