If you change your mind

We know, we had said farewell to the Atlantic Ocean over a week ago; but we are travellers and as you can see, we have altered our plans and are back on the coast, chasing the warmth and sunshine. We are camped near Nazare; a tourist resort looked over by a rocky headland. With a sunny day ahead, we set off with a packed rucksack and the tourist information leaflet about a local walk. We followed the marker posts through pine woods and along the beach, enjoying stretching our legs; it all seemed very simple. However, as is the way with these things our simple walk became more exciting. The next marker post was high on the cliff, underneath which the waves were crashing. We had a go at leaping on to the rocky ledge between rolls of surf, but retreated with wet feet and looked for an alternative. This less treacherous route involved crawling through tall bamboo canes, but we made it to the top of the cliffs unscathed.

There are a number of things that indicate that Portugal is not a wealthy country; we have seen families camping in tents on the edge of towns, while on the road we passed a group of ruined huts that were lived in and resembled a shanty town, in a number of towns we have seen the communal laundry facilities still being used, the photograph is of the one in Sitio, above Navare. The notes you receive from a cash machine differs from country to country; in wealthy Austria the ATMs generally only gave out 50 Euro notes; in Portugal your money comes in a wad of 20 and 10 Euro notes.

We continue to meet so many lovely people on our trip; in Alcobaca we spent hours chatting with Gisela and Paul over coffee about places we have seen. They have managed to find a lifestyle that allows them to travel for two or three months in a year and return to work; we envy them and hope we can find employers just as flexible. We will never tire of meeting new people. That said, our next stop is Lynn and John’s lovely house in the beautiful Alto Alentejo, where friends Kayt and Zohra will also be staying and it will be so relaxing to see old friends who know who we are and where we come from.

I've been on the road so long my friend

With under four weeks left of our trip it is difficult to hang on to that elevated feeling we had last April as we set off with looking for adventures, with a whole year and all those places ahead of us. We try and generally succeed, to live each day as it comes, but not surprisingly occasionally thoughts of how life will be back in Salford creep in to our minds and with a place and date set for our sailing our roaming is naturally limited; it is difficult to suddenly decide to shoot off to somewhere particularly warm, for example.

Portuguese cafes are one of those small things we have delighted in and will miss. They are often elegant, but slightly shabby; designed with flair and imagination, but with an air of having not been re-decorated since the 1950s. The only place that comes close in England is the fantastic Bruciannis in Preston. The Portuguese cafes are always individual and the coffee is always cheap; it is good to be in a Costa-Mega-Bucks-free-zone; apart from Sevilla, we’ve not even seen one of those chains since Manchester.

The Monastery in Alcobaca, north of Lisbon, could have been an ABC moment, but the monumental scale of the building makes it worth a visit, if just to see the kitchens; with marble floors, high tiled walls and ceiling, a small stream cascading in to a pond providing running water, a massive central fireplace and two enormous marble tables for preparation, it would have been easy to feed the five thousand from this kitchen, never mind a few monks.

Easy as 123

Australians often have a winning, no-nonsense way of summing up a situation; travelling around this part of Portugal, Mike and Theresa have introduced us to the ABC, Another Bloody Castle. This Portuguese-Spanish border is dotted with castles and fortified towns; they are all spectacular, but after a visiting a few you can be forgiven for deciding to skip one or two, particularly when it is raining.

Monsaraz is an exception that is not to be missed; a beautiful fortified village and castle in a lofty setting above the Barragem de Alqueva, Europe’s largest reservoir. Monsaraz is a picture-box village and provides fantastic views over the surrounding countryside. The reservoir, opened in 2002, was not surprisingly controversial as it flooded 200 prehistoric sites, millions of trees, habitats for Lynx and Eagles and a village. As is often the case, the economic arguments won over any concerns about the environment.

In Evora, we met up with Mike and Theresa again and shared ABC experiences. Evora is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a Roman Temple, Medieval Walls, cobbled alleys and 16^th Century mansions and most certainly on the tourist circuit. We did look around all these sights, but were most interested in the headgear people around here wear; for men, the flat cap is most common, while women sport versions of the pull on hat or headscarves. The hat shop in Evora was a serious shopping emporium and not for a giggling hat-trying-on-types like us, so we only gazed in through the window.

If you see a faded sign by the side of the road

Portugal is not a huge country, but travelling through the Alentejo you might be forgiven for thinking it is vast; we drove between large wheat fields and pasture for cattle, passed rows and rows of olive trees, with sheep and lambs grazing below them and extensive forests of cork oak trees, we meandered along the shores of enormous reservoirs.

In the midst of this agricultural abundance, a sign, hand-painted in white gloss on a slab of rock, announced the Serro de Bica campsite; without this we would never have found this small Dutch-run oasis which provided us with the facilities we need for a night.

Occasionally, the vast green-ness of the Alentejo is punctuated by an isolated white town or village, often with stone ramparts and a castle. We stopped in Beja for a look around the castle and splendid squares and bumped in to Mike and Theresa, the Australians last seen in Ronda and at that time on their way to Morocco. We caught up with their thoughts on motorhoming in Morocco and continued on to Serpa, a little gem of a town.

The campsite in Serpa is a municipal site and they warned us there was a strike of municipal workers the next day; we could stay at the site, but the Blue Bus would not be able to leave, as the gates would remain locked. Fortunately, we could come and go as pedestrians and we strolled in to the fantastic walled town of Serpa. The castle, museums, swimming pool and municipal park were all closed, due to the strike, but there was still plenty to enjoy. The narrow cobbled streets of the old town are very picturesque; lined with white, single-storey buildings, ranging from total decay to gentrified cottages, all with large and decorative chimney pots, cats made their way from place to place over the red-tiled rooftops or were curled up on a sunny wall, pots of geraniums and lines of washing provided colour in the streets.

There were not many other tourists around, but at one of the town wall’s gates who should we meet up with again, but Mike and Theresa! We drank coffee and put the world to rights for a while, sending them on their way with our battered old camera, as theirs had broken and some DVDs we have watched. We expect to meet them again.

I planned each chartered course, each careful step along the byway

We like to see a country that builds public buildings that look attractive, rather than drab, and Portuguese primary schools are a lovely example. Most of the ones we have seen follow the same style; a curved red tiled roof and Romanesque arched doorways at each end of the building. They are so picturesque and look like a school you would only find in Trumpton.

Houses in Portugal follow the white with blue highlights pattern and are often single storey. The pleasant open square in Porto Covo da Bandiera is a pretty example of this local style. This pretty coastal village does not get a mention in the Rough Guide; but then although the Alentejo area makes up about third of the whole of country of Portugal, it only merits 50 pages in the Rough Guide, clearly an area with few notable churches, hurrah! This lack of ‘sights’ to see means we make our own route and discover places for ourselves, which is no bad thing.

We are entertained by Portuguese business names; a bank called Banco Espirito Santo and a supermarket in Praia da Luz called Baptista, with billboard adverts of tomatoes under-going full immersion baptism. We wondered, is Portugal such a Catholic country it brings religion into commerce? However, our research reveals that these seemingly holy names derive from Portuguese family names, rather than national piety.

On a fantastic craggy beach near Porto Covo da Bandiera we had our last paddle in the Atlantic before we left the coast for inland Portugal. Ours were the first footsteps on the beach since the tide had scrubbed it clean, as we left the waves were rushing in and would soon wipe away any evidence of our excursion. If things go according to plan, the next coastal area we see will be on the Bay of Biscay.

She's been living in her white bread world

We are in no position to laugh at people’s difficulties with a foreign language; we have travelled three months in Spain with little language and in times of stress any one of the six languages we have used over the past ten months may emerge. That said, we do like to have a bit of a giggle over some of the translations into English we have seen.

Campsite toilet facilities are often a good place to find these mis-translations; ‘Please not to place the roles in the WC’, is not correct, but we all know what they mean. ‘The breach will be a lack of serious motive’, is less self-explanatory.

The rules and regulations for campsites are another opportunity for making less sense than you intended; ‘The campsite reserves the right of rectifying the material registered always when detect in-corrections in your registration,’ still has us baffled, we may or may not have breached that one, with or without a serious motive.

In Portugal we bought bread called Pao da Sogra. This seemed to be translated into English on the wrapping with the words ‘bread of the mother in paw’ and went on, ‘stew in oven of firewood’. Was this a cooking instruction, or a description of how it was made? All that is clear to us is that the bread in Portugal is fantastic and we’ve no idea how we will cope with Warburtons White Sliced when we return.

And we're changing our ways, taking different roads

Reluctantly we left the comforts of the fantastic campsite at Praia de Luz and set off to explore Portugal beyond the popular Algarve coast. North of the Algarve is the Alentejo, a largely rural agricultural area of Portugal, between the coastal strip and the Tejo river; this is one of the poorest areas of Europe. We were keen to learn more about this area and see what it has to offer the visitor over the next week or so.

We have found that most of the roads in southern Europe are fairly quiet, even the motorways; we haven't seen anything resembling Spaghetti Junction for ten months and Cordoba was our last experience of a traffic jam; even there, if Spanish road signs had taken us around the city, rather than leaving us to drive by compass to find the campsite, we would have had a jam-free day. We don't really know how we will adjust to the hustle of UK roads when we return. The roads to Vila Nova De Milfontes were typically quiet, with no pressure to drive at anyone's pace but our own.

Walking on the cliffs of the Atlantic coast we were among a wealth of flowers; pink thrift and rock roses are flowering and delicate sand crocuses are scattered. The landscape is green and verdant after all the rain and seeing these flowers in England, you would think it was May. Immediately inland from the coastal dunes and cliffs the fields are cultivated; the photograph shows a field of chamomile, with the ubiquitous Bermuda Buttercups in front of two highly desirable, to romantics like us, cottages. The smell of chamomile with a hint of salty sea spray; you felt relaxed and full of energy all at the same time.

The showery weather makes it feel like a warm April in England and can make it difficult to get clothes dried some days and so our standards have been slipping even further. We are currently in competition to see who can wear a pair of socks the longest number of days between washes, before the socks get up and walk away by themselves.