Getting lost, breakdowns, house and city visits

I’ll just start this post with its rightful protagonist: this is Lorenzo in his inner (outer?) sanctum.

You can tell how much of a character he is just by looking at the picture. Lorenzo is not exactly his given name, but it’s the one he adopted after trading life in the bustling streets of Paris for the quietness of the Extremadura countryside. The story of how we came to meet is quite simple: he offered lodging right smack in the middle of my route, at a convenient stopping point for the day, through Warmshowers, a site you can think of as Couchsurfing for bike tours. It would have been as simple as that… but life got in the way.

Last Friday, I left Portalegre quite late, qjust for a short (and uphill) 20km ride to Marvão, the oldest settlement around and an UNESCO world heritage site. Everything was going well, as evidenced by these glamour shots and a selfie I took with some barely visible goats.

A while after seeing those goats, I got to see a very dead one. If I was superstitious, I’d say that’s where my bad luck started, but the fact is: I got lost. No blaming the route this time: this one’s on me. I got to a point where it was getting late and getting back to the correct road meant going back uphill quite a bit, but wait! Someone cleared a lot of bush around here, and I see the correct road it in the distance!

It “just” meant crossing a chasm with a loaded bike. I determined it was possible, and did it in two passes, one for the bike, the other for the cargo. At the end of all this, I had lost daylight and got settled in for a cold night on the hills.

The next day, it turned out I wouldn’t cycle much, because just 15 minutes after beginning, this happened.

BIKE NERD PARAGRAPH: I think one of the pins holding the fixed part of the derailer to the mobile part got weakened in my previous repair and now failed, allowing the derailer to spin and get caught between the spokes.

Luckily, I was approaching a junction and going slowly while this happened so I didn’t even fall and no spokes got broken. After taking the derailer and the bent chain links out of there, I managed to get it going single speed. This is when I found out my insurance doesn’t include road assistance and texted Lorenzo to say I wouldn’t make it. At this point, a trio of spanish bikers stopped by to see if they could help. They lent me some metal paste to fix the broken luggage rack and took my luggage to the next town while the paste set in.

After having breakfast in Portagem, Lorenzo calls me telling me “hey, wait! I’m coming to get you!” The man just offered to drive 60km each way to take my bike to a shop. While I was waiting, I took a few shots of Portagem, which turned out to be a rather nice little town.

Lorenzo has then arrived on an old car you’d be surprised to learn still runs
— his good one is in the shop. After struggling a bit to get the bike in, he’d take me to a place where there was a bike shop, but it’s now gone. It’s now Saturday afternoon and the shops are closed anyway, so he immediately offered to take me another 50km to Cáceres on Monday. That meant I’d get to spend two days at his house.

After the cold night, a bed was more than welcome.

I then spent the weekend with Lorenzo, getting to know each other and learning about his passion for Hi-Fi equipment, jazz and blues, which we got to experience extensively, both in the backyard, as pictured, and in his living room where he had even better gear.

The man also has the biggest music collection I’ve ever seen, including music from every genre and every country you can imagine. Everything in uncompressed formats (of course!).

He kept me well fed, too.

Lots of conversation and musical tastes shared later, it was finally Monday and time to head to Cáceres, where we got my bike fixed by Rafa at La Bicicleta, for a very reasonable price.

After checking in to a hostel, in which I had a room all to myself, it was time to visit Cáceres, the first big(ger) city in this tour. It is the current capital of Extremadura, but it started its life as the Roman settlement of Norba Caesarina, in the 1st century BC. The visigoths razed that settlement six centuries later and, since then, it has been in control of muslims, the Portuguese, the Leonese, and the Castilians. Most of the architecture you’ll see in the old town is medieval and beyond, the walls having a patchwork of repairs with different materials, depending on the era they were made.

There was also some interesting wildlife:

Outside the walls, the most prominent place in the city is definitely the Plaza Mayor, a beautiful, large square, featuring a host of commerce and government buildings.

Outside the historical center, there’s a quite large, modern town, which is, apart from all the samey apartment blocks, quite interesting, with wide boulevards featuring gardens in the middle. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of that, so here’s some shots I wanted to share, but couldn’t fit anywhere else:

I managed to find out a good, cheap restaurant, too. It’s where I learned the Spanish also do migas, but the star was really the dessert. I assure you that while it looks great, it tastes even better.

And now, it’s time to get going, ’cause I don’t even know where I’m gonna sleep today. See you next time, and have a nice day.

A nice old lady made me care about tapestries

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The day I left Avis was, indeed, short, with me doing little more than 20 km and then ~~trespassing~~sleeping on a field that had the gate open. The pic haul was still pretty decent, though.

The next day, I was up ~~bright and~~ early, and soon reached Alter do Chão, where I had breakfast in a place with a rather… odd… decor.

So… Benfica and babies with their dicks out… that’s not weird, or anything.

And then things started going wrong. In the route I had saved, the route planner just gave up at some point, just plotting a straight line between where I was and where I ought to be.

I guess I’d have to draw the owl. The tool I used to generate most of these paths really likes avoiding roads, so I figured the left path would be the intended one. In hindsight, this is where I should have turned back.

But I kept going. And it got worse than that. And then, 1 or 2 km up ahead… there was a gate. So I had to turn back. On the way back, though, my rear derailer hit a rock and it got bent out of shape, breaking a spoke in the process.

I disassembled the derailer and banged on metal piece a bit, replaced the spoke with one of the spares I brought along and it… worked pretty well! I fully expected not to be able to use the rear first gear afterwards, but it all still works.

All in, it was probably a waste of around three hours.

The terrain here is littered with what I like to call Windows XP hills, but since the end point of the ride was 300m higher than the start, there was quite a bit of climbing. I arrived at Portalegre pretty beat, already at nighttime, sometime after taking a selfie with a horse.

Which leads us to yesterday, which I took to tour around town. Portalegre is a medieval town and it shows. It’s on a hill, it has a castle, and lots of narrow, haphazardly laid out streets. It has, at times, a great contrast of old vs new.

At other times, this contrast isn’t so positive. It reminds me a bit of Lisbon when I was a kid, where every square meter of public space needed to have a car, like the city’s purpose was to be a big parking lot.

A visit to the castle leaves us with just one question: why? Or maybe also: WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!

Bonus: The exhibition space is completely empty and the top floor is sealed off. At the other end of it, there was another tower from the castle, with an empty room and no way to climb it, and this safety feature on the windows:

Yep! No one can open that now! Now, I came to see a castle, not this. I turned back to the main courtyard in disappointment, and then realized that while they’re not giving me a castle experience, the lady downstairs’ eyes were all on her computer when I came in, and I’m not shy about jumping a fence, so I did, and I climbed a wall, and then I climbed a tower after climbing that wall.

Yep! That was worth it! And not a peep from her at the exit!

This leads us, then, to the old lady in the posts’ title. Now, any one who knows me will tell you I’m not an artsy person. In fact, I was in front of the former home–now museum–of the late José Régio, a somewhat famous writer / poet who reportedly had an extensive religious art collection, thinking: “no, I can’t imagine that being interesting”.

This building across the street had a sign on the door to the effect of “Guided tours: <phone number>”. I didn’t really have an idea what it was, but I saw an old lady come out with a broom on her hand and said:
“Good morning, can I have a guided tour?” And she was like, “Sure!” This was my introduction to D. Fernanda and to Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre, an internationally renown tapestry manufacturer, who use a kind of stitching they devised, which allows flat tapestries with smooth curves and gradients. She proceeded to show me around the building, where they use vertical looms to turn a painting into a tapestry and do every single thing by hand.

I’ve found it interesting, so then I visited the tapestry museum (of course!). The process starts with tracing the painting into millimeter paper and assigning colors to each section.

They then have the milimeter paper at eye level, and, moving up a line at a time, weave each stitch in place. Since each stitch is made of eight strands, they can mix them to form smooth transitions between colors, creating tapestries that look a lot like their original paintings, really.

I also visited the cathedral, where it was absolutely forbidden to take pictures inside. You know where this is going.

It’s… a cathedral. Not a very well preserved one, though the inside is, at least, a bit better than the outside. The (mildly visible) ceiling has an interesting pattern, too.

There were still more pretty places to be seen:

This is a police facility, believe it or not.

There’s also a local craft brewery, from which I got to sample their “American wheat beer”. It tastes like wheat beer but it also tastes a bit… fruity, like it has a hint of peach. I can’t believe it, but the flavor actually works! It’s pretty delicious.

Back at the hostel, a group of nursing master’s students had arrived and were kind enough to offer me dinner. If you had told me you’d put mayo, banana and mango on a chicken curry before today, I would told have told you to shove it. However, the prospect of a free meal made me try it, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t great! Thanks to Diana for cooking and the rest for the company.

Yeah, it doesn’t look great. Don’t care.

And that was it for Portalegre. Thanks for reading, but I have one last request, for now. So far, you’ve been content with just reading the blog, but now something I saw here in town tells me it is time to take action. A conflict is on the horizon. Tensions are rising. Intentions have been declared and statements have been made. So my question for you is…

Whose side are you on?

A rough start

Well… Like I said above… I’m not Bear Grylls. Unfortunately that means I suck at packing. Some people who I’ve told my plans to will have noticed how silent I’ve been. Well, the long and short of it was the rush to get everything done and packed before I left. This was what I wanted to pack:And this ultimately got left behind:It turns out 58 l plus a tent isn’t a whole of space. Who knew?😂The vacuum bags are the big surprise here. I tried to put my clothes in them, but they all but filled one saddlebag each, but since they become rigid after taking the air out, they weren’t really filling up all the nooks and crannies in the saddlebags, and their closure ended up wasting lots of space.Unfortunately, all this fiddling about meant that I missed my departure date. Now, normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. However, two good friends were supposed to meet me on the way, at Mora.New plan: take the train to Vila Franca de Xira at an ungodly hour and start from there.06:30 at Lisboa – OrienteCrossing the bridge at Vila Franca de Xira. That… turned out to be wildly optimistic.There were lots of dirt roads with tractor marks and with bits of sand that made it really slow going. I’m the end, I didn’t even get to the meeting point, and there’s still around 40km to go from there. Hopefully things will go better tomorrow.Here’s a selfie to wrap things up: