Friday, March 31, 2023

I am heading down to the NW Algarve on a new adventure.

I had to stop in Sao Teotonio first, to get a short term sim card for my phone. The Vodaphone card stopped working because it is the end of the month, even though I had arranged and paid for service until April 5th!! I now have a card that provides service for 8 days (until next Friday) at 15 euros.

I dropped in at noon at the Altura Steakhouse and Bar, just south of the town of Rogil. This is the steakhouse that the tow truck driver in February, (who picked up my last rental car!) recommended, even though he didn’t speak English. I understood that I should try to eat there and I am really hungry. It is crowded as I arrive, with lunch seekers. It is on a really busy highway. This is Friday and I can’t believe the traffic going up and down the highway, quite noisy. I am sitting out in the covered patio; I think I understand why it’s covered with the road activity. Carol, Charlie and I tried to get here together but, every time it was either, not open until hours later, or we were heading somewhere else and had already eaten.

Today I decided to go to visit Carrapateira. I had been reading in the Lonely Planet Guidebook (which has a lot of misinformation!) and that name was mentioned as an area not to miss, part of the NW Algarve, but hidden away from the usual travellers! I thought it was a beach at first, but it actually is a town and I had been through it twice before, once in February, on my on the way south to Sagres, and later, with Carol and Charlie in March. After we visited with Carol and Charlie, we meandered on a road north of the town and found the Bordeira beach, which was fabulous with its expansive white sands and rocky cliffs.

In Carapateira, I was looking for directions on my phone, to the beach, and had pulled over to the side of the road. I saw a couple drive pass in their Toyota vehicle. They went up a long dirt road uphill, so I thought, why not follow them. It was almost 2 km on the road a little bumpy, and I came up to a rise and there was a restaurant sitting at the edge of the cliffs. Just below it was the Amado beach, a long beach, which apparently is linked to the Bordeira beach by a hiking trail. While photographing,a man came up to me and started chatting. He said, if you look over there at the mustard coloured rock, pointing to the cliffs on my right side, there’s an old volcano and it’s right near an Islamic fishing village. I thought that was rather curious, so I went back up the trail, out on the boarded walkway and there were ruins! The sign informed me that this was an archaeological site from a 12th or 13th century Islamic fishing village, at the end of the Muslim period of Portugal. There was a couple walking around on the same boardwalk. I asked them if they knew anything more, once I knew they spoke English, and if they knew about the volcano. Guess what?- the man was a volcanologist and the woman was a geologist, both with PhD’s in their field of study. How weird was that? The expert in volcanos said, no, there was no volcano there. The major hole in the cliffs and the rubble was just the way landslides happen. He also said it will happen where we are standing now in the future. Not today please!!!

From my research later in the day: The Islamic Fishing Village is an archaeological site close to the town of Carrapateira in the municipality of Aljezur, Algarve Region of Portugal. The site was excavated by a team of researchers from the New University of Lisbon in 2001. This permitted the settlement to be dated to the 12th and 13th centuries, during the Almohad Caliphate at the end of the Muslim occupation of the Algarve.

I arrived home just after shortly after 5pm not interested in eating dinner after my big meal earlier. it took the dried laundry off the line , folded it and started organizing my suitcase. Tomorrow I will cook up all the vegetables in the refrigerator, add some chicken and make a stew of sorts. I have to clear everything before I leave early Monday morning. Where did those nine weeks go in such a hurry?