Primeiro Dia do Nosso Passeio de Bicicleta

Day One: Tavira to Faro, 22 miles

We’d arrived in Lisbon mid-morning after a series of nail-biting connections and in a few hours of walking reacquainted ourselves with a city we’d first visited, on a quest to find Henry Fielding’s gravesite, four and a half years ago. Dinner at Chapitó a Mesa, in the Alfama district, our table overlooking the whitewashed red-tile-roofed colorfully-muraled buildings terraced down to the River Tagus.

We hadn’t recalled the name when we’re made the reservation but we instantly recognized the wonderful eccentricity and killer views: this was the place we’d memorably eaten on the last night of our first visit. (We even bought another pair of earrings in the little gift shop, as we did back then.)

Early to bed, thanks to jet lag, and up fresh as two daisies—almost—in time for our morning train. We left our suitcases with the front desk of the lovely behotel Lisboa, and caught a cab to the Oriente train station with only our four panniers in hand. A quick shot of caffeine and a pastry, and then on the 8:23am bound for Faro.

The landscape between Lisbon and Faro was undramatic but quietly beautiful, rolling green hills topped with olive trees, fig trees, orange trees, and vineyards, a potent reminder of some of the savory delights this country has to offer. The connection in Faro was very tight, but luckily we were only a platform away from the Tavira train, an altogether clankier, louder, hotter carriage. We arrived in Tavira at lunchtime, and carted our panniers to a riverside tapas place called Mar a Montes. Big blessed (light) local beers, tuna steak, and codfish while we watched people walking by and the ferry from the barrier island come and go.

Our hotel was a short walk from there. The Hotel Vila Galé, “galé” meaning “galleon,” its logo a single-masted sailing ship, and we can think of no more suitable symbol for the maiden voyage of what will be the first of many, many European bike tours. Deep in the hotel’s basement parking garage sat our two boxed rental bikes, which we (read: David) wasted no time unpacking and setting up. They are a couple of aluminum-frame Fujis, the drive train somewhat inferior to what we’ve gotten used to…. We love our touring bikes back home, the Treks we rode last summer down the Pacific coast, and feel vaguely unfaithful to them when we mount these new and unfamiliar steeds. We’ve come to appreciate, already on this trip, how our bikes—carefully chosen, handlebars and saddle adjusted just so—feel like extensions of ourselves. These bikes are nothing like that, but we will get to know them as one gets to know passersby in a life. As an ice-breaker, we took these loaner steeds around Tavira, an eight-mile loop to get to know them and to get to know the town. Warm and thirsty, we stopped near the hotel for riverside white port-and-tonics.

After a swim in the hotel pool we walked to dinner at Come na Gaveta, a sidewalk bistro with the usual fresh and simply prepared seafood, plus “octopus bombs,” octopus tempura … well, you get the idea: when in doubt, order the polvo (octopus).

And when in doubt, go to a hotel bar called the Alibaba, have a couple (“dohsh,” the locals would say) copos de vinho, and listen to the one-man band belting out altogether too melancholic tunes for a lively Wednesday in the Algarve.

Thursday, May 23. First riding day, a short day, so we were in no hurry to get going, which was good as we had to sleep in a little on our last jet-lagged morning, solve a few mechanical issues, and do justice to the massive hotel breakfast (real bacon, an almighty spread of fresh fruit and delectable soft cheeses, tomatoes au gratin, and every kind of egg imaginable).

In short order we pedaled several dozen yards from the hotel entrance to the local service station, where two old-school paper road maps were going to have to take over from Ethel, our Garmin navigation device, who threw up her digital hands: she couldn’t help us in Portugal.

After a mile and half of tentative guesses and wrong turns, we finally found the main road, N125, which would take us out of town and all the way, one roundabout after another, to Faro. A fair amount of traffic, but our first impressions of Algarve drivers is that they’re surprisingly aware and respectful of bicyclists. We’ve seen a dozen or so Lycra dudes, serious cyclists who seem rashly to trust their impossibly skinny tires on the rough cobblestone ubiquitous in the “old towns” of Europe, and even fewer casual cyclists; we did meet, briefly, a duo of female German bike tourists making their way from Lisbon, into Spain, and back to Tavira. Despite the relative paucity of two-wheeled traffic, the drivers give us lots of room. Only one has honked so far, that after steering his or her red bug of a car halfway into “our” shoulder.

The best part of day one was not the mostly patient drivers or the well-maintained roads (they aren’t, but we’ve ridden much worse): it’s the big personalities of even the most nondescript small towns in Portugal, a colorful country whose natives like their street art. There are fewer of what those who know call “pieces”—short for masterpieces—here than in the big cities, but even the little roads have a rich graphic life, with cartoons and tags scrawled artfully on roadside walls, bridges, and buildings.

Even once-sacred buildings seem not beyond the artists’ pale, including this (presumably deconsecrated) church in Olhao.

We arrived in Faro around 1:15, but an erratic and untrustworthy Google maps blue dot led us hither and thither, at length, in search of our hotel. We finally sighed a deep sigh and asked two friendly policemen to point us toward the Hotel Faro. The more helpful one, mistaking us for French as so many do, said with a tolerant smile and a flick of his wrist: “Regardez! Regardez!” Look, look, you sweaty foreigners: the hotel is right behind you. We checked in but couldn’t get into the room yet, so found a welcoming little café around the corner — the Café Aliança, third oldest in Portugal — where we had two large Sagres (the local light beer, pronounced Saa-grsh) and one pica-pau, a Portuguese favorite of tender, flavored beef, pickled cauliflower and carrots, pickles, olives and—thanks to an amicable host who had taken a shine to us—a little creamy beer sauce on top.

Bikes locked in yet another hotel basement, us showered and dressed for warm weather, we strolled the sunny cobblestone pedestrian streets of Faro, through narrow lanes lined with shops and cafes, overlooked by wrought-iron balconies, everything slightly dilapidated but still elegant and cheerful, open for business, ready to take on the summer hordes of tourists which we shall just miss. We wandered into the old walled town with its aristocratic palaces repurposed into civic offices and museums, and coming back out to the harborside, settled into a sidewalk table where local craft beer Algarve Rock was on offer.

And so to dinner, after a slight 22 flat miles (734 feet gained), thinking maybe tonight is the night for one of the Algarve’s famous cataplana dishes, some kind of meat-and-seafood mixture (usually featuring clams or cuttlefish) named for the clam-shaped cooking pot in which the food is prepared.