I don't know why, but most days a post from an organisation called bigthink.com pops up in my Facebook feed. I can't remember ever having subscribed to it, but I don't mind. The aim of the site is to pose interesting questions from science on a daily basis in 5 minute snippets; that seems a lot more worthwhile than the usual daily FB dross. So about a week ago I was faced at breakfast with a five minute explanation of quantum physics' uncertainty principle - the whole Schrödinger's cat thing - I remained sceptical about it until yesterday when our experience at Autogas Cespa in Ayemonte provided absolute proof that in any event the 'big picture' is always more predictable than its small details.
At the 'event level' all went well. Nights have been cold since we arrived three weeks ago. We needed to top up our twin refillable LPG cylinders. We have used Autogas Cespa at Ayemonte on many occasions previously. We did yesterday and now have gas in abundance. All good, as Gill is wont to say.
However, taken at a momentary, quantum level things were far more chaotic. The place is in an industrial estate on the edge of town within sight of the bridge over the Guadiana that marks the border with Portugal. Experience has taught us that depending on which way you approach the Autogas place - from the east or west - your sat-nav directs you differently, from Spain you will approach it westwards, down the hill, from Portugal from the opposite direction, off a roundabout. Autogas Cespa has a narrow forecourt behind big steel gates and operates a one way system. In the past it hasn't been busy, but right now the south of Spain is awash with motorhomes; about half a dozen were drawn up on opposite sides of the road, confused about whose turn it was, the mixed nationalities each with a different outlook on queuing etiquette.
Our arrival complicated matters further. The external LPG filler is on the left side of our van. It means at Autogas Cespa we have to enter through the exit gate, the staff understand, it must happen quite often. It did lead to others in the queue to be perplexed for a moment (WTF is the English idiot doing) but they all twigged almost immediately, apart from an Italian who followed me in, then realising his error attempted a high speed three point turn in the cramped forecourt which was stacked high with racks of gas bottles. This stirred in the cool, so laid back I'm horizontal attendant to take emergency remedial action - he shrugged his shoulders, twice. Whereas the Italian's wife, who moments before had alighted to assist the manoeuvre, immediately had a dramatic dicky-fit worthy of an encore at La Scala.
After we had filled-up and paid up (€28) I managed to squeeze past the Italian van, now parked awkwardly just to the left of me, and even narrowly missed the French van which had edged right up to the entrance in order to assert his status of being definitely next in the queue. This manoeuvre Gill calls the 'boulangerie shuffle' based on the fact however assertive you are in a lunchtime queue in a bakery in France at least three people will sneak past by nonchalantly, inexorably shuffling forwards with a gait reminiscent of a clockwork penguin.
"Well, that wasn't easy," Gill observed as we headed off towards the motorway. I decided not to share my half baked theory that the chaos was due entirely to operation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. In truth as the day went on this seemed increasingly unlikely. Uncertainties assailed us equally at a macro level as well as the micro, in other words from this point on everything went tits up.
In my previous post I mentioned that I had been feeling fatigued and had needed to take things easy. Don't rush at stuff, we have 70 days before we need to be back home, I told myself. So, a stop in Tavira, a mere 30 miles into Portugal seemed like a good plan. Reviews of the new area autocaravanas on the edge of town were glowing, we had only made a brief day trip here back in 2017 and decided afterwards the place warranted a return visit, especially since TripAdvisor recently featured a new tapas restaurant in the town called 'Artefact' getting all round positive reviews.
Maybe the scrum at the Autogas place should have forewarned us. Tavira's area autocaravanas did look very good, but even though it was not yet noon when we turned up, it was full and two vans were queueing in front of us. The same company that operates the Tavira site runs another at Silves, an old town with a castle a few miles inland from Portomao. We figured it would have space because it was inland. Jokingly I suggested if that one was full we could always head to Sagres at the extreme end of the Algarve as it's bound to be quiet, it being too windy at Cape St Vincent to build a golf course.
Anyway, as we headed west along the motorway we were simply glad to be back in Portugal. It is greener, feels less developed than Andalucia and has an old fashioned charm, still evident even though we noticed lots of swanky looking new buildings around Tavira and more warehouse and retail sprawl lining the motorway.
Silves looked lovely as we approached it, a riverside white town stacked up on a hill, crowned by an old red sandstone castle and big church. We wondered if this was the place with the castle we visited about twelve years ago when we had a four day short break in the Algarve one February half term, our first visit to Portugal.
Sadly the area autocaravanas was full here too, as was the alternative paid for aire by the park. We joined about six other vans squeezed into car sized bays in the nearby public car park.
Time for a late lunch and a ponder. The question, do we stay overnight here in the car park , even though it is very much a public place, or press on to Sagres, situated beyond the Algarve's more popular destinations? We decided to go for a walk instead, the only rational response to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle being procrastination.
We found a small café in the nearby park. Time to celebrate our arrival in Portugal with a pingado and pasteis de nata.
It struck us that the country had developed considerably over the past seven years since our first unplanned visit here.
The equipment in the playground was all brand new, the big sports hall beside us was clearly a recent addition, complete with the array of solar panels to reduce its carbon footprint.
As well as being a lovely old town, Silves also exudes optimism and is not shy of development, even if that means the local fast food restaurant's 15 metre high neon sign 'Rancho Burger' gave the picturesque view of the castle from the riverside esplanade a unexpected contemporary vibe. As did the big yellow Lidl sign which proved very useful, as we needed a few bits and pieces, so we headed towards it.
This too proved trickier than anticipated, proving that uncertainty Wednesday still had us in thrall. The road in front of Lidl was lined with spectators. We joined them, but the only thing going on was a stream of police motorbikes passing by, gesturing to the crowd to stay back. Two young guys next to us held expensive looking road bikes, they confirmed what we suspected, a big cycle race was due any moment. The slow parade of police motorcyclists was now interspersed by cars honking horns, most had team logos on the side, a few belonged to the media. A lone ambulance, then nothing for a while.
Finally a small gaggle of riders appeared in the distance, approaching rapidly. As the leading group of five or six swept through a big cheer went up. More police motorbikes, then after a couple minutes a swarm of cyclists emerged from the distance, a peloton of fifty or so flashed by in seconds, tailed by a parade of support vehicles with a small fortune of spare bikes on their roofs. Excitement over, we wandered off to Lidl.
At some point during all of this some kind of consensus emerged, it appeared we were not going to stay here but drive on to Sagres. I don't remember the moment the decision was made. We've been together for 47 years, most things seem to get sorted through some mysterious non-linguistic process of osmosis. Gill phoned the Orbitur site to double check they would have space; of course they did, though the town is in Algarve province it is too workaday and surferish to be in 'The Algarve'. Emptier hopefully.
West of Lagos the landscape is emptier, still green, but a different shade, not so bright, not so spring green, more scrubby sage. The more desolate it got the happier I became, I love these ragged ends of the earth, the continent's remote promontories where the next landfall is thousands of miles beyond the horizon, in this case - North Carolina.
We know the road to here well, a parade of unexciting landmarks significant only to us, like one of those idiosyncratic maps you used to get on the inside cover of a children's book, 'the hundred acre wood', 'Swallowdale', but in our case annotated with: the road off to the Cabanas beach restaurant (now closed-up, sadly), Intermarché Budens (with its potholed wasteland over the road, perfect to park a moho); then soon after on the left the narrow road leading to Praia Boca de Rio (secluded free beach parking now so popular you cannot get parked); Lidl Vila do Bispo (with dedicated parking bays for mohos, mainly occupied by crusties); skirting the scruffy outskirts of Sagres, ignoring the sat nav's best attempts to take a short cut down a donkey track, finally, Sagres Orbitur campsite.
It's nothing special, a simple site in a pinewood, but Cabo de São Vicente is just down the road and the area feels remote and soulful even though Lagos is little more than half an hour away by car.
Yesterday someone left a comment on the blog in response to my whinging about feeling exhausted. Maybe you are simply feeling your age, they suggested helpfully. Well yes, I am 67 this May, so it is a possibility. Nevertheless, it has to be said after half an hour or so here I was feeling much perkier. Another possibility occured to me, my problem has been I have been feeling everyone else's ages. When we bought our house in 1996 it was ten years old, most of people in the neighborhood had kids, they all went off to university and we stayed behind. The street has become an inadvertent retirement community. So we escape in the van during the winter months to warmer climes only to join tens of thousands of northern Europe's retirees doing exactly the same as us. Since our first trip in 2014 the sliver of Iberia's southern coast with pleasant winter sunshine had grown ever busier. Even this year, despite the of complications Covid, many sites are fully booked or close to it. What did a I call our tribe - the geriatariat. Is there a more dismal demographic to be a part of?
Here is different, for a start the site is not crowded the pitches spread out among the trees. Moreover we are an eclectic bunch, quite a few people around our age, including one or two in big swanky Cathargos, but many younger people too, surfers in beat-up campers and Mercedes T class self builds.
There are van lifers in venerable Hymers with toddlers in tow in, a lone digital nomad in her shiny, tax deductible VW T30 camper, Eco warriors and earth mothers in graffiti daubed converted ambulances or delivery trucks, cycle tourists in tents.
It's a kind of random gathering of people who prefer a wind swept headlands to a manicured golf course. It makes me happy and feel far younger than I am.
Tomorrow we move on having spent two days here. I did manage to take it easy, as I promised myself. Yesterday the only thing we did was cycle into Sagres and have lunch at A Sereia, you cannot really find fresher fish than here, the small 'snack bar' as it dubs itself is located on the roof of the quayside warehouse where the fish auction happens every afternoon at 3.30.
In our enthusiasm we had set off a bit early. Lets visit the 'fortezza', Gill decided, then changed her mind after 70m of boneshaking progress up the cobbled road to it. Instead we locked our bikes at the top of the steep track that goes down to the Praia do Tonel.
I have an enthusiasm for surfing beaches that you might normally associate with a twitcher faced with a particularly melodic patch of ancient woodland. What I love about surfing is although it is a sport, the competition is more a tussle between the human and the wave than between one person and another. Moreover, with surfing the medium lives, shifts, allures more viscerally than the skier's snow or climber's unforgiving rock wall. And because the surfer inhabits a world of waves there is a beauty and spirituality about which is transcendental, for it could be argued there is nothing else but waves, light, gravity, sand dunes, drifting continents, sound, earthquakes, sub-atomic particles - all wave-forms.
Or course it is fanciful to suggest that it is wave action that beautifies surfers, it just happens that the litheness they need to stay upright and the strength to swim out to where the waves break gifts them great physique. Sleek in their wetsuits they look like Greek gods or goddesses sculpted in black marble by Praxiteles.
I would have loved to learn to surf on a long board, but I was in my late twenties before I taught myself to swim, then bought a body board ten years later so I could keep an eye on the kids when they used theirs on the beaches of Les Landes. In your forties it is too late really to develop the fearlessness you would require to be a competent surfer. So I watch and admire from afar like today.
By now lunch was calling, we headed for A Sereia and managed to get a seat outside with a view over the fishing harbour.
We decided to share a whole dorada, on the photo Gill took it looks huge, in fact it was a little less than 1kg.
There is nothing fancy about either the place or the food, but it is proof that fresh food skillfully cooked can be very delicious.
It takes a bit of care to eat grilled fish this way, gutted, but not filleted, and it does strike you when ordering fish by weight you are paying a lot for the bits that are inedible.
Still, we usually live about as far away from the sea than you can get in England, Buxton does not have a fishmonger, so fresh fish is always a real treat.
The light was stunning, making the colours of ordinary things sing out. I kept jumping off my bike to snap this and that.
The graffiti daubed building by the roundabout -
Rust red nets -
A yellow bush surrounded by yellow flowers -
The front of a tacky pottery shop -
Southern light is utterly ravishing to northerners immersed from the day they are born in greyness. Surrounded on three sides by the ocean, Sagres can be especially luminous; though when battered by Atlantic storms, it can do greyness too, as we know.
Today was grey. As storm Eunice upended trees in London, disrupted air and train travel and inevitably blasted Buxton with blizzards, her tail-end brought a blustery breeze and thin grey clouds to the Portugal's southwest tip. We decided to cycle up to Cabo São Vicente a little over 5km from the campsite. Not far, but there is a gentle upward slope from the site all the way to the lighthouse and a head wind to battle the whole way.
It would have been a struggle on a conventional bike, but we just notched up the electrics and sailed into the wind. We arrived somewhat sand blasted.
The cliffs are magnificent, the lighthouse giving scale and a sense of both human frailty and determination.
The west is all emptiness, to the southeast a series of headlands receding into nothingness.
Cohen's lines again, about living for nothing, about keeping a record, about getting clear.
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