Word Of Mouse

here we are in Fafe and on one computer so I´ll begin the tale and let Malc continue. The day off in Chaves ended with an ominous grey look in the sky and speculation on the campsite as to what teh weather would bring.However we set off invery light drizzle and high spirits towards Villa Real. Afterall it was going to all downhill to the coast now. After a morning´s hard climd in freezing driving rain plans changed. we stopped for lunch in Vila Pouca de Agua, did some emergency food shopping and had a huge greasy spoon lunch. When I say huge that´s what I mean - they had to bring along anlother table to fit our order on. We fell upon it like a pack of starving wolves and crossed teh road to teh fruit shop for pudding. mmmmmmmmmmmmm. We got on pretty well inspite of not yet having a Portuguese phrasebook, helped by a friendly person at the bar who spoke French. The belgians (who I accused of being Dutch in teh last entry) had told us French would get us a long way here and it seems to be teh case.

As teh road to Vila real looked to be so hilly and took us by a longer route we decided to change plans and head due west. This also turned out to be quite hilly. The rain picked up and so did teh wind (of course against us) and we got colder and colder. As teh nearest campsite was a long way off adn we weren´t relishing a wet night in a leaky tent we started thinking about hotels or anywhere warm and dry to stay. Nothing showed up but as Malc started shaking with the cold we decided to stop in the next bar anyway. This turned out to be one of those very foreign experiences. It was a local bar for local people. the only hot thing to be had was coffeee so we had some. It was those tiny strong numbers. When Malc went back for a second attempt at something hotter adn bigger he got a double with a dash of milk. I regretted having it later as I got teh total shakes.

~So a little warmer we set off in search of a hotel. The next town of any size Ribeira do pena looked promising as we whizzed down the steep hill to it. Hpwever this ghood sized town could turn nothing up in spite of the best efforts of six or so fast speaking Portuguese who in teh end had to send us back up the hill. Still we felt ok and decided we must be getting fitter as we sailed back to the top. Here we found a petrol station and restaurant with a small bed sign outside. I went into the restaurant and asked about a room - i wasn´t understood so I tried every lanuage i knew. Once room, habitacion, chambre,zimmer, soba got nowhere , i repeated in my best Portuguese what I had heard one of teh women in town say dormirrrrrrrra. This worked much to my amasement and I got directed outside towards a pile of rain soaked rubble. Malc and I stood outside looking blank then the womand appeared, realising we were stupid foreigners, and knocked on the door of a concealed house. A lovely woman appeared but could offer us no bed as she was full with a wedding party. She tried in vain to find us accommodation elsewhere then offeref her garage or the rubble tip as camping grounds. We declined her generous offer of a space to change in, hoping (in vain) that ceothes only set of spare clothes in our bags might still be dry, and we set off. Every place we passed through I tried asking for accommodation and it just turned up nothing. We had our hopes raised twice, once when a hotel was promised to be five minutes awaya and once when a kind chap led us in his car to an unmarked hotel. The former didn´t exist and teh latter turned out to be full. but nevermind we´d seen signs to a campsite. we follwed these until one revealed it was 10k in the wrong direction. we had no choice but to continue through teh wind and rain to the next campsite marked on our map. It was another of those raods that follows a river and goes spectacularly up and down and about twice as far as indicated on teh map. Finally we got to teh small town with the campsite and followed sings out of town (away from restaurants) to a watter logged campsite. we had a two minute break from teh rain to pitch our tent. Of course by now everything was against us though so the tent poles wouldn´t do what i wanted so i decided teh most useful thing I could do was sit and sob out of desparation, tiredness, hunger and sheer frustration. After a while I thought I´d better get a bit more practical and we got the tent up between us. Malc kindly sent me off for a shower while he started on teh dinner (we had emergency food). I stood for five minutes in the freezing cold while a small trickle of freezing and then burning water dribbled out of a pipe above my head. it seemed to demonstrate none of teh key features I would normally associate with a shower. Eventually i emerged colder more miserable and almost certainly less clan than I had gone in. Malc had resorted to cooking at teh washing up sinks in the hope it would be possible to preserve our dinner from floating away in the flood caused by the now torrential rain. we went to bed exhausted and woke to find our matresses acting as little floating islands, preserving our sleeping bags from coming wet all over. Sheer bliss. I hope this is what being 70 is all about. now over to Malc for the next day (which i promise has a happier ending).

Malc here. So we awoke that day in the middle of a lake of water, which continued unbroken inside the tent. We packed up as best we could - everything weighed about a ton because of being soaked - and headed back up towards town in hope of finding a laundrette or hotel - a vain hope. Eventually we gave up this as a lost cause and decided to make a break for it under the clearing skies of mid morning. Up the hill, and up, and up, to the little village of Gandarel, (with a short stop to attempt to dry some stuff out in a layby on the way). At Gandarel we fell off the bike starting off up hill, which gave some cheap grins to the occupants of a nearby cafe (and left Ali with some nasty bruises to the arms). Glad to have caused some amusement, we cariied on - the hill got even steeper. (Rant begins. Portuguese and Spanish maps are more or less HOPELESS for cyclists - the contour information, such as it is, is conveyed by shading on the map. Our map gave no clue at all that the road we were embarked upon was setting off on a climb of maybe six or seven hundred metres. If I had to summarize our trip through Spain and Portugal in a single quote, it would be this. "Well, hell, it looked flat on the map." End of rant.) Then grinning kids on quad bikes, trucks and speeding ambulances started hurtling past on their way up past us. It all got quite intense. Finally we made the top, and could see all around us in the distance the tops of other mountains below us. A half hour's freewheeling bought us to the little town of Fafe, where we had decided to try and spend the night if we could. Asking around turned up a nondescript building that actually was a hotel, where we spent two very comfortable nights for the princely sum of 25 euros a night. (A strange thing about Portugal. Many hotels are actually unmarked as such. Portuguese people are born knowing their existence, or they are shown on a secret document that only the Portuguese have access to. The only way you, as an innocent foreigner, can discover them is through asking around: but as we had already found, even this does not always work.)

Our time in Fafe cannot be described without making mention of the godlike individual in a lime-green shirt in the Fafe laundrette, who for five euros waved a magic wand and transformed a sodden dirty bag of unwashed cycling clothes into an immaculately folded, sweetly smelling, soft and best of all, DRY stack of clothes.

The other curious thing about Fafe is that every 50 metres or so along the street, you come to another loudspeaker attached to the wall by a mixture of baler twine and dodgy screws. These are all linked to the same municipal sound system, so anywhere you go within city limits you are never out of earshot. What it is used for is to broadcast the town council's choice of (ch)easy listening, three or so songs on a continuous loop, all through the day. The song we kept hearing was "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt. Over and over. And over again.