Where are Ron and Ellen?
Portugal (Ron and Ellen), Southeastern Africa (Ron), 19 September 2013 - 13 January 2014
Ron and Ellen in Porto, Portugal, October 2013
Vila Real de Santo Antonio, Castro Marim, Beja, Porto Covo, and Lisbon, Portugal
To see photos of Vila Real de Santo Antonio and Castro Marim, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of Beja, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Beja, Porto Covo, and back to Lisbon
To see photos of Porto Covo, click on the thumbnail at the left.
22 October 2013
Lisbon, PortugalDear Family and Friends,
After looking at the map and looking at the weather forecasts for various places, we decided to head to Beja after Tavira. Beja is a small city on a high point the center of the central plain in Portugal, an area of cork trees and wheat fields. The site has been inhabited since the Iron Age, although it was the Romans who founded the city, naming it Pax Julia. According to our guide book it is not a major stop on the tourist route, something that made it particularly appealing. Our hotel was on the pedestrian street, a wonderful location, and although the clientele was mainly tourists, the people in the town were friendly and obviously not burned out on tourism. We explored the castle, built in the late 13th century on Roman foundations, poked our head into various ornate churches of varying ages, visited a convent with a spectacular tiled cloister and other 16th century tiles lining the rooms, and wandered through the Jorge Viera museum, a contemporary museum devoted primarily to the work of Viera, a well-known Portuguese sculptor. There was another museum where you walked around on a glass floor (a bit disconcerting at times) to look at the ruins below, mostly from Roman times, but in one section you can see where the Roman building's foundation was built on top of an Iron Age wall.
While in Beja, we attended two musical events at the local theater, which seemed to have quite an active and varied arts program. One evening we heard the Portuguese Air Force Band (maybe 50 members, wind instruments, percussion, and three bass players) perform a mix of music - Wagner, Spanish and Portuguese composers, and, with three excellent singers, something from Miss Saigon. They were very, very good and played to a packed house. The next night we went to a cabaret performance, a well-known Portuguese woman singer backed by a 5-piece band. They were fairly good (not as good as the Air Force band - the theater was only about 1/4 full), but were far, far too loud!
On the way from Tavira to Beja we stopped and wandered around in Vila Real de San Antonio, the most southeast corner of Portugal across the river from Spain, which has a lovely riverside esplanade and a huge marina (where many British expats live year-round on their boats, according to a British woman we met taking her daily walk). Just a few kilometers north, we stopped and visited the 14th century castle at Castro Marim, on a hill above the salt flats and the river, with a stratigically commanding view of both the river and the sea.
As a final stop before returning to Lisbon, we headed to the western Atlantic coast to Vila Nova de Milfontes, a small sea-side resort. We wanted a veranda overlooking the water to relax for a day and a half, but couldn't find accomodations we liked - many places are already closed for the season. So we continued up the coast to the tiny town (the guidebook says the population is 1100) of Porto Covo. There we found an apartment with huge French doors and a huge veranda overlooking what is one of the most spectacular views we've seen anywhere. We were high above the tiny narrow harbor, which couldn't have been more than the length of a football field wide. The harbor opened out between the cliffs, where the surf was constantly crashing, and the entire coastline is jagged rock and cliffs, with a couple of really tiny beaches tucked into the land end of the openings in the rocks. We watched a couple of small boats going out of the harbor to the open sea and also coming back, and it was almost as if they were surfing the huge waves at the mouth of the harbor.
We arrived back in Lisbon yesterday afternoon, had dinner last night at Restaurant Farol in Cacilhas, the wonderful seafood restaurant a brief ferry ride across the river from Lisbon we'd discovered during our first week here. Today we've done some walking around in the older areas of the city, had lunch on a plaza overlooking the river, and are now prepping for tomorrow's flights: Ellen returns home and Ron heads to Africa. Ellen will work on posting the Portugal travel accounts and a selection of photos to the Web (and will send a message to the list when they are available)- and then we'll await reports from Ron on his African travels.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
Some final thoughts about Portugal, added after my return home.We kept meaning to comment on the economy while we were in Portugal, but never did. So here are a few (admittedly superficial) observations based on what we saw and on conversations we had with different people. On the surface, it seems like a relatively prosperous society, and we didn't see much obvious poverty. But there are many empty stores with for sale/rent signs in them, and many small shops of one kind or another in which we never saw a single customer over the several days we were in a place and walked past. The young woman in her mid-30s who was the housekeeper/manager for the 5-flat building in Porto where we stayed told us 1) she has multiple jobs to earn money (the flats, cleaning for two different women, and helping an 84-year-old man one day a week with bill-paying and shopping etc), 2) you can't get medical care unless you have money, and 3) her husband was in London working and they hoped to move her and their two daughters there in a few months because it would be a btter life. A woman in Aveiro told us that she was lucky to have a good job, but that if she lost her job she would have a hard time finding another one because she is in her mid-40s and most places can hire much younger people for much less - but at the same time, it is hard for young people to find jobs. A man (mid-40s, I'd guess) we talked to at the next table in a restaurant in Monchique brought his family back to southern Portugal 4 years ago from working a good job in London (he is some kind of engineer) because he wanted to be near his extended family; he said that when the crash came in 2008 all construction of any sort in Portugal simply stopped, and hasn't started up again (indeed, we saw numerous partially constructed buildings that appeared to have no one working on them). He also told us that because Portugal is surrounded by Spain, Spain's economy has a huge effect on Portugal, and the unemployment rate in Portugal has shot up as Spain's has shot up, but that Portugal is still better off than Spain. Lastly, the woman, also mid-40s, who worked at our hotel in Tavira told us that her husband used to have a company that sold construction materials, and when the crash came and all construction ended, he tried selling various other things but was unsuccessful, so he is now working "on the land" with his parents. She considers herself lucky to have a job. And she said that in the south of Portugal the economy is totally dependent on tourists, so people work very hard April-October, and then manage as best they can for the rest of the year. But she loves Tavira, and wouldn't want to live anywhere else. So - make what you will of those observations.
Since I've been back, people have asked me, "What was the highlight of your trip?" We really liked all the places we went, and I would be hard-pressed to come up with a clear favorite. I asked Ron, and he said, "My favorites were Sagres for the location, scenery and comfort, the town [Beja] where we went to the theater felt more in touch with the people, and the last place before Lisbon [Porto Covo] for the spectacular scenery where I could have just relaxed and looked for a week." I particularly liked the southern part of Portugal as well, but I think for me the highlight was more a concept than a specific place or thing. I'll try to explain. My return date (23 October) was planned so I would be home in time for Grandparent's Day at North Branch School, where our grandsons are in 6th and 8th grade and where I've been on the board for about 20 years. Serendipitously, Leo's 7th-8th grade class was just finishing a unit on the Age of Discovery, including the Portuguese explorers. So a few days later I showed the class photos of explorer-related places we'd been. My thoughts had been floating around unformed for a while, but talking to the kids helped focus my thinking. Portugal is justifiably proud of its history and heritage in navigation and discovery, and seeing the places and monuments first hand made me think about the immense curiousity and courage (and yes, probably a measure of greed as well) that made people set off into the unknown in small boats. It took me about 20 hours total to travel from our hotel in Lisbon to our house in Afton. How far would they have gotten in 20 hours in their caravels? I can stay in constant touch with distant friends and family - and with Ron in Africa - by phone or internet or even by old-fashioned letters, but once those explorers sailed away, there was no contact. When we were in Sagres, we visited Cabo de Sao Vicente, the southwestern-most tip of Portugal and of Europe. It would have been the last land the explorers would have seen as they began their voyages. What were they thinking as they watched it disappear, not knowing how long they would be gone, what they would face, and when -and most especially, IF - they would see it again? We forget how much of the world was completely unknown in the 1400s and 1500s, and even when we think about it, I think we in the 21st century cannot really have any concept of what that kind of "unknown" meant. I have a photo I took of Cape St. Vincent, cliffs and sea and lighthouse, and for me that photo reminds me of what must have been the great fear of those explorers, but also their staggering courage.
Last, a bit about my return trip - in case anyone else may be flying between Madrid and Lisbon. The connection I was worried about in Madrid, 1 hour between the scheduled arrival of the flight from Lisbon and the departure (in a different terminal) of the flight to the U.S., turned out not to be a problem because of Delta's excellent customer service. The Madrid airport is spread out all over the place and is not signed well at all. The Air Europa (a Delta partner) flights to/from Lisbon leave from terminal D and flights to/from the US are terminal A. Going from Madrid to Lisbon we had several hours, so it wasn't a problem that we had to wait 20 minutes for the bus between terminals. But I was really anxious about the 1 hour coming back, especially when we were told by a number of passengers that the flight from Lisbon to Madrid is frequently late (often, apparently, hours late). The flight actually arrived on time from Lisbon, although we then sat on the tarmac with the passenger bus parked at the bottom of the stairs and the ground crew standing around for almost 10 minutes for no discernible reason. When the bus finally delivered us to the door of terminal D, there was a Delta agent waiting, saying, "Atlanta? Atlanta?" Turns out there were 7 of us trying to make the connection. The agent walked us from terminal D to terminal A (a 22 minute walk that she said would be faster than waiting for the bus!), assuring us that they would hold the plane for us. I had decided ahead of time that I would walk, figuring that if the signs said it was 22 minutes I could probably do it in a bit less, but it was good there was someone to lead the way because the route was not well marked at all and you had to go through the shopping aisles of all the duty-free shops in each terminal along the way, where there were no directional signs at all. Apparently the flight from Lisbon is routinely such a problem that they routinely have someone meet people trying to make the connection. The Air Europa ticket agents in Lisbon all kept saying, "Oh, no problem, no problem, plenty of time!" Anyway, I was impressed with Delta's customer service, although I expect it is ultimately cheaper for them to send an agent every day to meet the flight than to reroute multiple passengers who don't make the connection. My advice in general would be to avoid making any connection in the Madrid airport if possible!
Ellen
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Last updated: 31 October 2013
