Picasso Dave

Barcelos to Ponte Lima. Portugal.

April 9th, 2017

Feeling pretty beat after a long but awesome day yesterday, I hit bed early after a dinner at a Peregrino cafe where they serve pilgrim meals. While there I also watched Porto smash a team from Lisbon, with three old blokes who didn’t speak any English, but we all exclaimed at the same things.

Barcelos is a lovely town with a medieval fort, a lovely main street and plaza and an ancient history of hosting pilgrims. It seems quite wealthy – wouldn’t mind spending more time there.

Got woken by some Germans banging and crashing and talking loudly in the corridor at 5AM so decided to get up and treat my feet. I had been to the pharmacy yesterday and bought some foot cream which I used in ample portions and it seems to have worked a treat with one blister settling right down.

Thinking that part of my problem yesterday was that I hadn’t had enough energy food for breakfast, I decided to stock up at the free hotel brekkie before leaving.

I also smashed about 3l of Agua to deal with any dehydration issues. Hitting the road at about 730 to walk the biggest day of the trip at 34kms, and also the highest at 440 metres, I made my way out of Barcelos and was walking at my usual pace only to be mowed down by a group of Catholic scouts, who walk to Santiago in two days (it’s taking me 9 more!) and then get up and do it all again next weekend!!

With the words of Yoda ringing in my ears, I put the headphones away and tuned into the sounds of Portugal. Being Sunday there was a lot of church bells and one of them started at 750 and rang for 15 minutes – no such thing as a sleep in on Palm Sunday.

The other sounds were predominantly dogs, frogs & roosters or cocks as they like to call them here.

Hitting farmland pretty quickly, I shared the road with pilgrims from the US and Germany and man can some of those old girls motor – they may look like a grandmama but those boomers are built tough.

About 10kms in, I met a Portugese lad called Joao. So we get chatting and it turns out he is a tour guide and history PHD student from Lisbon. Unbelievably his Father was good friends with Steve Sumner from the All Whites of ’82 as they did business together.

What followed was the best way for both of us to not think about what 34kms was doing to our bodies and that was to cover the history of Portugal from the Paeolithic period through the Visigoths, Moors and Reconquista, through to present day, with plenty of other subjects in between, including a lesson in Portugese nature, culture, religion, economics, refugees etc – brilliant. I now understand so much more about Portugal.

The scenery was fantastic. I had worked my way up a 2 km hill & then worked down into a beautiful valley with vineyards & farms before hitting another hill climb & entering the last valley of the day, stopping along the way for an omelette and salada to give me the energy boost for the last 10kms.

Entering Ponte de Lima (Ponte means bridge in Portugese and Lima is the river) we walked down beside the river underneath old oak trees where there was a market going on.

Feeling like a Picasso painting, I found the accommodation which is in a converted old manor house, and jumped into a very cold pool – bliss.