A Trip to Portugal (page 6 of 11)
Day Five – Peniche
We woke up early and made it down to breakfast by 8:20. We got a cab
to the train station and caught an earlier train than the one we needed to catch. The train from Calem to Caldas da Rainha is part of a different system than the train from Sintra to Calem, so we had to buy tickets again in Calem. As I was getting money from the ATM in the station, an American woman asked me, “Did you just get money from that ATM?” I answered in the affirmitive, and thus began our relationship with the crazy Americans.
The crazy Americans weren’t really crazy. They were a chatty, middle-aged couple who were headed in the same direction we were. He was a
grey haired Vietnam vet, and she was a half-French half-Armenian who was born and raised in the US. Both were very upset at France. Even her French mother was upset at France! Ther were staying in Lisbon but taking the train for a day trip to Obidos. They told me that since Bush had decided to go to war the dollar was doing well against the Euro. They told us that getting hotels on hotels.com was great and that we shouldn’t call hotels as we went, we should use hotels.com! They had saved hundreds of dollars,
and they don’t sneeze at hundreds of dollars.
We got on the train and ended up sitting next to each other. Edie and I had decided earlier that we should stop off at Obidos, so we chatted nearly the whole way there. We heard about their children (two boys, one good and one bad), their travels, their views on travelling, on Portugal, on books we should read, places we should go, etc. They were really very nice. Just a little intense.
We both got off at Obidos. Obidos is a medieval walled city. Like Sintra there’s a modern town right beside the walled city where most of the people in Obidos live. The train station is on the opposite side of the walled city from the modern town. The train station is also, of course, at
the bottom of a hill. While the crazy Americans went to the bathroom (after wishing us 31 years as happy as theirs), we crossed the tracks and started up the hill. It was a little tough with our luggage in tow, but not the worst hill we tackled in Portugal.
When we finally made it to the city, our first mission was to find the
turismo. Lonely Planet didn’t include a map of the city, so we asked around. The walled city of Obidos is layed out like a straight line. We entered at the end with the castle, which turned out to be the back end. The main entrance was at the other side of town, and the turismo was just outside of the wall. So we made one quick walk to the turismo where we got the bus timetable from Obidos directly to Peniche, directions to the bus stop, and permission to leave our bags in the turismo. Thus unburdened, we went back to actually take a look around.
Obidos is very pretty, but Edie made the excellent point that it reminded
her of Disneyland. There’s one main street running the length of the town, and a total of three streets running in that direction. The streets are narrow, there aren’t many cars in the town, and there are lots of shops selling the usual tourist stuff. It felt a little like manufactured history, even though it is genuinely old. That said, there are worthwhile things to see in Obidos. My favorite was the church that had paintings by
Josepha de Obidos inside. I’m always amazed at extremely ornate churches with beautiful art inside, and this one is a gem.
After walking through town a bit more, we went back to the turismo, got our bags, went down to the bus stop, and waited for the bus to Peniche. The trip was uneventful and blessedly quiet. When we got to Peniche, we got off the bus in what appeared to be the center of town. Lonely Planet again didn’t have a map, but it had a description of where the turismo was, and that plus a few street signs got us there pretty quickly. We picked up a map and got directions to our hotel and advice on what to see.
Our hotel in Peniche was the Residencial Vasco da Gama. It was, in a word, a pit. An aside here about guidebooks. This might be obvious advice, but it struck me particularly hard this trip. Before trusting
anyone’s advice (including mine), figure out the advice-giver’s level of comfort relative to your own. I don’t have to stay in four star hotels when I travel, but I do like to have a minimal level of comfort. For me, this means a private bathroom with a shower and clean sheets and towels. Residencial Florescente had clean sheets and towels. Residencial Vasco da Gama did not. Our sheets had multiple cigarette burns, for starters. Lonely Planet listed Residencial Vasco da Gama in its budget category for Peniche. It described the rooms as being “posher” than other residencials in the area. Edie was offended that they would use the word “posh” at all, despite my protestations that they only used it as a comparison. In any case, I’d hate to see the less posh places. It was here that I realized that I tend to prefer Lonely Planet’s mid-range suggestions, which actually would rate as one dollar sign (out of four) in Fodor’s. Fodor’s recommends places that I think my parents, having higher requirements than myself, would enjoy and could afford. Lesson learned, we decided to suck it up and stay.
Our evening in Peniche consisted of our usual wondering around. We started at the fortress on the southern tip of the city that, until recently, had been used to house political prisoners. Directly beside the fortress was the older of the city’s two fishing ports. It appeared to be a marina
with mostly recreational boats, although there was a nice long walkway with a lighthouse at the end. Despite the absence of fishing boats in that marina there were dozens of Portugese men sitting around, looking like they were waiting for their ride home. We walked a little further along the water down a street that contained dozen of seafood restaurants. We crossed a bridge to get to the northern part of the city, which appeared to be an industrial wasteland. We walked to the new port which was actually filled with working fishing boats. We were definatley out of place; the only other people there were working on the boats or trapping crabs off the docks. Nevertheless, we had a good time looking around at the fishing boats. We walked by the nearby bus station to check on schedules for tomorrow’s buses to Coimbra. (The turismo gave us a schedule, but I thought there was a missing bus in the middle. Turns out there was, but it took two hours longer than any of the other buses to get to Coimbra. This restored my faith in the turismo.)
We took a cab from the bus station to the northern tip of Peniche, which is also on the Atlantic. (Peniche is sort of confusing. It’s on a peninsula, but it’s not on the tip. So the ocean is to the north and the south. Some kind of islet or river or something runs north/south through part of the town, which is why we had to cross a bridge to get from the old town to the new.) We went out to a point which was on a cliff overloking the ocean. It was beautiful.
We walked back to the old town through a residencial section of town. I continued to marvel at how even the most humble homes were sometimes decorated with beautiful azulejos. We went back to the hotel to regroup, then headed out for dinner. We stopped at the old port again to watch the sun go down over the water. Most of the fishermen had gone home for the night, but there were still a few stragglers hanging around the dock.
We left the pier and strolled along the street with all of the seafood restaurants. They all looked empty. This was after 8, too. We ended up having a decent meal at a restaurant a few blocks off the main drag. The waitress claimed better facility with French than English, but I let us down
this time. I just don’t know the names of individual fish in French. I also asked for a demi-bouteille of wine, which resulted in our receiving a full bottle. Not sure if that’s my French or hers. Decent meal, but apparently not memorable. I don’t remember what either of us ate. I’m sure it was fish.
On the way back to the hotel I had a phone debacle that easily overshadowed
my earlier victory. We picked a place to stay in Porto, and I decided to be brave and call. I did, and a woman with a high pitched voice answered the phone. I said hello and asked (in Portugese) if she spoke English. She did not say yes, she did not say no. She said something very quickly that I did not pick up at all. This coincided with my dropping my phrase book. I got extremely flustered, said thanks, and hung up. Rather than pick a new place to call, Edie decided to try her hand. She called and got the same person. She asked if she had the right place, and again asked if the woman spoke English. Apparently the woman told Edie to hold on, she did not speak English but she’d go get someone who did. How Edie managed to
get all this is beyond me, but she did. And we got a reservation. And I went home humiliated.
We returned to the hotel only to find that our room was directly above a bar. Needless to say, the noise insulation wasn’t so hot. Residencial Vasco da Gama served breakfast at the normal 8–10 hours, but we decided to sleep in if we could and not worry about getting up too early. I did manage to fall asleep to the chatter below, and stayed asleep for quite awhile.
