Travelling Hopefully - White Port Edition

Did you know there was such a thing as white port?  I didn’t fortunately a visit to Porto enlightened me.  Porto isn’t where port comes from but it is what most port goes through on its way to somewhere else.  For centuries Porto’s wealth has relied on people getting very drunk, emptying the house of alcohol and realising that if they want to keep drinking they’re going to have to open the port.

We left Lisbon (with at least one traveller clinging weeping to the hotel door begging for more time) and piled into a bus heading north.  By a fortunate coincidence our destination was also in the north.  Porto rests in the valley of the Douro river just downstream from a bunch of vineyards where port is produced.  Warehouses were built and fleets of small boats acquired to transport the port from vineyard to warehouse where it would be stored until the time came to ship it to Britain and other places where alcohol content is more important than taste.

Naturally being located in a river valley meant that Porto has lots of hills as most of the flat land is occupied by the river.  Our hotel was part way up one of the hilly bits.  Around us stretched the town of Porto with its handsome public buildings, external tiling and construction sites.  Particularly the latter.  Porto was being renovated when we arrived and as usual the builders had left crap all over the place.  Old buildings were getting a touch up and new metro stations were being dug.  As a result most of the construction site had only a vague resemblance to a town.  Here and there non renovated old buildings reared proudly above the clatter and challenged you to find a way of accessing them.

Our orientation walk picked its way carefully through the scaffolding and we twisted our bodies into unusual shapes in the hope of taking a photo without a crane in it.  Normally the main purpose of our orientation walks is to tire us out so we’ll go to bed when told and won’t misbehave too much but this time there was a specific objective in view.  A port tasting at a boutique (and Portuguese owned) winery had been arranged.  Actually the tasting was at their warehouse the winery itself being further up the Douro where they could grow grapes without them getting dug up for a metro station.

The warehouse where said tasting was to take place was down near the river so our orientation walk had a significant down aspect to it (as well as a significant “clamber over construction material element”).  This meant that our return would be uphill however by that time we would be fortified with port and the port was fortified with alcohol so there should be no problem.

The port warehouses are across the river from our hotel (and indeed most of Porto) which required us to walk across a rather handsome split level bridge.  We walked across the top which carries foot traffic and tram lines, the bottom carries cars and more foot traffic.  The line between roads and footpaths is somewhat blurred and not just after the port tasting.

Once across the Douro we navigated increasingly narrow back alleys until we reached the port warehouse that bore our name.

“Some warehouses,” announced our guide, “provide cheese to go with the port sampling.”

“Does ours?”

“No.”

We arrived at the cheese free warehouse and after a completely unnecessary introduction to the making and history of port were finally permitted to start drinking the stuff.  The ten year old white port was delicious.  I’m not a huge fan of tawny ports but those who liked them said they liked them.  I seriously considered ordering a a bottle or two until they handed me a discreet slip of paper with she shipping costs written on it.  I decided I would just keep cutting metholated spirits with ribena.

Travelling Hopefully - Rattly Transport Edition

To assist the Lisboneiros in getting around their topographically inconvenient city a number of facilities have been put in place.  Most of those facilities are called “steps” but from time to time there is something a little more imaginative such as the H&M store where you enter at one level, go down a few sets of escalators and emerge onto a different street.  This also gives you a legitimate reason for going into an H&M store.

Even better though are the canary yellow funiculars that rattle their way up a few of the steepest hills.  These charming little boxes on rails look as though they were built in about 1374 but are probably a little younger than that.  We took the Gloria funicular on our orientation walk.  With a grinding rattle or possibly a rattling grind our bright yellow box lurched slowly (but considerably faster than any of us could have walked) to the top.  At the top we had lunch regaled by a street performer playing the theme tune from Game of Thrones while we looked over the city.

Funiculars are cute but they’re hardly a mass transit system.  For that we need to flip to the second of Lisbon’s rattly public transport options; trams.  Lisbon has gorgeous old, rattly trams which lurch through the streets carrying the Lisboates about their business.  Fairness forces me to concede that Lisbon also has gleaming new, much larger trams that whisk people hither and yon.  The much larger trams glide down the main roads of Lisbon which tend to be built on the flatter bits leaving their geriatric colleagues to struggle gamely up hillsides and around tight corners to bring public transport to people who don’t live on a main road.  Lisbon also has buses, trains and a metro system but you know, whatever.

I caught a gleaming new tram to the Time Out Market which is apparently a draw card, I don’t know why unless you have an unreasonable fetish for food courts.  It would be useful if you were hungry and had inexplicably missed the literally hundreds of restaurants, cafes, pastry shops and supermarkets with which Lisbon is adorned otherwise I fail to see the point.

Having exhausted the amusement value of Time Out in approximately two minutes I then caught a cute rattly tram to my actual destination.  Or more accurately I didn’t.  My destination was the Maritime Museum in Belém.  The big sexy trams went there but the small rattly ones turned off and climbed a hill and wandered through somewhat lower rent territory.  I caught the small rattly tram anyway because I wanted to catch a small rattly tram.  I hopped off at the last point where it was convenient to walk down to the main road and pick up a big gleaming tram to the Jerónimos Monastery.  The monastery is a huge, impressive building and the Maritime Museum occupies a small part on the left if you have just alighted from your big sexy tram and are staring in awe at the Monastery.  If you can’t see the Monastery then you have got turned around and are looking at the Monastery’s gardens which occupy the piece of ground between the road and the Tagus River.

The museum was quite interesting being part a history of Portugal’s great age of discovery when various Portuguese got into ships and sailed out into the Atlantic.  In the words of the caption at the museum “establishing contact and trade with distant peoples.”  They could have added “establishing trade in distant peoples” but that might have been a little too close to the bone for a museum dedicated to Portuguese achievements.  There were also displays on struggles in the colonies without quite explaining how said colonies were acquired.

The rest of the museum consisted of models of ships used by the Portuguese at various stages of their history up until the present day.  Plus there were some royal barges and seaplanes largely I suspect because they couldn’t find a more appropriate museum to put them in.

I really enjoyed Lisbon and couldn’t happily have spent more time there but I didn’t.  Instead we hopped on a bus for Porto.

Funicular 

Travelling Hopefully - Excessive Pastry Edition

 From the Algarve we came descending on Lisbon like dark angels sent from Hell to punish mankind.  Then we hit the Lisbon metro system and realised we were too late.

All of which is an overblown way of saying we caught a bus from Lagos to Lisbon and then took a train to our hotel.  In actual fact the Lisbon metro system deposited us within camel spit of our hotel with perfect efficiency.  Too much efficiency actually as it turned out the hotel wasn’t ready for us when we arrived.  After a tense negotiating period they permitted us leave again as long as we left our luggage there as hostages in case we found a nicer hotel while wandering around.

Once we bid a teary farewell to our suitcases now trembling under the hotel’s brutal yoke we set off into Lisbon.  Lisbon has a lot of up and down.  They claim the city is built on seven hills like Rome.  I know the Romans did a lot of impressive things but copying their decision to situate a major city on the lumpiest ground available is not necessarily the best thing to emulate them in.

Despite this the Lisbites built their city and when a combined earthquake, fire and flood destroyed it rather than take the hint they rebuilt it in basically the same place. Thus parts of Lisbon have a well organised grid pattern and other parts er, don’t.  Our hotel sat roughly on the border.  

The orientation walk purported to give us a glimpse of some of the various neighbourhoods of Lisbon but rapidly turned into an orgy of pastry and warm custard (no not that sort of an orgy, although…).  Lisbon is home to the Portuguese tart which I have to say tastes vastly better than its shabby Australian equivalent.

Shedding pastry crumbs and with our fingers sticking to each other, cardboard containers and on occasion walls and passing vehicles we stumbled on.  Always ahead of us was the unobtainable perfect Portuguese tart teasing us and leading us deeper into Lisbon.  Finally we stopped and ungummed our mouths long enough to ask where we were.  Our guide who had completely lost patience with the pastry covered , custard smeared freaks she had been landed with pointed out that we were back at our hotel and that any of us who survived the inevitable type 2 diabetes might like to try a Fado performance that evening.

Fado is a Portuguese art and consists of two guys with guitars trying to drown out the manic depressive who is using song to work through some emotional issues.  We decided we did want to try it and climbed quite a number of stairs in order to do so.  The food was good and the Fado appropriately heartfelt and waily.  We all agreed it was very good, then we went in search of more Portuguese tarts.  Along the way we encountered street performers and what claimed to be the world’s oldest continuously operating bookstore.  I bought a book and some very bad coffee there while my companions trembled and suffered custard withdrawal symptoms.  Eventually we returned to the hotel while we could still fit through the door.

Travelling Hopefully - Algarve Edition

For the record the Algarve is the southernmost region of Portugal.  It has a long history involving Romans, Visigoths, Byzantines, Moors and Portuguese all of whom were eager to add the Algarves fishing villages and golf courses to their empire.  Currently the Portuguese are in charge.  They used it as a base to discover parts of the world that weren’t Portugal.

Into this history laden region came a bus, its exterior metal still glowing red hot from a prolonged encounter with Seville.  On that bus five weary travellers and one chirpy guide gazed with wonder at the Atlantic stretched out before them.  Fortunately the bus stopped before it got any closer.

Our destination was Lagos, a small charming town on the Atlantic coast.  It used to be the capital of the region before a couple of earthquakes persuaded the local authorities to move elsewhere.  Lagos became a staging post for Portuguese voyages of exploration/exploitation and the town became a wealthy trading centre particularly for the slave trade.  Nowadays the process has reversed and Lagos makes a good deal of its money from expats ie foreigners who come voluntarily and then refuse to leave.

A cool ocean breeze greeted us on arrival at our hotel and we gave a collective moan of delight.  The beach appeared to be undergoing renovations but once we made our way past the construction equipment an expanse of beach goers  came into view.  It was safe to assume that somewhere under them was sand.

The next day we sallied forth under the baking sun and commented on how much more pleasant than Seville it was.  A walk along the coast to the town culminated in an ill advised visit to the fish market.  Once that little misstep was out of the way we piled into a not particularly large boat for a trip back down the coast but from a more aquatic perspective.

It turns out that the best way to see Lagos is while bobbing on waves a short distance off shore.  Here rocks and ocean have had a rather messy collision and the ensuing debris has left holes in the land and lumps of rock in the ocean which combine for a pleasing visual effect although it would probably drive an obsessive compulsive insane.

Pigeons nested in the jagged rocks thus adding an additional element of threat to the danger of shipwreck.  Carefully our little motorboat nosed through rock strewn passages and into small bays the pilot’s sharp eyes alert for the ever present danger of kayakers who were freaking everywhere.  Weapons were kept close at hand in case these freaks of the sea attempted to board us but fortunately we escaped by scattering coins in our wake.  The coins sank of course but kayakers aren’t that bright and they clustered around where the shiny things had sunk while we fled the scene.  Rather late in the day one of our group asked about the presence of  sharks a question that should really have been asked while we were still on the shore.  If marauding packs of murder fish were swarming around the coast of Lagos it was far too late to do anything about it now except hope they satisfied their hunger on the kayakers before reaching us.

Fortunately the answer denied the presence of sharks in the vicinity while studiously and strangely explicitly refusing to extend the same assurance about killer whales.  Despite the above we returned safely to shore and wandered through the charming town of Lagos seeing (but not entering) the slave museum and no end of gelato shops to the delight of certain members of our tour.  

The next day I walked the other way along the coast until I reached a lighthouse.  There was no particular reason for this except that I announced I would do so in front of witnesses.

Travelling Hopefully - Monoculture Gone Mad Edition

 So it’s time to address the elephant in the room.  Olives; they have been a constant companion on our journey so far.  Whether growing by the side of the road or appearing on our dinner table at ridiculously inflated prices olives have dogged our steps as we make our way through Spain.  

Now that we head for the Portuguese border it is time to give these little round greasy things their due with a blog entry in their honour.

Olives were introduced into Spain in 1923 as part of a cultural exchange programme with Ethiopia.  At first the Spanish didn’t know what to do with them and stored them in a warehouse in Seville.  A carelessly dropped match from a security guards cigarette led to the biggest conflagration in Seville’s history.  So much damage was done that the government of Seville seriously considered building another cathedral on the ruins.

Fortunately sanity prevailed but while fighting the blaze Seville firefighters commented on the purity of the flames and the lack of smoke.  Gripped with excitement the Spanish authorities begged the Ethiopian government to provide them with more.  At this point the Ethiopians broke down and admitted they had bought the lot cheap in a Greek garage sale.

Diplomatic negotiations took place with the Greek authorities and a few months later cheering crowds greeted a Greek cargo vessel as it unloaded its precious cargo at Seville’s docks.  A desperately planting program followed and a mere ten years later every dinner table in Spain was adorned with olives.  In fact olives completely supplanted oleander as the preferred meal accompaniment for the Spanish people.  Coincidentally a sudden reduction in the dinner time mortality rate helped a population boom in Spain boosting the nation’s population from a few thousand to the burgeoning numbers we see today.

Of course today olive trees have spread to the extent that there is barely any room for Spaniards and the government is seriously considering declaring them a noxious weed.  All of which simply proves the old saying “Beware of Ethiopians bearing Greek gifts.”

Travelling Hopefully - Barber of Seville Edition

The next morning was clear and cool and it remained that way for approximately twenty minutes before transitioning to clear and searing hot where it remained for the rest of the day.  For reasons that probably made sense at the time I and a couple of co-tourists had booked a tour of the Alcazar and Seville Cathedral for 3pm a time when the sun had moved from extremely hot to actively murderous.

Our orientation walk took place in the cool of the morning which rapidly became the heat of the morning.  Nevertheless the walk was done and we breakfasted in a thoroughly oriented fashion before fleeing back to our air conditioned dungeon which became more appealing with every moment spent in the sun.

Still you can’t spend the entire holiday hiding in an air conditioned room, apparently.  Thus in the early afternoon I and my companions in heatstroke sallied forth to find the Alcazar.  What we actually found was the tourist office where our tour began.  They sent me a helpful text message telling me to register at the desk.  I replied that I was right there.  The woman behind the desk stopped texting long enough to formally acknowledge my presence on the tour and offer me headphones but a helpful staff member had already given me those so somewhat reluctantly they pronounced me good to go.

A small horde of us set off for the Alcazar following a purple fluffy thing attached to a stick.  The stick in turn was attached to our guide who used it to marshal her troops for the assault on the Alcazar.  I don’t know if the Alcazar was ever attacked by an enemy but if it was I’m pretty sure the assault troops wouldn’t have got past passport control.  Once we had safely negotiated the Alcazar’s defences we set foot in the famous palace while our guide mounted a rear guard action against the passport troops who were regrouping for another assault.

And now I have prevaricated as long as I can so, what was the Alcazar like?  It’s very large, awash with handsome gardens and intricately decorated rooms and generally well worth a visit.  I have to say I was slightly disappointed largely because my expectations were very high.  I have had many reports of the Alcazar being amazing so I felt slightly let down.  On the other hand the combination of gardens and thick stone walls meant it was a few degrees cooler inside which was a blessing.  It also had hyper aggressive peacocks which is something you don’t see every day.

From the Alcazar we went to Seville Cathedral.  The cathedral has an interesting look having been built on the ruins of an earthquake damaged mosque.  The resultant look is sort of Moorish Gothic.  The bell tower is a former minaret done in the Moroccan style.  Indeed the twin of this building is in Marrakech, it’s the one that didn’t quite wind up facing Mecca.  The Spanish stuck bells and an ostentatious windvane on theirs and voila, Christian bell tower.

The interior is very Christian and symbolic of a universal church at the height of its power.  Suffice to say that normally the only people who go in for this level of interior decoration are mafia wives and gangsta rappers.  It  actually works though because the cathedral is so big that 400kg of gold and 1200kg of silver just sort of blend into the background.  This also gives you an idea of what the background is like.  The foreground is much the same but more fore.

There is one priceless, near miraculous thing that being inside several thousand tonne of stone with a ceiling halfway to heaven conveys.  The cathedral is cool dare I say blessedly cool and with the outside temperature having left 40 degrees in its wake I was more than happy to contemplate the wonder of God as long as he didn’t kick me out of his house.

The cathedral also houses the tomb of a small percentage of Christopher Columbus.  Strangely the great explorer seems to have traveled more after he died than he did while he was alive.  His body was housed in a cathedral in Santo Domingo.  As the Spanish colonial empire unraveled the body was moved from place to place before eventually winding up back in Seville.  Apparently they lost quite a bit on the way.  All they have in Seville is a finger and part of a hand and they’re not 100% sure they belong to Columbus.  It’s quite an impressive tomb though.

We saw a flamenco show that night, this is obligatory as Seville is the home of flamenco.  By this stage I was suffering from heat exhaustion and most of what I remember involved stomping.  I do recall the guitarist was better at asserting himself than the one in Granada, he actually got a solo spot part way through the performance.

The next day before we left Seville for somewhere cooler (pretty much anywhere but specifically Portugal) I went for a shave.  This was partly because I needed a shave but it was mainly so I could use “Barber of Seville” in a blog title.

Travelling Hopefully - Wooden Mushroom Edition

 After traversing the oleander fringed motorways of southern Spain our bus lurched to a halt and vomited its contents onto the streets of Seville.  Groaning and slightly dizzy from inadvertent oleander inhalation we took stock of one of the most famous cities in Spain. 

Seville is hot, very hot.  We thought it was hot in Grenada but we were wrong.  The balmy, nay chilly temperatures of Pomegranate City were behind us.  In Seville it was so hot that it is almost impossible to convey how hot it was without resorting to a list of expletives ending in the word “hot”.  Fortunately our hotel had air conditioning.

The air conditioning was the only normal thing about our hotel.  A huge iron gate barred entrance and we had to buzz the reception staff to let us in.  Once in the same iron gate effectively prevented us from leaving unless the same reception staff were inclined to let us go.  One gets the impression that the building was originally designed to be a sex dungeon and was converted to a hotel part way through construction.

With our bags offloaded and the air conditioning relished in it was time to beg permission from the staff to leave so we could get some lunch (food being something the hotel didn’t provide).  A five minute walk brought us to the closest place that served food and since we were all suffering from heat exhaustion it was decided that this was an excellent spot to stop.

This cafe was also convenient for a large wooden mushroom which was on our list of things to do in Seville. The Setas de Sevilla is a large wooden structure which looms over part of the city near our hotel.  It is described as a “cultural landmark” which is code for “we paid a lot of money for this now stop asking us what the hell it is”.  What it is is a purely wooden structure which sprawls over a block and somewhat inadequately provides shade for the citizenry beneath.

Shade for the population of Seville is an excellent idea but there are better ways of providing it than building a roughly mushroom shaped wooden lattice work which has the disadvantage of letting the sun through.  Apparently the population of Seville aren’t crazy about the thing as they feel it doesn’t really complement the current skyline of the city.  To be fair there aren’t too many cities where a giant wooden mushroom type thingy would blend seamlessly with the surrounding architecture and I’m pretty sure most of those cities where it would blend in are not on earth.

Underneath this towering monument to modernity is a collection of Roman ruins which were unearthed while excavating the foundations for the wooden mushroom type thingy.  I popped in there to remind myself of a time when structures were sensibly made out of stone and needed a vaguely rational reason for existence.  Then I fled back to the sex dungeon/hotel for some air conditioning.

Our lovely guide had put off our orientation walk until the cool of the evening on the grounds that doing it at midday would kill us.  Evening rolled around and was hotter than midday.  Not wanting to end the tour with a bunch of corpses on her hands she re rescheduled for the next morning something that we her charges agreed to largely on the promise of breakfast.

That evening we had tickets to actually climb the Setas (we’ll go up in a lift actually).  There is a curving walkway which allows visitors to look out over the Seville skyline.  Coloured lights within the structure illuminate various parts of it in different colours.  It has to be said that nighttime is when the Setas comes into its own.  The light show and the views combine for a beautiful display which almost makes you forget that it’s 10.30pm and still 35 degrees.  Almost but not quite, we fled back to air conditioning.  I have never been so happy to hear a dungeon door slam behind me.