Because we are directly on the Portuguese coastal Camino here, the walkers have inserted themselves into our consciousness. We like looking for them, and they are easy to find, such as directly outside the hotel when we stepped out. Most that we see here on the upper coast have started from Porto, probably four days ago at this stage. The whole Camino through here is 280 km and takes 12-14 days. So it is quite short actually.
There are lots of walkers already on the go when we start off.
Scott commented yesterday on the narrow walkway of the bridge over the Lima. Here is the one today at Esposende, over the Cavado River. It's like airline seats, they keep shaving an inch and then another inch.
As usual the big question for us was whether to continue following EV 1, risking unknown conditions down by the beach, or to take the highway, and so to brave traffic and noise. We decided to give EV 1 a chance, and this worked beautifully, for at least the first half of the ride. The next several photos take us through what we saw as we progressed down the coast this way.
EV-1 at first offered us this brown path, which was great.
Scott AndersonIt never occurred to me to try identifying snails until the ones we saw back in the Gargano, but I think this is a Spanish milk snail (Otala lactea). I’m especially glad to have done this research because it introduced me to love-darts, which they and some other snails and slugs use to reel in a mate. Great article, great pics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_dart Reply to this comment 11 months ago
When we first flew into Porto, the plane circled around north, just to line up with the runway. That's were I saw acres and acres of greenhouses. Here are some, and I assumed there would be more, but somehow our route did not bring us by many more.
Scott AndersonThanks for using the word windrow in a sentence, with illustration. I’ve often read the word but just glossed over without knowing what it meant. Reply to this comment 11 months ago
Steve Miller/GrampiesGenerally you "windrow" hay, before coming along with the baler, but onions also need to dry and then be picked up. Reply to this comment 11 months ago
At some distance from we noticed a tower that I thought could be a lighthouse but which Dodie identified as a church. We steered toward it for a peek, and sure enough a church it was. I stepped in for a peek and did nit find much out of the ordinary. I would mention though - a clean shaven Jesus, and wall tiles with interesting symbols. For example, there was the intertwining of the anchor and the cross. That is perhaps not very controversial, but it still is a bit of homegrown theology.
This structure across the street from the church is either a ruin, or a piece put there on purpose.
We see a clean shaven boyish Jesus, a priest with an unidentified baby, and Mary in the highest position. All theology tidbits that were no doubt locally developed and approved.
The path now moved to boardwalk, something we might take as quite fun, and certainly with an ocean view. But there were some drawbacks. Inherently, boardwalk is not a high speed surface. And next, the walks were filled with peregrinos. That meant repeated dismounting and squeezing past. We also ran into walkers that were quite testy about sharing the space - not that they objected to someone walking a bike, they just did not really want to shove over. A variant of this was an increasing number of oncoming cyclists doing the Camino. These were highly resistant to dismounting for passing. In one "fun" case, we watched an oncoming cyclist and wondered when he was going to dismount. But he never did, he just kept coming, but slower. We reacted by not scrunching over, resulting in him unleashing a lot of mouthing off and complaining. The thing is, he did this in French. Maybe he did not consider that no one in Portugal would likely understand his comments, or maybe he just reverted to his native language when upset. In any case, he received quite a bit of negative commentary from us, provided in the language he could understand.
Diversion came from towns along the way, such as Povoa da Varzim, that had a casino, with a pink hotel. Some wide open spaces and a nice little harbour were pleasant to look at.
A little ove 1/3 of the way to Porto we crossed a little bridge into the downtown park of the town of Vila do Conde. This used to be quite a shipbuilding place, and it recalled this with a faithful replica 16th century ship floating in the harbour. The park was surrounded by lots of interesting houses, and was the perfect spot for lunch. But there was more to the town than just this. It was backed by a hill, and on that hill was a church/monastery and also the terminus of a tall aqueduct. Feeling strong, and at this point in the day not pressed for time, we undertook to climb the hill and to look at the church and aqueduct. We got quite nice views down to the town, but the church was under renovation and not open.
Vila do Conde is where what had been developing as a really glorious day became work. After the town, it was about 20 km before we really got back to the sea again. Somehow we struggled into and out of a nature preserve with an unusable surface, and then through miscellaneous suburbs of who knows what. Finally we did regain the boardwalk and the sea. But the joy was shortlived, as the boardwalk had stairs! Yes, 34 up and then 24 down, as the route struggled with some rocky outcroppings. It was a matter of taking all the bags off the bikes and then carrying both them and the bikes up up, along, and down down. At least we were not the only ones, and I was able to offer a German couple of about our age (from Hanover) some help with their slog.
No, this nature preserve won't do. We backed out of it.
Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Scott AndersonDodie kept checking the downloaded track, from the official website, and indeed this was it. The only sign indicating that this was EV 1 is the one in the photo above. Seriously a ridiculous routing choice! To make it even worse, at the start or entry to each boardwalk section a pictogram sign showed no bicycles allowed, with no alternative routing suggested. Reply to this comment 11 months ago
Now began a very very long and tiring section of the ride. From Matosinhos we no longer had to worry about the path surface, which was always paved, but we were now in a town environment. We struggled and diddled and twisted, across a difficult bridge, then circling and dodging this way and that to get on and stay on the correct route, and finally walking through construction and city streets, 5- 10 km before reaching our guesthouse. This was all a major revelation to me. Far from the quaint hillside town of the postcards, Porto is actually a huge and sprawling metropolis. It has large modern buildings, kms of streets under construction, big traffic jams with honking drivers, and blocks of absolutely standard retail stores of the kind that can be found in any city. All that "typical Portuguese" pottery, the chicken legend stuff, the fancy tiles? - it's just for tourists, and tourists are not found in 99% of Porto. I could not detect a culture or style here different from, frankly, Vancouver.
Another aspect of "real" Porto was industry. We found an active container port here, cars lined up on the docks, and a huge oil refinery area. Try to find those on a postcard.
Something lacking in all of Porto is any provision for bicycles. There was not a single bike lane that we could see. Together with the busy streets, we had no option but to walk. It took a long time, and we had to phone the guesthouse to make sure they would know we were still coming. We arrived about 8 p.m. , our latest of the tour. This cruise along the coast had been a real mixed bag. At first we thought we had discovered a paradise bike way to go, then it was an ok, sort of adventure on boardwalk, and then 20 km of bike path free city!
Running that in the other direction, we were thinking that a camino walker would need a taxi to the edge of the city, else they would spend their first walking day just trying to get out of town. We ourselves had been "teleported" from the airport by taxi to the old town, all those days ago when we first arrived in Portugal, and then we had left by way of the Douro, so we never realized what a metropolis we had been in, 'till now.
Oh, one other thing - the Port wine, the Douro wine region, and all that? No sign of it in "real" Porto, at all. Not even one wine shop, that we saw.
Come to think of it, we had found a similar phenomenon when we did the Camino into Santiago a few years ago. Santiago had been the intense focus of so much folklore. But when we got there, we found a large city that almost had not heard of the famous Camino. Not until we found our way to the cathedral did the Camino spring back life, in that otherwise uncaring city.
The riding surface is good now, but look at that industrial area we are entering.
We are now in our guesthouse, perched just on the edge of old Porto. Frankly, after our rude awakening to the reality of Porto, we are eager to go back to the postcard fantasy. We will be meeting Brent Irvine tomorrow, presumably in the old town. That will be really fun. I will be looking for photos of quaint houses, with grillwork balconies, and azulejos facing. And maybe I will get a keychain of a Barcelos chicken!
This is the time in the blog, when the bike wheels have stopped turning, that I urge everyone to keep reading each day. There is still a lot of interesting action to come, from seeing if our bike boxes are still where we left them, to airport fun, and some more days in exciting Montreal. Stay tuned!
Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles) Total: 2,923 km (1,815 miles)
