(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by
Liz)
In Luso the next morning, after a big breakfast at our pension, we walked past the village market which was busy with shoppers. We were looking for pillows to make out nights a bit more comfortable while sleeping in the tent, and lo and behold, here they were in this village market, two huge comfy pillows for less than 3 Euros (less than AUD $5)! We also found the little liquor store on the edge of the market, and Tim procured himself a small bottle of Port. At least, he tried to, but the store owner seemed to have disappered. We left the correct money on the bench, but didn't want someone else to take it. Finally, a little lady from another shop saw us, took our money and raced across the market square yelling 'Magdalena, Magdalena!!', looking for the owner of the store.
After all that excitement, we than managed to get lost once again on the roads. Our Europe road map just doesn't seem to match up with what is actually on the ground, but after half an hour of country back roads, and villages that didn't exist according to our map, we found ourselves on the road we wanted.
This road, although marked as fast on our map, turned out to be signposted as much slower, and was fairly boring to boot, with nothing much to see but Velocidade Controlada's at every turn (little buggers that detect you are not going under the 50km/hr speed limit, and then proceed to stop you with a red light to slow you down even more). To add to the frustration, every other driver was doing the more popular 90km/hr or so. I think we were overtaken by every Portuguese person in the area.
Anyway, we finally made it to our first stop of the day, a town called
Tomar, hiostorically famous for being the headquarters of the Knights Templar.
We parked the car, and found a little restaurant for lunch,
overlooking the towns centerpiece, and pretty lakes with water cascasding down at one edge, and fish a birdlife everywhere.
After lunch, we procured two ice creams from a tiny shop where Tim kindly pointed out the prices to the little old Portuguese man running the shop. Then we made our way uphill to the towns famous monastery, Convento de Cristo.
We looked out over Tomar below us, and
wandered around inside the monstery walls for a while before heading back down to the car and navigating our way out of Tomar.
This time, on some much faster roads, we made it to our next stop of
Óbidos quite quickly. We parked across the road from the tourist office and walked towards the Igreja de Santa Maria.
The majority of the town is encircled by the old castle walls, and this is what we had come to see. We walked along the little street that runs down the center of the castle, and then found some steps on the other side where we could climb up onto the castle walls themselves.
This place is not for people scared of heights (which includes me!). There is a maximum width of 1 meter, but more often about 80cms to walk along. There is no fence, just a sheer drop sometimes as high as 20 meters, and on the other side there are huge gaps in the stonework, and another huge drop. Tim almost ran on ahead taking photos of the gorgeous views all around, while I inched my way along, clutching at the slippery stones for any hold I could grab onto.
We spent a while walking around about half of the castle walls, admiring the views of the surrounding countryside, and even looking down on our little car. (
Picture where Tim didn't quite make it back to Liz in time to beat the camera timer!)
Back down on solid ground, we stopped at the tourist office to get ourselves a map of Lisbon, our next destination, and then went back to our car.
As we approached the car, Tim said something about a window being smashed. Innocent old me thought 'That's no good, another car has flicked a rock up and it's broken our window'. Unfortunately I was wrong. Somebody had smashed the small window on the edge of the drivers door, reached in and opened the door, thereby unlocking the central locking. Nothing was missing from the back seats (our jackets and a picnic bag were there), but when Tim opened the boot, we saw that both of our big packs were gone. Closer inspection showed they had also taken a bottle of wine we had bought in France, Tim's bottle of port from earlier that morning, our hiking pole and a couple of other bits and pieces.
The main things in our bags was the majority of our clothes, all of our toiletries, cosmetics and medications, the bag of cables, including the phone charger, camera charger, our spare hard drive and a large number of other electronic gizmo's, the DVD burner (the one in the laptop doesn't work anymore), and the bags themselves.
This, obviously, all came as a bit of a shock. We had been parked in a busy spot, with lots of cars driving by close by, and lots of pedestrians around, and close to the tourist office, but it hadn't stopped the people who did this. Annoyingly, the vast majority of what they took would have been of very little, if any, value to them, but to us, it has been a big hinderance. Replacing clothes and shampoo in a foreign country is not so bad, but more specific things like medications and the camera charger are not so easy to find.
Tim went across to the tourist office while I stayed with the car. Thankfully, the tourist office people were really helpful, and by the time we were finished there, we had a list in Portuguese of what was missing and what had happened, directions to the nearby police, directions to the Citroën dealer in the next town Caldas da Rainha, and they even phoned the Citroën dealer to make sure they had the replacement window for us (which they did).
Our next job was to drive around the edge of the castle wall, and in through the other side, right near the police station. By now it was late in the day, and we weren't there in time to make the police report, and we weren't going to be at the Citroën dealer in time to get the window repaired. So it was nice to find even more friendly Portuguese people, a random bystander who helped us translate what the police said (To come back at 9am the next day to make a full report), another who found us a room in a hotel right across the road from the police station (Casa de S. Thiago do Castelo), another who assured us that the police would keep their eyes on our car overnight, and the lovely housekeeper running the hotel, who brought us a big tray of tea and cakes. All this was so helpful, and made our afternoon so much easier.
We then spent a couple of hours making a full list of what we had lost, phoning our personal insurance and the car insurance, and getting over the slight shock of the past few hours.
We didn't really feel like eating dinner, but went down the road anyway, where we found a little restaurant, ate some pasta and had a bottle of rose' wine, and then went back to our room to make a few last phone calls to our insurance based in Australia.