Day Nine – On A Long, Dark, Desert Highway

Day Nine – On A Long, Dark, Desert Highway (January 4, 2011)

Hot damn I love blackout blinds. It could have been 4 in the morning for all I knew when I woke up at 9:30 this morning. The blackness was absolute, which caused a bit of an issue when it actually was 4am and I had to find the bathroom in the pitch dark in a strange room in a strange country, not quite awake. I got lost. Fortunately I realized my mistake before I peed in the hallway.

We made our way down the rather rustic dirt road and out to the highway, heading west (to be fair, the road to the hotel is normally paved, however the water and/or sewer people evidently needed to do some work on the water mains/sewer supply. They didn’t feel that replacing roadways was their remit, and the city road people apparently and somewhat justifiably felt that as they hadn’t ripped up the road in the first place, replacing it wasn’t their concern. The road remains dirt, and the heavy rains are doing their worst. It is expected that someone will flinch at some point and the road will be repaired, but it is hard to say when this might be).

West led us to the pay as you go motorway, which is actually relatively expensive – more than €5 to get from Tomar to Óbidos, although this does mean travelling on well paved and mostly three lane super highway at very high speeds (in fact, about 10km/hr more than Aurelia is comfortable doing – she can do it at a pinch, but the vibrations and noise don’t seem worth the effort, and I’m a gentleman – I don’t like to see a lady strain herself unnecessarily).

Óbidos is known for two things – the shimmering whiteness of the buildings within the surrounding and impressively tall medieval curtain walls which completely encircle the old city, and the cunningly crafted and deceptively strong cherry liqueur called “ginja.” It seems the tourists have discovered both the shimmering whiteness and cunning liquid and the tourist traps have followed them. The main road from the big entrance gate up to the church at the other end of the village is lined with shops selling the typical tourist tat, including, but not limited to almost hand-made and very nearly hand-painted pottery, socks for some reason, wooden swords, a Celtic music shop (not even I can explain that one), and the other 1001 tourist accoutrements which seem required.

We did a bit of an exploratory wander before the rain started up, at which point we found a restaurant for lunch. It was traditionalish Portuguese, so it had salt cod on the menu. While I’m sure some people like salt cod, we are not two of them. Instead, we had the not-particularly-traditional-but-tasty fettuccini with chicken, bacon, and mushrooms, and chicken with pineapple for me. Both were better than we would have expected. By the time we’d finished lunch, the rain had more or less stopped.

We went back out for more photo opportunities and did a fairly thorough circuit of the village. There isn’t a lot there, other than that main street, as far as we could tell. Our curiosity satisfied and our memory cards somewhat more full than they previously had been, we returned to Aurelia and set Tracy the satnav towards Alcobaça (which I think sounds awfully like the name of Chewbacca’s cousin from the country).

Tracy sometimes has a somewhat disturbed sense of humour, and our decision to set her to avoid toll roads meant that in retaliation, she tried to get us to drive through the very centre of a relatively large but hugely cramped Portuguese country village. This was not fun. Also, it seems that since Tracy’s maps were loaded, they’ve changed a whole bunch of streets to one-way, which adds to the degree of difficulty. Eventually we capitulated, and changed her programming back to the default, allowing her to take us 23 kms on the toll highway.

Almost by accident we found the town-centre parking lot in Alcobaça, directly across the courtyard from what is apparently one of the most beautiful Cistercian Abbeys left – Mosterio de Santa Maria, dating from the twelfth century. After minor annoyances trying to get change for a €10 note in the local shops so that we could pay for parking (we’d used the last of our small change paying for the damn toll road getting to Alcobaça), we entered the abbey.

Not long ago, we’d read a series of books by C.J. Sansom, one of which is set in a medieval monastery. I thought of the description of monastic life as I walked through the ancient halls and courtyards of Mosterio de Santa Maria – it would have been a very difficult life, and if today was anything to go by, often very cold. One of the things from the book that stuck with me was the description of some of the monks passing the time in the cloister by chipping engravings and messages in the walls – the walls at Mosterio de Santa Maria are covered with carved messages and symbols. The time it must have taken to do all that, the dedication, and the sheer boredom required to spend that amount chipping away at solid rock...no life for me...

We spent a good hour wandering around the monastery before deciding it was time to head back to Tomar for dinner and a quiet night in. Evidently Tracy wasn’t quite over her irritation with us, and I made it worse by thinking that it would be a good idea to change her settings again to avoid toll roads. I paid dearly this time. She sent us up to the top of mountains into what turned out to be darkness, light drizzle, and very heavy fog. It may have been the most stressful drive of my life.

We went up and down and around blind corners, through tiny villages on a road barely a lane wind, on through the evening. I was shattered by the time we finally pulled into Casa Rosden. I won’t be making the mistake of trying to tell Tracy what to do again anytime soon, I can assure you.

The evening has been lovely, and has consisted mostly of cooking dinner, listening to my classic rock play list, drinking wine, and talking about the trip we’re on and trips we’ve taken. I can’t think of a much better way to spend a fairly cold and rainy evening in rural Portugal.