Holiday Extension

Lisbon to Madrid to Geneva, 29th-31st July

I wasn't really expecting to wave M off at Lisbon airport, but then again you can never be sure of anything in life.

It was on the train to Lisbon from Cascais that I first realised that my ID card was not in my wallet, where it has been for the last 10 years. A thorough search of my pockets revealed that it wasn't in any of them either, and on arrival at the airport I launched a full scale assault on my bag, which took a long time but resulted in nothing. Miika hadn't found it at his place either. Where the hell had it gone ? M suggested that I call our hotel in Sevilla on the off-chance that I may have left it there. The cheerful guy at the reception confirmed that it was, and I was stuck with no ID. After a desperate attempt at getting on the plane using my health insurance card (which, predictably, failed), I was faced with the reality of of the situation. I can normally talk my way out of trouble but EasyJet is a formidable opponent and there was no (legal) way that I was going to get through. M gave me a look that only women can give, its complexity out of reach to any man - part sympathy, part annoyance, part pity, part bloody-hell-not-this-again. I was suddenly waving as she went off to the plane and back to work, and I headed back out into the Portuguese sunshine and back into Lisbon. I would like to take this opportunity to confirm that this is the first time that such a plane-boarding failure has happened to me (although I have missed planes for various other reasons, nearly all involving my own incompetence) and I have no idea why or how my ID card was not in the same country as I was. 

I headed off to Oriente bus station and bought a ticket for the next available bus, which left at 11pm. It was now 1pm and so I bought "Fresh Air Fiend" by Paul Theroux (the pretentious father of the pretentious Louis Theroux), sat at the beach and read it until the sun went down. On my way to the beach I also tried to find the tower of Belém, Portugal's most famous landmark. I failed at that as well, although I did catch a glimpse of it from the train as I headed out to the suburbs for my beach session. I'd been looking for it at the wrong station. It all made sense.

The bridge to Setubal

The same bridge as in the previous post, just this time with fishing rods.

Another overnight bus session followed, and it was my penitence for not having my ID card on it. I probably clocked up about an hour of sleep. The only seat I could find was behind the central door and so my knees were jammed against one of those hard walls. The woman sat next to me was of a certain age and the owner of a smartphone which rang incessantly. Unfortunately the smartphone appeared to be new and she seemed unable to either answer it or refuse the call (or indeed turn down the volume) and so every so often I would hear the blare of heavy metal coming from her handbag and try to close my ears as she got increasingly flustered and violent towards her screen. We arrived in Sevilla at half past five, I tried to walk to the hotel and instantly got lost. Any other day, a wander through Sevilla's old town at night would have been a pleasure but I was desperate to find somewhere to sit down and try to have a nap again. I picked up my ID card, went straight to the train station, got a bucket of Coke from McDonald's (and I am ashamed) and bought a ticket for the next slow train to Cordoba, where I hoped to pick up another one towards Madrid, saving money in the process. Another hour and a half to kill, during which Coca-Cola company shares probably rose a little as I tried to stay awake. 

"A portrait of the artist as a tired man" - Sevilla, 6am

Cordoba pulled into view at 9.30 and it seemed that no slow trains ran north. The fast train was 80€. Fortunately, the bus station was just over the road and, 4 hours after swearing I'd never get on a long distance bus again, I bought myself a ticket for the far more pleasant price of 16€. The bus left at 2pm and would arrive in Madrid six hours later. I set up camp in a cyber cafe, bought some flights from Madrid back to Geneva and stared vacantly at the screen while keeping M up to date with developments over Skype. My breakfast consisted of a sandwich, carefully crafted from a supermarket baguette and a buy-one-get-one-free pack of chorizo. The second part of this became my lunch. It was a far cry from the tapas and limoncello of the ten previous days. After an interminable wait, I got onto the bus and, naturally, the guy who sat next to me was not only the largest person on the bus but also the one with the loudest music and the least soundproof headphones. I slept like a baby anyway.

 Sunrise from the train. Not a particularly interesting or good picture, but I didn't take many

 I wasn't sure if my friend Fiesta in Madrid was aware that I was coming. My phone battery had died and I'd sent him a text message from a newly acquired Spanish number that didn't appear to want to cooperate. I'd sent him a message from the cybercafe in Cordoba and hoped that he would check his emails before I arrived. As luck would have it, we arrived on his building's doorstep at exactly the same time. As always happens, my tiredness evaporated as the evening came and we ended up going out with his friends for a night out which lasted far too long. We got home at 6am on what was, for the second time of asking, the last day of this trip. Our tiredness ensured that the trip ended in exactly the way I would have wanted - with a day at one of Madrid's exotic and enticing municipal swimming pools.

Beach Bums

Cascais & Lisbon, Portugal, 25th-29th July 2012

Having finally arrived in Cascais, we were treated by Miika and Henna to a true travellers' welcome (beer and cheesecake) and eventually settled down to sleep. There was only one spare sofa so one of us would have to sleep on the floor - I did the gentleman routine and insisted that it be me, knowing that I would sleep like a baby anyway. This prediction turned out to be correct.

Host number 1 engaging in a kebab fight with M

...while host number 2 is far too busy for shenanigans like those.

Cascais is a small place on the coast so we did small-place-on-the-coast stuff. Fish at the restaurant. A day at the beach. Surfing.

The surfing episode was one that I looked forward to with bucketloads of trepidation. I always enjoy trying out new things, although I generally never miss an opportunity to injure myself and surfing seemed to fit the bill. Together with our South African instructor we did the basics on the beach: learnt how to lie on a board (successfully reproduced on the waves) and learnt how to stand up once we'd caught a wave. In the gentle, non-moving setting of the beach, the standing up was easy. It turned out to be less so once waves and motion were thrown into the mix. Normally a calm and reflective person, I managed to forget my left and right while trying to remember which side to stand up. Catching waves was easy - doing anything with them was not. Miika had done it before and we looked to him for inspiration, and one other guy in the group knew what he was doing as well. Looking to him for guidance was somewhat more difficult though as he was apparently the owner of an ultra-proud dad who stood on the beach taking pictures and waded into the sea shouting "WELL DONE OLIVER !" every time the guy managed to stand up. I caught a particularly good wave, sailed towards the shore, remembered which hand was my right and stood up with such enthusiasm that my forward motion propelled me up and over my board, crashing head-first into the sea before deciding that this probably wasn't going to be my day. Nonetheless, I'd managed to stand up - granted it was only for half a second and only on one leg, but it's a start.

We consoled ourselves with a beer at the beach bar afterwards, as all good surfers naturally do. I slept on the floor again, with very good results again.

T.I.C. - This is Cascais

While the gang busied themselves at the beach I headed into Lisbon for a bit of a wander around. It's an attractive town but looks more tired than Madrid and Sevilla. It's also probably the biggest city in Europe without a single flat surface as the roads undulate over hills all through town. It seemed a bit of a ghost town compared to those in Spain as well - most of the people milling around in the centre seemed to be tourists and the terrace restaurants were bursting at the seams. After wandering around and seeing everything I could be bothered to see, I hopped on the train back to Cascais. M insisted that I sleep on the sofa as I'd be more comfortable but its length combined with the arm rest ensured I woke up with a cricked neck every hour through the night. I decided to be a gentleman the following evening and sleep on the floor again.

 I don't remember what this is

This is a fountain 

This is a theatre 

 And this is a tram.

 The seafront at Cais do Sodre station

It was a lazy time in general and we were shown around slowly by the delightful hosts who seem to have adapted to the Mediterranean pace. It was a sudden jolt from this pace to find ourselves on the train back to Lisbon, heading for the airport. And that should be the end of the story. For me, it was not........

The Periodical Anti-Bus Rant

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 ?