portugal

Portugal

Sunday 4th November 2007:

We entered Portugal through a deserted Customs, and carried on through the night to Aviero, stopping for an excellent value dinner (€7.50 for three courses, a drink, and coffee) along the way.

On arriving at the coastal city of Aviero, we found a campsite straight away and amazingly it was even open at 9:30pm and was right near the beach (praia). Both totally exhausted we went straight to bed, also realising that even though we were now in Portugal it's still not very warm.

Monday 5th November 2007: Praia de Barra, Portugal              GPS Info:   N40°38'21.4"   W08°44'39.7"

Miles Today: 379               Total Miles:  3033

We awoke to a beautiful morning with clear blue skies, sunshine and fairly warm. We were both keen to see the sea and praia so we set off towards the lighthouse. We were only about three or four streets back from a big, sandy beach and a small harbour entrance. Heidz got in lizard mode and enjoyed warming up in the sunshine on the big cement blocks around the harbour entrance, while we watched the fisherman fishing off the harbour wall and the fishing boats returning from their early morning's work and obviously on their way back to the markets.

We set off for another long days drive aiming to reach the Algarve. We stuck to the main A-roads(peage)  and paid a wack in tolls, but it was worth it to get to the Algarve and warmth, hopefully. Both unsure about the Algarve or where's good to stay, we decided to try and find somewhere fairly big to do phoning, internet and other stuff. We entered Albufeira in the dark and decided to drive west to Portimao and then stop wherever we found a campsite. Portimao is big, busy and has many big fancy hotels, but no campsite near the sea that we could find. We drove around a bit puzzled that the sea showed as being so close on the GPS, but there was only pitch black darkness outside that we could see. It was only when we got out of Duzi2 that we realised a lot of the Algarve is on cliffs high above the beach.

Hoping Albufeira might be more camper friendly, we drove back on the A1, to where we'd just come from. Albufreira seemed older with VERY narrow one way streets meandering up and down and around its heart. Ross very calmly drove Duzi2, who had to breathe in and turn around some very tight tiny corners. But again, no camping could be found anywhere.

Both tired, irritable and fed up we asked someone who pointed us to Villamora. So much for our GPS. Pity its has no European campsites registered.  Ross brilliantly  picked his way way down some very dark, rural roads to get us to the beautiful golf estate of Villamora, no campismo there either, but we were then directed to Forte Nova. Ending up on a beach with No-Camping signs all around, we were both desperate

and contemplated just pretending we hadn't seen the signs, but drove on a bit and stumbled onto the campsite which was open! At last we could stop and sleep inside our tent.

Tuesday 6th November 2007: Quarteira, Algarve, Portugal             GPS Info:   N37°04'01.5"   W08°05'03.8"

Miles Today:  0                 Total Miles:  3033   

We've got to move! We must be camped across from some kennels because the dogs just don't stop barking! Don't know how the one dog isn't hoarse from it's continuous barking.

The sun is up and it's warm. We set off to the beach for a nutella roll breakfast and a lovely long walk along our stretch of beach. The sea is a beautiful turquoise blue and the air was clear, we could definitely have seen Africa had we been further south. Heidz collected handfuls (truckloads) of shells of all different kinds and colours.

We walked in to explore Forte Nova/Quarteira and found an internet cafe to check for email messages and other admin matters concerning our flat and our garage. Thank you for all the emails and messages, it's so lovely to hear from you and to catch up on news from family and friends. We checked on ferry prices to cross over to Morrocco, and refreshed ourselves on the best route by reading other peoples websites. It's definitely cheaper to buy a return and forfeit the return crossing, so that will probably be what we'll do. On reading up, we've decided to cross from Algeciras to Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Northern Morrocco, that way entering as a domestic ferry making life a bit easier on the other side, and avoiding Tangier, which seems to be rather troublesome and potentially dodgy. It was very comforting to read Martin and Debbie's (Big Sky Adventure) diary entries to see they had the same over-loaded and over crowded conditions as we have in Duzi2, when they first started their African adventure. There's hope for us yet. 

We went back for a yummy chilli con carne dinner with some VERY sweet special late harvest wine, kindly given to Ross many many years ago by Richard Maney, his previous boss. While we were cooking, we were adopted by a young cat with reddish eyes who was trying hard to scoop some food. Dogs on one side of the campsite and cats on the other...

Wednesday 7th November 2007: Quarteira, Algarve, Portugal      GPS Info:  N37°04'03.1" W08°05'03.7"

Miles Today:  62              Total Miles:  3095

Awoke to another gloriously sunny morning and to the hopeful meowing of our young feline friend, our Portugese wildlife sighting. We set up the chairs in the sun and started to write our updates for the past week. Due to our exhaustingly long drving days our daily updates are not happening daily, hopefully this will change in Africa.

With the help of Heidi's hand written daily diary and many hours and friendly 'Hellos' from fellow campers, we're now up to date with our written updates, still have the photos to do, but will hopefully stay this way.

We knew we had to sort out our flat today so thanks to the wonderfully cheap €5 international phone cards, we were able to call the UK for 130min and SA for 38min. This meant we could contact a whole lot of agents and thanks to the campsites fax facilities, we were able to receive and send documents that required signatures. It seemed like a bit of a waste of a day being stuck doing admin things, but hopefully will bring some result for our flat and much needed peace of mind.

Phoned our parents and enjoyed lovely long calls to each of them, which was mutually beneficial. Thank you MUNDI, our phone cards.

With the inverter beeping due to a low charge, we decided to stretch Duzi2's legs and drive out to Faro to see if we could get a sticker of the Portugese flag and see what Faro had to offer. Well not too much to write about Faro by night at least. Thank goodness we didn't keep driving to there on our first night because there's even less sign of campsites there than anywhere else.

Had Burger King for dinner as everything else was closed and then headed back to the campsite to spend our 3rd night in the 3rd spot, moving to a different site each night.

Thursday 8th November 2007:    Quartiera, Portugal           GPS Info:    N37°3'59.2"    W08°05'05.9"

Miles Today:                             Total Miles: 

Woke this morning knowing that we had a long day's drive ahead of us, but needed to make sure the various faxes we had sent yesterday had been received successfully, before we left the luxury of having communication like this available to us.

we were also spoilt this morning with having fresh bread rolls, straight from the oven, for breakfast. The little lady at the local supermarket had told me to wait while she fetched them from the oven, and presented them still on the baking tray. We wolfed these down with oodles of Nutella.

Went through the updates Heidi had spent writing till late last night, and saved them to the memory stick to take to the internet cafe down the road. Used the remains of the last €5 phone card to phone the various agencies in Twickenham, and hopefully this will now mean that there are more eyes and ears looking for tenants for us. What a fantastic start to the the Africa stage of this little drive that would be.

Managed to use the tools we had bought yesterday to remove the gearbox filler plug at last and check the level of oil in the gearbox. It started dribbling out immediately, meaning there was obviously enough. The oil leak is obviously coming from somewhere else. Checked the oil in the transfer box and this level was fine too. All other fluids were checked and looked OK.

Drove down to the local internet cafe and quickly uploaded our latest updates and checked emails etc.

Sent email to Martin to register our site on the Africa Overland Network website (http://www.africa-overland.net/). We also looked at the possibility of using Facebook albums as a place to store our photos of the trip and have links to these within our website, which would save on space. This particular internet cafe couldn't get around us copying the photos up to the albums though, so we'll have to wait for the next little cyber spot.

We then spent a while hunting around the Quartiera area looking for a sticker of a Portugese flag for Duzi2. It appears though that the Portugese are even worse about stickers of their national flag than the French, as they don't appear to have stickers of any sort other than Spiderman and his mates. Managed to get a little sticker of some sort from a children's toy shop type place though.

Finally hit the road a lot later than we were intending, but still sticking to the mad, typical Ross & Heidi idea that we could still drive all the way down to Algeciras or Tarifa this evening.