Sevilla, Spain to Cascais, Portugal, 25th July 2012
After spending our final morning in Sevilla wisely (having a lie in and then walking to the bus stop in sweltering heat, buying postcards on the way), we began the day-long journey to Cascais. There is no train line across the border south of the Madrid-Lisbon line and so we were faced with my travel nemesis: the long-distance bus. This could be a strange sentiment, you might think, for someone who crossed Africa with the aid of exactly these vehicles. But in Africa there were always new sights through the window, people who were willing to have a chat with you or who were slinging insults at the driver. Failing this, you knew that an African bus was always on the brink of breaking down so you could get off to stretch your legs or get some skewered meat and a beer. A European long-distance bus is a fail-proof, air-conditioned machine and is generally filled to the rafters. It is filled with "characters", just like the African buses - but whereas the Africans were characters in the sense of "I'd like to buy this character a beer and hear a few stories", European long distance buses seem to be more the haunt of more seriously questionable characters.
Once we boarded at Prado station, the bus left pretty quickly and to my surprise we were one of only a few passengers on board. I was also surprised that we were heading the wrong way, and both of these surprises were explained a few minutes later when we pulled into Plaza de Armas station, a few blocks away, and passengers filled every seat. Opposite us, a German guy with a fluorescent pink monkey stuffed toy, which had the good fortune of being showed everything through the window by his caring owner. You could tell that the monkey enjoyed it by the way it nodded its head in appreciation with every interesting sight that went past. In front of the German guy was another guy with a large camera who took burst shots of everything through the window (trees, bushes, clouds) complete with the fake shutter noise for each of the 30 thousand snaps he took during this trip. And directly in front of me, of course, was the classic "girl who just must lean her seat back as far as it can possibly go". And so we set off from Sevilla on the interminable crawl to Lisbon. A few hours went past, Portuguese border appeared in front of us, and the sea opened up to the left. "The sea ??" I asked M. What is the sea doing there ? It turned out that my bus experience was to be extended as, instead of heading straight for Lisbon, we were also doing a tour of the Algarve resorts to drop people off. Curses. Still, we stopped at Faro bus station long enough for me to get a beer and a snack so it was a blessing in some sort of disguise. After many more hours of hearing the infernal camera shutter going off in my ear while trying to find space under the maximally-leaning seat in front of me and watching the pink monkey getting his guided tour of Portugal, we finally arrived in Lisbon Sete Rios bus station.
The metro station was eventually located (after one large illuminated M sign turned out to be advertising a mass calorie intake facility in the form of McDonald's rather than a mass transit facility) and we attempted to buy tickets to Cais do Sodre station, from where we'd have to get a train to Cascais. Our Portuguese was not fantastic, nor was our knowledge of the Lisbon metro system, and the place was seemingly deserted so there was no one to ask for advice. The machine had an English language option although unfortunately only the line "Select desired product" was in English. The products themselves remained listed incomprehensibly in Portuguese. The tried and tested method of "press as many buttons as possible until something looks good" was carried out and we eventually worked out that one must buy a magnetic strip card and load journeys onto that. We bought a card and loaded 2 journeys onto it. I went through the gates, passed the ticket back to M and waited for her to pass through. As she inserted the ticket, the machine made a collection of irate noises at her and told her in no uncertain terms to go away. She tried pushing more buttons and inserting more money before scuttling off and summoning a wandering security guard for help and he explained to her in his best Portuguese that we needed one card per person. Thankfully, we had just about enough coins to pay for that. Everything then went perfectly fine for the next 20 minutes.
Cais do Sodré station was where we changed to the suburban train to Cascais - different ticketing structure but same ticket. We were prepared this time so we tried to add credit to our cards when the machine beeped irately at me, this time. The fact that I had a problem was articulated to me in English as I had requested but the problem itself was outlined in Portuguese. Fortunately, a woman in the queue next to us needed changed and spoke both English and Portuguese. We were a godsend for each other. It turns out that my ticket was not accepted by the machine for train ticket credit as it still had metro credit on it. I kept both of my identical-looking tickets, trying to remember which one was for the train and which one was for the metro. We finally piled onto the Cascais train, an hour and a half later than predicted, desperately trying to think of more illogical public transport systems we have come across.
We got to Cascais where we were staying with Miika and Henna, a Finnish couple who are judoka and nutritionist respectively and who decided to jack it all in and spend the year surfing (to put it simply), their reason for living here for a while. They welcomed us with bread, meat, cheesecake and beer. Long day ? Which long day was that ?
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