New Years in Portugal

Sunday morning dawned and we drove towards the airport just as the ice was beginning to harden on the car window - good timing since we haven’t yet bought a scraper. At 6.00 in the morning it is hard to believe how many bleary eyed Britons were escaping the English winter – the queue to the check in wound it's way like a snake right around the airport. There were flights to all the ‘cheap’ destinations we had seen on our search for a cheap holiday on the internet - Glenoble, Innsbruck, Krakow, Dublin, Glasgow, Nice and Faro. A winter holiday or a summer one - summer of course and some warmth please.
Armacao de Pera is a little town in the Algarve region about 40 kms from Faro airport. The Lonely Planet describes the Algarve area as Portugal’s major tourist resort area since Faro airport opened in the 1960’s, leading to a flood of package tours from Britain and increasingly, Germany and France. The big attraction? Almost year-round sun, great beaches and low prices. Those are still the Algarve’s major selling points, though rampant development during the late 1970’s between Lagos and Faro destroyed much of the coastline’s picturesque quality’. And it is true.

The weather was still and warm (about 20 and above), our hotel was one of many along the beach (a bit like Australia's Gold Coast - but some how the impression is one of little planning and haste!!). The town is full of smallish apartment blocks, with only a church and one small fort providing any hint of what the history of the town had. The area only has about 250 years of history in its towns because most of the area was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755 and a rather large tsunami. The souvenir shops come complete with clothes, scarves and ornaments made in China and very few local traditionally made goods - though the ceramics we did find were very good quality, highly colourful and quite unique. We are getting a collection of Collins Phrasebooks but hardly opened our Portugese book as most menus are in Portuguese and English with some in German and French. There are hamburger cafes, places to buy coffees and cakes and a few ethnic restaurants serving American food, pizza and pasta, Chinese, Indian and just a couple of Portuguese restaurants serving fresh fish and nice local wine. The beaches and the natural coastline are superb. We wandered along the cliff line which over time has become a bit like Punakaiki and a bit like the Pinnacles and Castle Point. Fossils galore and cactuses and the last of the flowers hyacinths, hydrangeas, ginger, red hot pokers, bougainvilla. Spring and summer must be a real picture. Great views and opportunities to explore little beaches, cliffs and the little church on the hillside. The church is no longer used for mass but many come to light candles and pray. Candles were lit for little Madeleine McCann on New Years Day as they were in other towns along the way. When we tired of wandering around we lazed by the heated swimming, ordered baguettes and lemonades and listened to the Atlantic Ocean roll onto the golden sand or to Elvis, Gerry and the pacemakers, Chattanooga choo choo etc in the bar (you can tell what age group and ethnicity the hotel caters for).

Harry was keen to visit Gibralter – the day we went turned out to be a very wet and cold –it was a reasonably long day sitting in a 60 seater bus and not being able to see much because of the rain or the dark. Gibralter was fascinating in a funny sort of way. We needed our passports to cross the frontier from Spain but it was sufficient to wave them in front of the customs officer while saying ‘yes I have a passport’ . We then ran across the runway (yes the runway of the international airport) before finding the main street of this tax free haven. The street is like a large international airport full of jewellery shops, perfumeries, expensive clothes and electronic goods though far more attractive than any airport I know. You can use either English or Gibralter pounds or Euros to purchase all your goodies and then wander back through customs without them really looking to see how you've bought. We took a guided tour around the rock – with a bus driver who kept saying ‘you can’t see nothing – terrible terrible weather – very very hazy’. It is a place that you could spend 2 days exploring (the 5 kms of tunnels made in the rock during war time), the only castle built in about 1200, the limestone caves and at the same time wondering at that mix of old, 60’s and 70’s buildings, the poorer areas and the rich. 60,000 people live in a very small area about 6 square kilometres. Monkeys live in the reserve free to come and go as they please. It is assumed that the Moors (arabs) brought them over in the 1700’s. The legend is as long as the monkeys stay in Gibralter so will the English. So they have great care, the bus driver led us to believe better than many of the residents. Once numbers grow too big they are sold to zoos etc (300 were recently sold to German zoos). Lots of signs about not feeding them and fines of £500 (us kiwis know why - diet, learning to fend for themselves etc) but the bus driver ignored this and handed them dried pasta out the window.

Portugese have novel speed cameras. If you are caught speeding a red light comes on and you are required to stop - the time you have to stop depends I think on how far over the limit you went - an instant punishment though I gather there is nothing stopping you from going through the red light if you can't be bothered waiting. In Lisbon they are just trialling the good old ‘money earning’ speed cameras that we know in England and back home and the authorities are apparently warming to this new form of revenue collection so it is just possible the novel method might be in decline.

The colour of Portugal is white. Houses have a trim around the window sills and doors and the colour is significant. Blue is for scaring away the devil and ex fisherman also have blue to remind them of the sea. Pink is for romance and love, red for good luck, green for hope. Although, not stated there were lots of houses with yellow and gold and I think that is possibly the colour for success and money. We wondered what the neighbours would think when the residents changed from pink to another colour!! Would the rumours start? Many centuries ago a prince brought his Swedish princess back to Portugal. She was very homesick in winter and longed for snow so ordered the planting of lots of almond trees. In winter they are covered in white flowers which when the wind blows look like snow drops. She was never homesick again. Chimneys signify wealth – the more chimneys the house the richer you are. The tale goes that when the Romans landed and tried to prohibit the Moors from practising their Islam, they built their mosques and masqueraded them as chimneys. They certainly have an Islamic look about them.
Cork is a major business in Portugal. It is illegal to cut down a cork tree. They take 25 years to grow before you can take cork and then you can only take cork off it every 9 years, and not off all the tree as you would kill it. Each cork tree is marked with the year it was last stripped. The cork tree drops acorns and there is a little black pig that is fed solely on these almonds. Apparently, when this pig is smoked and preserved it tastes exceptional. We saw a large number of these pigs hanging in a shop at a cost of 62 euros a leg and the only sign in English was ‘Do not touch these you will get dirty’. We did taste some ham one night which could be this expensive pork and decided that it must be quite an acquired taste.

One day we took a day trip through the countryside and down a river in the afternoon. We were picked up by a very Scots man, strong accent, long hair and beard, immediate impression was Billy Connolly. Very talkative, told us lots of jokes and bits about the country, took us through little villages before we joined up with the rest of the tour. He is another man about our age, wanting a change from the routine work he had been doing for a long time in Scotland. We changed guides when we met up with the others and although there were a collection of Dutch and English speaking people in the jeep the tour guide spoke none of these languages – so when the rest stopped and got a commentary he was silent. At one point he pointed and said 'Spain'. Later on I asked an English speaking tour guide about what was significant and found that 'Spain’ was actually a huge resort of 5000 beds in Spain built around a golf course. Apparently now, Portugal is stopping these developments – well done Portugal. On the river cruise coming back we saw another construction that would take 56000 beds for those interested in golf and sunning themselves. Unbelievable. Lunch on the safari was memorable – leek and potato soup, peri peri chicken and salad, oranges and local entertainment some even in Portugese. We met two Scottish families both had rellies in NZ and one a sister lives in the same town as my Mum – small world isn’t it and a dutch couple had a daughter who worked as a shearer on a NZ farm but now is based in Aussie. From the wildlife perspective it was special, and apparently quite unusual to see Flamingos in the wild and stalks nesting in specially prepared platforms above lamp posts and power lines.

EU has made big changes in Portugal like:

• The smoking ban came in on 1 January, but they still subsidise tobacco farmers in the north of Portugal.
• They subsidise orange plantations which are very expensive to grow here as they need lots of irrigation and soil (mainly rock around here).
• Carob besides chocolate substitute is used to feed animals, as a natural sweetener (and lots of other things I can't remember). As their seeds are almost exactly the same weight, they were used to weigh things and that is were carot comes from as a measure of gold.
  

Portugal is known for its ceramics and it really wasn’t until we got to Lagos that we saw some great examples. The houses in Armacao de Pera were sometimes tiled, but they looked a bit like the tiles that we did our bathrooms in back in the 60’s and 70’s. In Lagos, the street signs were all done in tiles, and most of the houses had some form of tile around the doors or walls. Not all spectacular to look at but it was effective when looking down streets. After the devastation of the earthquake it was rebuilt and there were fine examples of 200 year old buildings including the town wall and the fort beside the marina. There was a statue of St Barbara who wanted to convert to Christianity in the 1800’s – her father locked her up in a room to prevent this but apparently a priest managed to get in and she converted. Her father decided to behead her because of it – but God judged him and he was hit by lightening and died. Had a nice fish lunch – second time in my life I’ve eaten fish that look at me while I eat them (first time was new years eve with a plate of sardines) – I didn’t look at it and it tasted just fine – that with olives, cheeses, wine and oranges make good cuisine in Portugal. Across the marina we spied a number of cats. Thought at first that they were wild, but they didn’t seem scared of people walking passed. We then spied what looked like little kennels and thought that they were probably put there to kill the vermin from all the fishing fleet – they looked quite well fed.



It was a long trip home and with the pilot telling us it was 2 degrees in Bristol we didn't have much incentive to get on the plane. But 2 degrees with no wind chill factor and no rain actually is bearable and after grocery shopping we settled in cosily with good books and laptop to catch up on all the news and to relax. Work again tomorrow...but lots to continue to look forward to.