Seamanship?

High & Dry

 Olhao is a fishing community, so of course there are boats coming and going all the time, piloted by seamen who know their way around watercraft and can drive boats better than they drive their cars, motorcycle and trucks. Their vessels are how they earn their living so they are finely tuned crafts kept in perfect seaworthiness. Well, most of them . . . . . . . .

I saw just such an example last evening down on the waterfront. We went down just to enjoy the waterfront as the sun went down and the town turned dark. We found a bench right on the Malecon, and sat down to sit and watch for a while.

Proper Rope Work

It was low tide, and there was a fellow down below the seawall demonstrating his finely tuned boating skills. A closer look however revealed that perhaps this was not Olhao's finest at work. His boat was old, and in need of paint. It was painted an odd green below the waterline – no wait that 's not paint that barnacles and sea grass.

He was standing on shore with a rope about 12 feet long. There was a rock tied onto one end, and he was throwing it towards his boat which appeared to be attached to a rope at the aft end, but the bow was drifting. At first I thought he was trying to get the rope onto the boat to pull it in, but the rope was not long enough and kept falling short. Then I noticed a rope in the water attached to the front; he was throwing the rope hoping to catch the bow rope which he had somehow lost control of. Time after time he threw the rope without luck. Then a breeze blew the bow out further from shore. He simply waited for it to drift back in, and when it did he continued to throw the rope with little luck.

Olhao Fishing Boats

There was a woman also down there with a little dog, and I thought she was yelling at the dog, but once someone else called the dog up from the seashore I realized she was actually berating this seaman for his inability to corral her transportation.

Finally after about 15 minutes another little similar boat appeared coming in from the channel out to the islands. Seeing the embarrassing situation his compatriot was suffering he nosed his own boat with skill and dexterity towards the misbehaving craft, bumping into it and pushing it towards the shore until it could be corralled and pulled closer.

Well equipped vessel?

The woman on the shore worked her way skillfully over the rocks in her flip-flops and was helped into the boat. Once she was seated, the seaman jumped on board, started the motor and they made their way out around the dock, along the sand bar, and into the passage out towards the islands.

Oh Bill, as you expected, the ropes were simply thrown on board willy-nilly; no proper coiled ropes here.

Another Island Day

The Ferry to Culatra

 Olhão is a fishing town, and one of the reasons for this is because it has an extremely well protected harbour. If you search Olhão Portugal on Google Earth and zoom in, You will see that the coastline in the area is very shallow with a network of islands that form the Parque Natural da Ria Formosa. This natural formation serves to provide a buffer between the Atlantic Ocean and the town of Olhão. When the tide goes out large expanses of sand and wetlands are exposed. Along with providing a rich source of shellfish ,this also provides a huge heat-sink that soaks up the beautiful Portuguese sun I am always bragging about, so that when the tide come back in over the hot sand, the advancing cool Atlantic ocean is heated up, providing unusually warm water.

Beautiful Shells

On the islands out in the Ria Formosa are various small towns connected to Olhão by ferry. Today we took the ferry out to Culatra Island. Linda and I went to Culatra (Town) to scout out the 'snack bars' are restaurants while Regis and Pete continued on the ferry to Farol (Town) to hike along the beach and meet us in Culatra for Lunch.

New Use for a Carpet

Fishing Boats

Linda and I wandered through the little town made up of houses much as I described on Armona Island except this is a much more important fishing town with a large marina full of both fishing boats and pleasure craft. As well it has a series of fishing shed built along the shoreline. Walking along the shore in the town it is obvious how protected the town is. Although many boats are tied up to the large wharf, there are as many simply pulled up on the shore with little worry of storms. At the back of the town is an impromptu boat yard with everything from old traditional wooden boats to modern fibreglass speedboats pulled up on the sand in various states of repair or just neglect.

Not a Person in Sight

A walk down a very well maintained boardwalk – I noted how this boardwalk has nicely grooved surfaces for traction, where the sidewalks in town are all made of slippery uneven cobbles - brought us out to the beach. Like the beach on Armona, this one is miles long with almost no people at all. I walked way down one end, and although there were footprints showing someone had been there, I saw no one. Although there are communities on these islands, I do not think the natives use the beaches. People take the ferries over to spend time on the beaches. It is a bit of work to get there, so this is probable why it is so sparsely used. It makes for a lovely private beach for those willing to take to trip.

It seemed to me that this beach on Culatra was cleaner than the one on Armona, but although there were plenty of garbage cans around, just down the beach from us was a collection of juice boxes just left scattered about; obviously left from a visiting family who just couldn't bother to carry them to the garbage.

Another Great Meal

Pete and Regis did not take long to hike the route from Farol to Culatra, and after spending some time just enjoying the beach, we wandered back into the town to choose a restaurant for lunch. When I asked which fish was fresh, the waiter gave me a funny looks and stated with a smile “We are a fishing town. All the fish is fresh; if it isn't, we feed the cats.” My Golden Bream was delicious, and when he did not recommend the sardine because they were out of the good ones, Linda allowed him to choose for her and was very happy with his choice.

Another lovely day in Portugal.

Monday in Faro

Faro's Walled City

 When we flew to Portugal, Faro was where we landed, but we were picked up by a taxi arranged by Colin & Suzanne, and he was an efficient driver, but not exactly a tour guide, and his english was not really even good enough to ask simple questions. We therefore zoomed through Faro without seeing much. We were also too tired to really pay attention to much.

Today we went back to Faro on the train to actually have a look at the city.

Faro is the major transport hub on the Algarve. It has a rail hub where Linda and Pete arrive from Lisbon, and the airport in Faro has a constant stream of planes arriving from all over Europe. From the apartment, we see planes all day flying into Faro bringing people to the Algarve to enjoy a Portuguese holiday.

The train only takes about 20 minutes to go from Olhao to Faro, so it is a simple trip. Although the train station is bit out of way, the walk to the centre of Faro is a pleasant one along the waterfront through to the old city centre, and it is easy to find your way to the major attractions in Faro.

Do not however expect to find a Tourist Information Centre if you go on Monday like we did – it is not open. At least we were able to find the place following the signs, but as has been our general experience, we were not able to actually get any information.

Beautiful Pipe Organ filling Cathedral with sound

There is a walled fortress which the old city seems to revolve around, but it is not really an attraction. It seems that the actual city has taken over the fortress. You can see the walls from the outside, but if you enter through one of the gates, you find yourself just in the inner city with restaurants, shops, art galleries and a beautiful cathedral, but no actual fort or castle. This may actually have been a walled city rather than a military fortress, which would make sense. We might have been able to find out if we could have visited the Information centre. . . . . .

The visit to the Cathedral was nice. You could climb the bell tower for a view over the city, and we were told by another tourist couple there that you could have pressed a button to actually ring the bells but I had my doubts since the church bells tell the time in Olhao. I could imagine the poor citizens of Faro being constantly confused about what time it was. “Is it two o'clock, the bells chimed twice? Oh no, it's just those damned tourists ringing the cathedral bells again . . . .” we could visit the main cathedral , the gardens and the museum. The highlight was the actual church, because there was a beautiful old pipe organ, and someone was actually playing it. The museum was a bit disappointing, and I hope that some of our 3 E entry fee might be used to restore the paintings in the museum with holes in them – they could use some work.

The Bell Tower

Following our tour of the cathedral, we wandered down through the old city to find a place to stop for lunch. Here we discovered another advantage to living in Olhao. Food was generally at least 20% higher here than back in Olhao. For example the Cataplana Regis has wanted to try was 45 E compared to 29 E in Olhao. We decided to stick with the “Menu of the Day”.

Watchin' the Washin'

 At home, I have taken over the task of doing the wash, and Regis' mom would be proud of how good I've gotten at it. I sort of took over doing the wash while on vacation as well.

A Family's Washing

One of the advantages of renting a place and staying in one place for a while is that you do not have to pack as many clothes, because a rental usually has washing facilities. We have over the years of travel, built up a pretty good collection of specific travel clothes and one criteria for them is the need to be quick drying. In Spain this was a problem. We had a lovely apartment, but it was on the second floor of a four story building, so the only place to hang out clothes was in the outdoor patio which was enclosed by three stories of walls. The clothes took forever to dry; no wind and no sun. I used to look with envy across the street at the woman who would hang her clothes out in the morning and was able to take them in by noon. Here is Portugal we have access to the roof and there is a lovely clothes line up there. The wind blows, and the sun shines constantly. I can literally hang out the clothes and sit on one of the loungers for an hour and most of the clothes are dry (Linda has brought some things that take longer to dry – I'm trying to educate her on 'travel clothes')

Now I am beginning to worry about this. I think I am getting domesticated . . . . . I am fussy about how things get hung out; all the pants have to go together, longest to shortest, I worry about how my clothes line 'looks'. I want people to see that I know how to hang out a wash.

Interesting way to hang out wash

Now I also have started noticing other folks wash. The young family across the tracks seems to have a line out constantly, and sometimes she puts it out at night so she can take it in first thing in the morning and get another line out. Her clothes are hung out in a completely random order, but then she is normally running after a little guy who just will not listen to her. She even keeps a stroller up on the so if he is completely impossible she can strap him in there while she hangs out the wash. I actually was worried about them a week ago, when her same line of clothes was out for two days and I hadn't heard the little guy crying in a while.

Roof To Washing Flags

The old lady two doors down hangs out only one or two things at a time, and she brings it up in a wash basin, throwing it up the stairs ahead of her as she struggles to pull her old bones up onto the roof to hang things out.

As you look across the roofs of the houses between the apartment and the water, you see many lines of wash out, blowing in the sea breeze like flags. Many use the old fashioned poles to hold then higher when bed sheets are on the line, and one guy (Yup, I'm not the only 'guy' doing wash here in Portugal) has a strange arrangement where he has a tall pole in the middle of his roof with four lines going down to the corners, so his wash hangs on an angle.

Oh my god look at that line over there . . . . the underwear is all mixed up together . . . .

The Gardener

The house on the corner

 Now I told you about “Timex' the rooster who lives somewhere out behind the apartment, crowing out his own unique time announcements, and where there are roosters there are likely chickens, so I guess there must be some urban agriculture going on here in Olhão. Looking out the front balcony however it is solid chock-a-block houses all the way to the water, so there are not many inner-city garden plots to be seen. I see lots of container plants perched on balconies and rooftops trying to survive the almost complete lack of rain here, but not many real gardens.

Walking across the bridge

The one exception is the house on the corner up the road. The building is almost twice as large as any other house around it, so it must have been an important house at one time, but it is now showing it's age. The architecture is much more elaborate than most of the houses in the neighbourhood. It has a fancy sloped tile roof and the entire roof is surrounded by a walled terrace accessed by a built in stairway. Although the surface is in dire need of paint, it still holds onto a style well above the other smaller places beside it. There are built in tiled sections, and the doors and windows are elaborate and ornate. I look down on this house from across the train tracks at a height from my third floor balcony, so I can appreciate some of the former glory that I can imagine this house had, but from street level it looks sad, old and possibly deserted.

It is not completely deserted however; the gardener lives there. Because this house is bigger than others, it has a yard, and in this yard that goes from the house to the wall for the train track the gardener has made on oasis of green in the surrounding concrete plaster and walls.

He has fruit trees, flowering ornamental trees, and even what looks like a bonsai tree. There are rows of flowering lilies and pots containing other flowers everywhere. In between there looks to be herbs and possibly vegetables. The yard is not big, but he has filled every square inch of it with plants. I can look down at it, but anyone who walks across the the bridge over the railway line gets a brief view of his beautiful garden.

I often see him out working on the garden. It can't be easy to produce the beautiful plants he has in an urban setting like this, so I figure he works hard at it. One day I passed as he was watering. Twenty minutes later when I returned he was still patiently ensuring that his plants got the moisture that never seems to come from the sky.

I'm sure that Colin & Suzanne, our hosts (Who also are subjected to my constant blogging) will know the actual facts on the 'Gardener of Olhão' and his house but really it is more fun to let my imagination roam – I never said my blog was all fact . . . . .

TAG you're art!

 Years ago, when we sailed on the Queen Mary II to Hamburg Germany, we got a taxi to our hotel, and when we got out of the cab, we knew we had chosen the wrong neighbourhood; all the building were vandalized with “Tagging” At the time you just didn't see this, especially in Germany. As it happened, our hotel was on the outskirts of the Reeperbahn, or the “Red Light” district of Hamburg, and the police or whoever controlled the “Tagging” just didn't worry about vandalization in this neighbourhood. Oh, (BTW)by the way, this was one of the best hotels we have ever booked and other than walking by the sex shops to get anywhere in Hamburg, everything was wonderful. It was Hamburg Harley Days and 55,000 Harley Davidsons descended on the city for the weekend – I had a great vacation.

This tagging has become rampant everywhere, and we have not found any country that has been able to control it. I think it gets worse as unemployment increases, especially youth unemployment, and Europe, especially Spain, Portugal & Greece are really suffering serious unemployment. Needless to say, the tagging is really bad here in Olhão. It is everywhere. Entire buildings are covered, and as the number of deserted or unoccupied building increases, so does the tagging. Even the trains have gotten a new coat of paint, sometimes even covering the windows. The train we returned from Spain on was completely covered on one side with tagging. There is a little unoccupied house on the corner that is completely tagged from top to bottom, and the wall of a long building down the road is a virtual 'Art Gallery' of tagging.

Now one question is whether “Tagging” is vandalism or art? Some of it is absolutely amazing in the artistry and complexity. No question, some is just ugly spray paint, but I must admit that some is actually very beautiful. Here in Olhão, there are some talented taggers, and I have tried to include some of the really interesting examples. In many cases I suspect that the tagging actually makes some of the crumbling buildings here look nicer.

People must at times find it frustrating. Across the street, the houses back onto the railway, and some people have cleaned off the concrete wall and whitewashed it, only to have it used as a canvas by taggers. I walked by one building with serious tagging covering all the windows, so those workers using the building have so suffer with their only natural light diffused through pink, purple and green paint.

I can't help wondering though, when do they do it? I have never seen a 'Tagger' at work, so I assume it must be late a night, and it must be a bit difficult to tag those moving trains, so it must be done when they are parked late at night.

Back To Spain

 

Portugal is nice, and we are really enjoying our time here, but it was Spain that really got us into this “Rent an apartment for a month” vacation plan, so since we are only an hour from Spain here in Olhão, we decided that one of the day trips that Regis loves to plan would be to take the train to the end of the line in Vila Real de Santo António, where you can catch a ferry across the river to Spain.

Taking the Train

Having taken the train to Tavira the other day, we knew how it worked and approached it with increased confidence, and were able to relax and watch the countryside go by through the tagged and dusty windows. Being able to watch the various train stations come and go was actually kind of sad. The larger stops such as Olhão, Tavira and Vila Real de Santo António are all tagged and looking a bit tattered, with cracked concrete and rusty iron, but many of the stops are closed completely with boarded up doors and windows, broken glass and terribly vandalized by the persistent taggers. The trains stop there, but there is no office, ticket booth or inside waiting area. The train stops, people get on and buy tickets on the train. The trains breezed right by some completely deserted train stops overgrown and crumbling, doors and windows bricked closed.

The train pulled into the station at Vila Real de Santo António, and we headed through an industrial area into a quite nice pedestrian shopping street, five or six blocks long leading down to a lovely riverfront park and Marina where we found the ferry. Regis and Linda made plans to come back across to Portugal with enough time to do some shopping on the way back to the train.

Vila Real de Santo Antonio, Portugal

It is always nice to try to locate the Tourist Information Centre and get a few maps and information on the town you are visiting. We have not had much luck with this so far here in Portugal. There is a good office here in Olhão, but you can never tell when it is going to be open. The posted hours bear no relation to when the office is actually open – you go down and take your chances. In Tavira we finally found the office on the way home, but it was closed tightly. Even though we followed the signs we could not find any hint of an Tourist information Office in Vila Real de Santo António. One helpful fellow gave us nice explicit directions to a building with no apparent information office and at the municipal office I was told that the closest office was in another town back down the track. Across the river in Spain I had no better luck. I followed the nice big signs with clear arrows to where the office was supposed to be, but again nothing there. Perhaps these offices only open when there are more tourists.

The ferry to Spain was a surprise. A few years ago, a beautiful new bridge was built to cross the river so the ferry became a less important way across the river. In North America we are used to modern ferries even on small crossings, but the ferry from Portugal to Spain is a converted wooden freighter. There are metal ramps bolted onto either side and the cargo area has been roofed over providing a spot to park cars. The ferry pulls up alongside the dock, and the ramps allow cars to come and go. Not a lot of cars use the ferry; there was one on the way to Spain and two on the way back. The ferry may be an old converted vessel, but it works well, taking 15 minutes to cross the river, and like most european transportation we have used runs perfectly on time.

Spain

 

We enjoyed going back to Spain, and Ayamonte was a pleasant town with a maze of little streets filled with interesting shops and restaurants. As you wandered through these narrow tiled streets you came to beautiful squares with churches and tiled benches and children running and playing. We knew we were in Spain as all the shops started closing soon after we arrived; displays were moved inside, shutters were lowered, and lights turned off. Fortunate for us, most of the restaurants remained open and we found a place were Regis could get her Paella and tapas.

As we walked back to the ferry, the squares were silent, surrounding shops locked up tight, and the children gone home for a meal and a nap. Ah yes, I had almost forgot about living on Spanish time . . . .