Word Of Mouse

It took a little while to find our way out of Albufeira. First of all we needed to get the bike back: Bramble had spent her holiday locked in the garage of Tony Fernandez. We retrieved the bike, loaded on the stuff (it was a bit hard to remember what went in which pannier for a while, not having had to pack up the panniers for a couple of weeks) then rolled down into the middle of town for a last meal among the sunburned hoardes before setting off.

Luckily the road was fairly flat and we made good time, reaching Olhao on the far side of Faro in the early evening. All those two weeks we had watched the lights of planes in the distance touching down at Faro airport, and it felt like a relief to finally be on the far side of all of that tourist development and, as Ali put it, to have cycled out of our view (the one from the Albufeira balcony).

There was no gentle introduction back into life on the road. As soon as we applied the brakes in the campsite, a mosquito landed on my face. They were BIG ones too. We had never encountered such an onslaught of biters. We again had to resort to commando tactics, making sorties from the safety of the tent to throw things in saucepans or stir the rice... and could not start eating even once the food was cooked without first spending several minutes transforming mosquitos into was-squitos.

A following day´s mostly flat riding took us to Vila Real de Santo Antonio, on the Portuguese side of the bounding river between Portugal and Spain. We had been a bit nervous that there would be no way of crossing the river save by using the autoroute road bridge (or making a 100 plus km detour inland, or swimming) but a bit of close inspection of the map indicated that there was still a ferry running between Vila Real and Ayamonte on the Spanish side. We found the ferry port in time for a late lunch, posted our postcards with our last remaining Portuguese stamps, and boarded the ferry in the afternoon sunshine for the short crossing to Spain....