Walking the Camino in Portugal

Day 15 Mealhada to Agueda

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Judy

25km A long hot day, spent walking mostly on paved roads.We missed an early arrow as we set off, but quickly realised thanks to Greg’s GPS. Then an hour or so later, I walked on ahead of Greg and completely missed an arrow on a tree in the forest, but only realised some time and distance later. Meanwhile, Greg got to the next cafe a couple of kms up the road and turned back to find me when I wasn’t there waiting for him. We met up again eventually, but it goes to show how easy it is to get lost if you’re not constantly on the lookout for those yellow arrows.

Later in the morning, we stopped at a little cafe at Adfeloas. The owner offered us a stamp for our credencial – Pilgrim Passport – and asked us to sign his guest book. We found our old friend John Smith had been there several days before us, and there are a couple of Australian girls a few days in front of us too.

We had a proper cooked lunch at the Queiroz restaurant at Avelas de Caminho. Their specialty is leitos – suckling pig – but as we had had that for dinner the previous evening, we each had an omelette.

The day’s walk seemed to just go on and on for me, by the end I was feeling pretty tired and emotional – Greg ended up taking even more of my stuff, and at one point even carried my pack for a while. But we got there in the end, and stayed at a lovely place, Residencial Celeste, which is 1.5km north of Agueda on the main road.

Walking on the N-1 highway

The Camino is a faint track through the trees

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Day 14 Coimbra to Mealhada

Posted on May 15, 2012 by greg

23 km – It was a late start because we had decided to post the tent and thermarest inflatable mattresses back to Australia, because we did not think we would need them anymore. As well it would be 3.7kg of weight savings. Greg went to the main post office in Coimbra to find it was closed for good. It was then to another Post Office down from the Hotel Oslo. There was a ticket system. So it was a thirty minute wait to be served just to post a parcel, and it cost 82 euros to post 3.7kg back to Australia. Australia Post might be bad, but it is streets ahead of Portugal Post.

We started of well, covering the first 5.6km out of Coimbra without a break. Greg was wearing his new shoes that he bought in Coimbra as replacement for his Dunlop-KT-26s that are wearing out. However they turned out they were too small, and were left in a railway station car park for someone else to use.

It was a warm day, about 29C. We walked through Ademia missing the cafe, stopping at a water pumping station to eat our two custard tarts that Judy had bought in the morning.

It was a steep climb up through Cloga do Monte then over the A-14 and back down into Trouxemil. The John Brierley guide said that there were several cafes and shops in the Trouxmil square, but we found they had all closed down except for one cafe. We pulled out the laptop logged onto the the Vodafone broadband and booked the hotel in Mealhada.

Eventually we had to walk a 1km stretch of the N-1 the main highway through Portugal. We had seen nearly all the Faitma pilgrims wear yellow flourescent safety vests, so we bought a couple in Coimbra, and used them on the N-1 highway stretch.

After the 1km stretch we were diverted west of the N-1 into forest paths that were not in the guidebook, or on our GPS route. Eventually we left the forest paths and followed quiet country roads through Mala and Vimjetra. Our pace had slowed, and it was getting late. We arrived in our hotel 1.5km north of Mealhada at 7:30pm.

Walking up the hill cloga

Important information where the camino goes, and where the bar is...

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Rest Day Coimbra

Posted on May 14, 2012 by greg

Sunday in Coimbra. We did the kind of things that most people do on holiday – slept in, had a late breakfast, walked around and explored a bit, sat in a cafe eating cakes and drinking our preferred caffeinated beverage (me – coffee, Greg – Coke), went to a shopping centre, had an afternoon nap, had dinner at an Italian cafe by the river.

Side note: we wanted to buy a small tube of sunscreen when we were at the shopping centre. We had looked at the small supermarkets in the towns and villages we walked through, but hadn’t been able to find any. And no wonder – the cheapest, smallest tube or bottle we could find was 13 euros! Almost $20 for a 100ml tube. It’s very surprising, because a lot of Portuguese people are quite fair, but I guess there isn’t the problem of skin cancers here that there is in Australia.

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Day 13 Condeixa-a-Nova to Coimbra

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Judy

22kms plus a bit. Last night we stayed at a town that is a couple of kms off the Camino. We wanted to break a 30km stage into 2 shorter stages, and Condeixa-a-Nova had a couple of residencials and some restaurants, so it seemed like a good place to stop. We had dinner last night at a Churrasco restaurant, which specialises in char-grilling meat and fish. There is usually a Churrasqueira in most towns – the equivalent of a BBQ chicken take-away in Oz. We had Frango Churrasco – char-grilled chicken – and it was good!

We spent the morning wandering around a bit lost at times – getting back onto the Camino route was tricky, and then we missed a yellow arrow and a road that used to be on the map has disappeared or been incorporated into a new section of main road. We ended up walking on the 4-lane main road for a bit, then clambered up an embankment (not easy to do with a rucksack trying to drag you back down the slope) and found those yellow arrows again.

We stopped at the first cafe in the next village, Cernache, but it was closed due to the death of the owner. Some little old ladies assembled in the street told me all about it – and I’m pretty sure they said that the owner died whilst doing the Macarena, just keeled over on the dance floor. When your number’s up and all that ….

Most of the day’s walking was on sealed roads, which is always tough on the feet, but we did do a nice section of bush track walking at around lunchtime, and found a shady, grassy spot under some fir trees.

Our first view of Coimbra (former capital of Portugal in the 12th century, now a university town, population 160,000) was one of the most breathtaking town vistas we can remember. We walked down a cobbled street from Santa Clara, via the Santa Clara convent, crossed the Mondego River and into the town of Coimbra. We’re staying here for 2 nights.

Saturday afternoon at a cafe

Coimbra

Down the zig zag road

Over the bridge into Coimbra

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Day 12 Rabacal to Condeixa-a-Nova

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Judy

14km. Late start to the day because we wanted to have a look at the Roman Museum next door to the albergue, and it didn’t open until 10am. Well worth a visit, with lots of artifacts from the Roman villa which is located on the outskirts of Rabacal. We didn’t see the villa, but did see part of another Roman villa at Conimbriga, which is 10km away.

Resting again

Santiago shrine in Fonte Coberta

Walking along the stream

In the hill north of Poco

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Day 11 Ansiao to Rabacal

Posted on May 10, 2012 by greg

18kms. Another sunny day (we’ll stop talking about the weather soon, I promise. It’s just that sunshine is still a bit of a novelty to us after 2 weeks of rain every day). The Camino Portuguese guide by John Brierley has the Alvaiazere to Rabacal section as one very long day of 32.5 km. This includes a lot of climbing and desents, so we split the stage into two days. Even then the 18km was a hard day. It was warm and sunny, and it took a bit of getting used too.

We climbed out of Ansiao which gained us 100 metres in altitude. We passed the first of many pine trees that had been tapped for their sap. It was a quiet country road through Netos where there were several new houses that had been built. Then we went cross country on a track through pine and eucalyptus forest to a cafe/service station at Freixo, where we consumed yet another portuguese tart (or two). Then we left the road for farm tracks that became rtacks through old walled olive groves. We are not qute sure why there are all these walls seperating the olive groves, but they look fairly old.

We climbed upwards in the warm afternoon until we reached Alvorge, where there were a cafe and mini-mercado (small store), but they all looked closed. It was then a steep decent into a valley that contained a old lavadero. We had passed a lavadero before, it is a community clothes washing place, which has a creek feeding over stone washboards so you can wash your clothes. No longer used now of course.

We had to detour a couple of sections of the path that were completely flooded, and then climbed again up a hill covered in low scrub. It was fairly warm, and there was not much shade when we stopped for a late lunch.We decended into Ribera de Alcalamouque, where as usual there seem almost no-one around, passed another abandoned Qunita (farm) and headed north passing small patches of grape vines that just could not produce much income. If grape growers in Australia cannot make money out of 10 hectares of grape vines, we cannot see how these grape vines that are about the size of a house block make any money.

We arrived in Rabacal, to find the only accomodation in town closed. How it works is you need to ring someone in town, and they come and collect your money and open it up for you. We didn’t even get to ring anyone up, someone drove past stopped, asked us (insign language) if we wanted to sleep, and organised it all.

Pine sap collecting

Trying not to get wet feet

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Day 10 Alvaiazere to Ansiao

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Judy

15km. Gorgeous day, blue sky with no clouds this morning, and just a few high, wispy clouds by the time we finished walking at 3pm. We spent the day walking on quiet country roads and along cobbled paths through old abandoned farmland. A lot of the time there were stone walls on either side of the path, indicating that in the past someone had gone to a lot of trouble to enclose the fields, but now they lie abandoned and overgrown.

We walked through small, long villages perched on the sides of hills. Only one cafe along the way, at Laranjeiras, a few kms after we started walking. And a working water tap at Vendas a km or so further on. Most of the villages we walked through had no shops at all, but we saw a mobile fishmonger selling her wares from the back of a refrigerated truck a couple of time as we walked this afternoon.

Our camino route now has blue arrows in addition to the yellow arrows we are following to Santiago. The blue arrows point in the opposite direction and are for pilgrims walking to Fatima. The first Residencial (hotel) we tried this afternoon (Residencial Adega Tipica) was full of Fatima pilgrims who had just arrived, so we wandered around the corner to the next hotel (Residencial Nova Estrela on Av. Dr. Victor Faviero) on the list and met the owner outside. He speaks Portuguese and French but doesn’t speak English, so we managed to understand each other with a mix of Portuguese, French and the occasional Spanish word.

Windfarm above Alvaiazere (click for larger version)

one of the many roadside shrines

Having morning tea by the roadside

Walking down the hill towards Venda (click for larger version)

Where we are in Portugal (pink arrow)

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Day 9 Portela de Vila Verde to Alvaiazere

Posted on May 8, 2012 by greg

17km. It rained for a lot of the night, but we stayed dry in our tent. We awoke to dark clouds, and we thought we had another day of rain. However the rain had stopped, and it never rained the rest of the day. We put on our wet clothes from the previous day, packed up the tent and headed north. We walked through Portela de Vila Verde, which, like most of the villages from the previous day, look almost completely empty. Its rare to see anyone, and lots of the houses are for sale, with the occasional collapsed building.

The cloud started to break up, and we started to see patches of blue sky. We draped our wet clothes over our rucksacks to help them dry. Then it was a climb uphill to a hill at 305 metres, then down the hill through a very overgrown path, that became just rocky, but Greg managed to trip on a rock, and fall down scapping both his knees. The morale of this tale is to use both walking poles not just one.

Then we found a service station just off the track when crossing the N-110, and purchased drinks and icecreams. It was then 3 km along a road, in sun, and quite warm, we were managing to dry even more clothes hanging on our rucksacks.

It was then a turn-off for the last 5km which wound through little lanes through villages and farms all the way to Alvaiazere.

Drying clothes on our rucksacks

Pig-Sty

Quiet Country Lanes

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Day 8 Tomar to Portela de Vila Verde

Posted on May 7, 2012 by greg

15km. It rained – all day. We have camped behind an old stone wall, off the Camino. Its another 15km to a hotel, and Judy is suffering from some bad blisters on her feet. We walked out of Tomar in the rain late in the morning, and the rain never stopped. We have had some nice tracks to follow, and we are only passing little villages.

After Tomar we crossed under the IC-9 Expressway, and got out of the rain for a short period. Then it was through forest tracks until a bitumen road whih led into Casales. We sheltered in a sports shed next to the basketball courts, and then headed of towards Solanda hoping to find a cafe open, but alas it was closed. It was then down a steep hill and back up again to reach a cafe in Cabeleireira, where we sheltered from the rain and had something to eat from its very limited range on offer. They ran a Mini-Mercado (small store) next door, but again its range was very limited. So it was some peanuts and vanilla wafers for dinner.

Special cover built for pilgrims to keep the rain off, and I think cars might drive on it somewhere as well

Sitting in the rain

Camped behind an old stone wall, near an abandoned farm

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Rest Day Tomar

Posted on May 6, 2012 by greg

We took it easy in Tomar, giving Judy a chance to recover after walking 3 days straight. It was our first sunny day with no rain since we have arrived in Portugal. However we were not walking!

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