Bike Day 5 - Praia Du Luz to the end of the road

Today was the end of the road for my bike trip. I don’t mean “end of the road” in the figurative sense, I mean it in the literal sense in that I kept riding with the ocean to my left until the road ended at the westernmost point of continental Europe.

This is what it looks like on Google Earth.

Whenever I feel like I’m going in the wrong direction, which happens several times a day, I always stop and say “recalculating” quietly to myself. I think it’s funny, and I have no one here to dispute that so I’m going to keep doing it.

The Algarve has many areas I enjoyed, but all of the towns in the eastern 80% of it are very touristy so I would recommended it only to people who don’t mind being around a lot of tourists. On a non-judgmental observational note, I noticed that every town I stayed in had lots of pizzerias. I also witnessed at least five instances of British tourists asking the desk clerks at the hotels I was staying at where there was a good pizzeria (the answer was always “Just walk out the door and head toward the beach. You’ll see plenty of them.”). That’s my observation. If I were young and single I’d open up a Portuguese pizzeria in England and make a killing.

Anyway, today’s ride was exactly what I’d been hoping for over the last few days. Isolated coastal roads, beautiful ocean views, and the constant possibility of heat stroke, dehydration and/or falling off a cliff. From today’s ride:

Yes, that's my road going up the mountain.

These are the ruins of a 17th century castle that was manned with 6 people whose job it was to shoot cannonballs at pirates trying to steal the tuna catch from local fisherman. Substitute a few words in that sentence and it also precisely describes things going on today, 400 years later.

There was a “moat” which I hopped across no problem. It was about 5 feet wide and 4 feet deep (but really, the informational sign called it a moat). I guess maybe they figured there wasn’t much need for protection from the land side.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the voluminous amount of snails everyone was eating. I’d assumed that was a cultural tie in to Portugal’s coastline and seafaring, ocean-bound history. But then today I saw thousands of them sunning themselves on milepost markers along the highway, so I guess I’ll have to reconsider.

The closer I got to the end of the ride, the more I rode up and along beautiful cliffs. There were many paths that went right up to the edge, here there was a 300-foot drop straight into the ocean, but not a single guardrail or sign telling people to try not to fall off the edge. Take that, National Park Service.

Anyway, the bike company guy picked me up at the lighthouse and drove me to Loulé, a modest town miles from the coast with no pizzerias. I transferred all of my stuff back out of the panniers (and also transferred some stuff back in – at the beginning of the ride they gave me a toolkit that included a huge wrench and enough tools to disassemble and reassemble my bike. I quietly slipped them all

into my pack and gave it back to them. I figured that if anything went wrong with my bike that required tools like that, the only tool I was going to use was my mobile phone.)

I stopped in this café for a late lunch. The menu was in Portuguese and had no pictures of the food, the waitress spoke no English, and I had only the vaguest sense of what I was ordering. Finally.