Before I start thinking about this year's Giro d'Italia and my favourite Italian climbs - and there are plenty of those to choose from - it's none too soon to get back to finishing my next book, about my cycling journey around the Iberian Peninsula. My next few blogs therefore, will be excerpts about some of our travels through northern Portugal. Colourful, loaded with history and hugely underrated, its a great place to visit.
* * *
Now entrenched in Portugal’s
North, I took a day off from cycling to pick up Emma from Porto Airport. Never
having visited Portugal before, she was looking forward to tagging along with
us until we returned back over the border into Spain.
Leaving early next morning, I
was soon travelling with ease along the N106 towards Penafiel. With few bends
and carrying little traffic it was one of those stretches of road that seem to
carry you without time nor effort.
Then, just like a sudden dose
of bad weather, the traffic conditions changed, and so too the gradient.
Although it was nothing I hadn’t encountered before, it turned out to be a
precursor to a very frustrating afternoon, and evening, to come. It wasn’t the
busy traffic, or the heat, or bicycle problems. It wasn’t even the cobblestones
through the town of Cinfães that felt like cycling along the rutted tracks of
northern France.
Neither Roz nor I paid much
attention to terms like ‘commune’ and ‘municipality’ when it came to planning
our accommodation in Europe. Inherently generic, they seem irrelevant compared
with words like ‘village’ or ‘town’ which provides a more accurate account of a
particular location’s whereabouts.
As for our accommodation in
Cinfães that evening, just about all the sites we visited seemed to echo the
same sentiment; that is it’s a small village containing little more than 3,000
inhabitants, who reside in a municipality of almost seven times its size. So as
you now may have guessed, gliding free and easy up and down the village’s one
main road, expecting to stumble upon our accommodation at any minute, I was ensconced
in a ‘neighbourhood’ spanning almost 250 square kilometres. The problem was, I just
didn’t know it yet.
The rest of the afternoon became
a revolving door of dead-end streets and confusing directions that despite the
best of intentions, came to no avail. It reminded me of the time in Tuscany
when Roz and I arrived at a house we’d booked on an internet site. According to
the normally reliable Google Maps, this was the place, but the bemused look on
the faces of the couple who lived there suggested otherwise. Obviously not the
first overseas tourists who’d turned up on their doorstep, we were treated with
more hospitality – lunch, served with warm conversation and a local white wine
– than we were likely receive at our real destination; if and when we
eventually found it. We ultimately did, but not before travelling many more
kilometres than you’d care to ride on a bicycle.
Tormented by the stifling heat
and worse still, the feeling of incarceration, I stopped outside a camping shop
at the far end of the village. About to close its doors for the day, a young
guy was bringing in the last of the odds and end still out on the pavement.
Resigned to the possibility that
the place I’d been searching for didn’t even exist, or at best, was a long
distance away, I wearily asked him if he’d heard of the Casa da Geada. And better still, did he know how to find it.
In what was the first piece of
good news since starting out on the N106 some six hours earlier, he at least
reassured me that our overnight accommodation was for real. Evidently snug in a
high mountain forest, some 20 kilometres to the north, it would involve an hour
or two of steady climbing; providing of course, that I took the right road. Studying
the maze of wiggling lines on my map, that was by no means fait accompli.
More anxious about
misinterpreting the directions I was given than the steep terrain, I pulled into
the front yard of a small house. One of only a handful straddled along the high
side of the road, three people were seated around a table outdoors, finishing
off their dinner. A couple and their young teenage daughter, the rather bemused
looks on their faces suggested that it wasn’t the first time that a stranger had
suddenly appeared on their front doorstep.
On the home stretch towards Casa
da Geada, I began pondering over some of the things I brought up about our
experiences so far. Their questions, and my anecdotes in response, were all about
what I’d done on my bicycle; the mountains I’d climbed, the close shaves I’d
had, my experiences of getting lost and of course, about the wonderful places I’d
travelled through along the way.
But gnawing at me during the
rest of the ride that evening, was something I’d neglected to say, something
far more enduring in relation to why it’s healthy to travel. While the rumbling voice of history,
religion, and jingoism still conspire to divide us, the more we learn about other
people’s cultures and differences, the more we realise just how similar to
everyone else we really are. That was something we truly could have toasted.
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