We crossed into central Portugal fairly early, passing a proper border post that was manned only by charity collectors! Obviously it was just a leftover structure from the pre-EU days. Having decided to head north then work our way south, but not really sure where to head as our guidebook gave little information for the north, we followed signs to a historic town for lunch. Great, I thought, if this is what the place is all going to be like I’m going to love it here! We headed up an increasingly thin and winding cobbled laneway, past old castle walls and stone houses, to a lookout point at the top of town. The buildings I found particularly interesting because their door- and window-frames were made from solid stone blocks. We enjoyed a quiet lunch looking over the stark desert-like landscape, overseen by a curious bird-of-prey, a giant black bumblebee with iridescent blue wings, and a yellow-and-black butterfly. Trusting our GPS list of campsites, we headed inland for a lakeside campground that actually existed! At first thinking it was just a public swimming pool, it turned out the campground pool was open to the public, with the quiet and well-priced campground on the hill behind. The lake itself wasn’t very attractive, so we didn’t spend any time exploring and headed straight the next morning for the north coast.
Using a brochure from the campground as a guide, we stopped in Lamego, a pretty historic city with a castle and an impressive staircase up to a church. A tree-lined avenue in the middle of town leads up to a series of stairs and viewing platforms, each one a little different in style to the last. To the sides were forest walks and grottos, while the secondlast set of stairs opened onto a plaza surrounded by statues. A final set of stairs led from here to the church, which turned out to be dedicated entirely to the Virgin Mary. It
was quite bizarre entering a church that had very few depictions of Jesus, while everything else was of Mary – big statues, artwork, stained glass, everything! I’ve since learned that Mary is the parton saint of Portugal, the Nossa Senhora de la Conception, and there is a lot of dedication to her around the country, including festivals. We had lunch in Lomego, then set off onto the toll roads to get ourselves up to the coast. While not really wanting to pay for road use, we decided highways were the most efficient 
way to get around, and it turns out pricing is very reasonable. Just past Lamego, we travelled over valleys into the World Heritage-listed wine country of the Douro Valley. These heavily terraced valleys of olive trees and port wine vineyards were beautiful for their intense cultivation and vivid green colours. It was truly a man-made landscape. I wished we could have stopped to explore, but our GPS list showed limited camping options so we had to move on.Our old guidebook had noted that Viana de Costelo was a reasonable beach resort, but either it was better 10 years ago or it was just a typical guidebook description, because the place was hideous! I wanted to run away as soon as we arrived, it made my skin crawl – huge apartment blocks and hotels, typical beach resort look is not my style. We followed our GPS list to some campsites north of town, only to find they were beaches! I guess people have entered sites suitable for campervans or those willing to risk beach camping. While I have no problem with beach camping, I don’t want to set up late at night and pack early each morning! And actually, we were looking for somewhere nice to chill for a few days. Frustrated, we headed back towards Viana, passing a hideous, massive campground – it even had waterslides! – and you could hear the noise from the road. Somehow we found signs to another campground, and what an amazing find it has turned out to be. Tucked away behind a small village, next to a river and full of more ‘normal’ campers, we found the right place to relax.
Needing a day off and not knowing what to go next, the next morning we had a lazy start to the day. After chatting to the Dutch family next to us, who let us look at their campground books and map of Portugal, and looking hard at our guidebook, we decided it was best to head south again and to buy a map ourselves as it listed campgrounds and gave us a better idea of what was out there to see. Our peaceful retreat has been somewhat disturbed, as a loud speaker system on the local church has been blasting pretty bad music all day, starting from last night (wow Mum, even Demis Roussos a few times!!). We know there is a public holiday coming up for Le Nossa Senhora de la Conception, and assume this may be some sort of lead up to the festivities. I kind of hope we’ll end up in a small town for the holiday and maybe see people in traditional dress or performing traditional dances. We got caught in a local festival in the Czech Republic 10 years ago, it was absolutely fantastic and I’d love that experience again. We walked around the river to see where the best place for swimming would be later in the heat, and walked over to a huge grocery store to stock up on a day’s worth of good eating – incredibly cheap, which made us very happy, including a big watermelon for only a few euros that would have cost us an arm and a leg back in Oz! After lunch, we swam in one of the best swimming spots ever. The river has been lightly dammed (more so at the other, much busier, end), creating a deep pool and little waterfalls that give you a fantastic back massage when you sit under them! The water was cold but refreshing and we had a lot of fun. We’d bought some pineapple and coconut juice and kept it cool in the river while swimming, pretending it was real pina colada. The river has been covered in beautiful little demoiselles (type of dragonfly) and it’s been very peaceful (waterfall drowned out sound of the loud speakers!) - a refreshing change to the last few days of hard travel! Travelling by motorbike, I get little exposure to the sun, and it appears I’ve been working on a nice truckers’ tan! My lower arms and neck are getting tanned where my t-shirts end, and my face is getting very freckly, with panda-eyes from my sunglasses.
We seem to chat to at least one person in every campground about the bike and our trip (not every place and it seems to be getting less the further we go from France). Often it’s with Dutch people, but that’s not surprising as their English is excellent, so I guess they feel comfortable to talk to us. It feels very weird to tell people about our trip, and to hand over our email and blog addresses to those who are interested in following what we’re doing, like it’s something really amazing. I mean, it IS amazing I guess, but I’ve admired many other people for their travels and never expected me to be the one getting the attention of fascinated people!! It’s very flattering (even if you can tell some people think we’re insane), and I hope a few people will contact us as a result to go onto the blog update email list and follow our travels after the brief contacts we’ve had with them.