First things first – prepare the bike and find the ocean so that I could make sure to keep it to my left for the next 5 days.
On these European bike rides I have been all kinds of lost; from slightly and briefly lost to profoundly lost. Today, about which I was a little nervous because I don’t speak the language, I’d saythat on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is “call 911” and 10 is “game on,” I did about a 7.5, which I’ll happily take any day.
This part of the coast has a lot of salt marshes. The ones that are protected have wildlife that people come from all over to see. I saw a few well-dressed people on bird safaris with binoculars and notebooks.
But where the marshes aren’t protected, people dig channels that funnel saltwater into what they call salt pans and make salt by drying the seawater, which I found really interesting.These are what salt pans look like when they have fresh seawater in them.
Half done.
Ready for harvest (or whatever you call the process of collecting salt you grow yourself). I passed maybe a hundred of these on my ride. Miles of my ride were on the narrow dirt roads on the top of the salt pan retaining walls.
But a lot of my ride was in pretty isolated areas.
When you’re on a narrow dirt path and you have only a vague idea where you are (even when you know the ocean is to your left, that leaves a lot of territory to get lost in), seeing signs like this every once in a while is very reassuring.
Some of my ride:
And it turns out that of all the Portuguese phrases I could have learned, I chose a great one. I’ve used “Good day” (bom dia) probably a hundred times and everyone is so nice and says “bom dia” back to me. These positive, peppy, four-word conversations make me think that people here really want me to have a good day. One of the papers in the package the bike tour company gave me has some other Portuguese phrases that they recommend I learn, like “I have had a stroke” (Eu sofri um aneurismo) and “I need an ambulance” (Preciso de uma ambulancia), but they’re just not for me. Even if I do have a stroke and need an ambulance, I’m going to stick to bom dia.
While the ride today was relatively incident free, the process of getting into my room in Olhao would itself take a good bit of writing to describe. But I’ll summarize. The bike guy booked me into a guest house that he’s never dealt with before in the “old town.” I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an old European town, but they purposely made the roads narrow, curvy and with no logical layout so that they would be hard to invade – only the people who live there know how to get anywhere. And the people who live here speak Portuguese (although in fairness to them, I don’t know how anyone could give directions to anyone in a place like this even if we did speak the same language). Anyway, he told me to call the owner when I was approaching Olhao. I did, and she didn’t answer so I decided to try to find the place. I figured anyone who knew where it was couldn’t describe the directions to me and anyone who could communicate with me wouldn’t know where it was. I had very limited connection to Google. During my aimless wandering in circles I passed the cultural museum at least 4 times. “Aha” I would think, “Here’s a new plaza that might give me some clue about where I am. Damn it’s the cultural museum again.” It was tough, because there really was no logical way to figure out where this place was. I finally reached the owner, who told me that she was out of town, but I could just find the mailboxes at the end of her street, open the first one and pull out the set of white keys. One of them was for each of the three doors I had to get through, and the last one was for my room, the number for which she couldn’t remember but she thought it might have my name on it (nope, it didn’t). Anyway, I did find the place and get to the room. If you really care how, I’ll tell you about it someday, but getting to my room took me about 1/3 of the time that it took to ride over 40 miles today.
Don't forget to say,"Obrigado".
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