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Friday, November 9. 2007I declare closed the investigation
Just received the letter below from Portugal, which Google Translate has helped me gather is to tell us that the inquiry into our car being broken into in Óbidos is now closed due to lack of evidence.
To add to the fun of reading the original Portuguese to type in to the translator, some of the words hadn't printed properly so I am left to make educated guesses about a language I know two words in. Announced themselves to V. Exa, as a Denunciante, which was delivered in the order of filing survey referenced above, resulted in a complaint lodged against DESCONHECIDOS, pursuant to art. 277 of Code of Criminal Procedure, with its reopening arise if new evidence which invalidem the pleas in that order-art. 279, paragraph 1, of the same diploma legality. Anyway, obrigado, Portuguese police! Or should that be "Due in low"? Saturday, March 18. 2006Belém, Monsaraz
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
Once again, it rained all night, but we were still dry in our tent. Our tent is tiny, so I find it quite suprising that we managed to stay dry - I thought we were going to flood for sure! In the morning, we again waited a while in the tent, and the rain finally slowed then stopped. We went out to the bus stop, and caught a bus to Belém, one of the suburbs of Lisbon. We had decided to go here for a few reasons - it was right on the river, it had lots of winding little backstreets to explore, and most importantly, it reputedly has the best pastel de nata's in all of Portugal. We spent a little while looking at the river and getting a few photos, before searching out the cafe where the famous pasteal de nata's were to be found - the Confeitaria de Belém. I have to say, we weren't disappointed, not only were the custard tarts the best we had had (hot custard, crispy, flakey pastry - it's too hard to describe how delicious they were), but their coffee was pretty special too, and I'm not usually such a big fan of coffee. After all this tasty goodness, we thought we wouldn't find too much better to see in Lisbon (and the weather was looking dodgy again), so we caught the bus back to the camp ground, packed up the tent, and drove off. Our road out of Lisbon proved much easier than the road on the way in had, and we found ourselves on the right road, heading in the right direction quite quickly. It was quite an unusual experience for us :) Anyway, we drove over Lisbon's river, Rio Tejo, and then headed east. We had a quick stop on the motorway for lunch (Servo food is terrible the world over), and then continued on our way. Our last stop in Portugal was the tiny walled village of Monsaraz, quite close to the Portugal/Spain border. This quiet and peaceful town is set high on a hill, overlooking the surrounding farmland and countryside. You can hear sheep bells ringing in the distance, and see across the river towards Spain in the distance. As you walk along the narrow cobblestone streets, you suddenly come to a gap in the houses, and catch a glimpse of the green countryside beneath the village. It was a very nice stop, but I think we were both a tad nervous about leaving the car near such an obviously touristy spot again. But never fear, our car was safe and sound when we returned, and we were soon back on the road. One bridge and a few short kilometers later, we drove back into España. Friday, March 17. 2006Lisbon under so much rain
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
The next morning, we lay in our tent for a while, hoping the rain would stop before we got out. Eventually it lessened, and Tim went off to the shower block and I followed a while later. We had breakfast at the camp ground restaurant, including pastel de natas and a big pot of tea, before traversing the flooded road outside the camp ground to get to the bus stop. By the time the bus had turned up and then driven us into central Lisbon (the camp ground was about 6kms from the center), it was again raining heavily. We have water-proof jackets, but decided to buy ourselves an umbrella to try and keep us a bit drier. This done, we then spent the morning trying to find replacement phone charger, camera charger, hard drive, clothes and so on, all of which were things that had been stolen. All this took up most of our morning, but at the end, we had a phone charger, an iPod charger, a memory card reader for our camera and some clothes. The main things we were now missing was a spare hard drive, and most importantly, a charger for our camera batteries. The camera we have has its own specific battery, and as we want to capture as much of our honeymoon as possible, the charger is kind of essential at the moment. Unfortunately, because it is such a specific piece of equipment, it is not so easy to find. We looked in a couple of specialty electronic stores, and camera stores, with no luck. Poor Tim, who usually takes huge amounts of photos, was having to really think about which shots we wanted, because we didn't know when or where we may find a charger, or quite how long our batteries would last. After all the shopping, it had finally stopped raining, so we decided to see some sights while we could. We walked up some winding streets until we came to the city's castle, Castelo de São Jorge where we spent a while admiring the views out over Lisbon and its harbour. Then we got a bit lost in the backstreets before it started raining heavily again. We found our way and went back downhill to find a warm spot to sit. After a beer each in a dry pub, we went back out into the rain, and found a little Indian restaurant called Ghandi Palace where we had delicious curries, pappadums and naans. After dinner, it was still pouring rain, so we decided that we would catch the bus back to the camp ground and see how dry our tent still was. Thursday, March 16. 2006Fixing the car again, restocking, into Lisbon
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
We slept well despite the previous days excitement, and rushed the nice breakfast at our hotel so we could go across the road to the police station at 9am to fill out a police report. While Tim did this, I tried to find some of our lost items in the nearby chemist, like toothbrushes and toothpaste, but had no luck. After the police report was finished, we left the hotel and drove to the next town Caldos da Rainha, where we had been given great directions to find the Citroën dealer on the other side of town. Once there, we were told in broken English that our smashed window would be fixed in two hours. As it was 11am by now, we decided to walk the couple of kilometers back into town to find some morning tea. In town, we sat and had coffee and pastel de nata's, then found a spot outside to sit while we phoned Citroën in France to try and sort out insurance and so on. This done, we walked around the town market, bought some nuts to snack on later, and then wandered back towards the car dealer. When we got there, we were all ready to get on the road, but we soon found out they hadn't even started on our car, and now it siesta time was about to start, so they were closing up for a couple of hours. We considered walking back into town, but then asked if we could have our car back to sit in while we waited. We passed the time talking, eating our nuts from the markets, and me attempting to have a siesta also. A few hours later (4pm), we were finally on our way, window fixed and glass all vacuumed away for us. We had to stop off at a nearby supermarket to replace some of our toiletries, and a couple of other things like socks and undies, and here we also got some sandwiches to take with us. We found the fast toll-way, and drove south to Lisboa (Lisbon). Our directions to get to the camp ground weren't too bad, but once again, our map just didn't match up with the actual roads. So instead of driving around Lisbon and finding ourselves at our stop for the night, we ended up driving right through central Lisbon at peak hour, before managing to navigate ourselves to the camp ground Parque de Campismo de Lisboa. It was getting dark, so we quickly found a flattish spot among the trees and thick carpet of weeds, and put up our tent, which luckily didn't seem to have been what our nasty thieves fancied. We had seen a Decathlon store near our camp ground, which is like a large supermarket, but for all things sporting and outdoors, so we headed across to there next, spending a while replacing what we could from our lost goodies. On our way back to the tent, we stopped at the camp grounds restaurant for a dinner of soup, before going to bed. It started pouring rain a few hours later, and continued to do so all night, but we stayed perfectly dry in our little tent. Wednesday, March 15. 2006Tomar, Óbidos, Theft
(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. Tuesday, March 14. 2006Sierra da Estrella, Luso
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
After a better nights sleep than the previous night, we packed up our tent and drove out of Porto. We headed East, driving along very scenic and very wiggly roads, around the region that port is grown. We stopped a few times to admire the views and take some photos, and to wait for trains to pass. Part of our drive took us along fast motorways, but then we were back on the slower roads, heading up into the mountainous Serra da Estrella. We spent quite a few hours, winding our way up and down, through rocky barren mountainside, past a few last patches of winter snow, an then into pine forest with some more patches of snow. This was our warmest day by far, with our car temperature gauge saying it was 26 degrees centigrade at one point. Tim was in his shorts, and just had to have a photo taken in the snow :) More wonding up and down, and beautiful scenery in every direction. We stopped to make tea at some point, and eat a bit of lunch, but most of the day was driving and enjoying all the different landscapes. Late in the afternoon, we even drove through huge patches of gum trees and wattle trees all in flower, and smelling just like home. Our stop for the night was in the little town of Luso, where we quickly found a small pension (Astória) to stay in before finding a tasty dinner at a nearby restaurant-bar (Lourenços), where I ate my huge pile of spinach, and then devoured Tim's as well... love my vegies :) Monday, March 13. 2006Around Porto
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
Up early the next morning, we made ourselves some tea, and then decided we would walk into Porto, as our campground was only about 4kms from the center of town. We stopped about halfway for a refresher of coffee and the addictive pastel de nata (portuguese custard tart), and then continued on our way. Once we made it to the center of town, we took a while to find the bridge we were looking for, but eventually managed to locate it, and crossed the top section of it, getting nice sunny views of Porto and the river as we went. On the other side of the river we spent a while looking back across to the other bank from what appeared to be an old fortress high up above the bridge we had crossed, before making our way through some gardens and then down through more of the narrow winding streets. We were on the hunt for an open Port house, being part of what this city was famous for. After a while wandering around, we eventually stumbled across Taylor Fladgate which turned out to be a British owned Port House. We sat at their funky little table and chairs (all made out of old barrels), and enjoyed a taste of white port while we waited for a tour of the port house. None of the port is actually made in Porto, it is stored there though, so our tour took us through one of the storehouses. We learnt all about where the port is grown, how it is made, and what the difference is between a vintage port and other port. It was all interesting, as a lot of the information we were given was new to us. After the tour, we were given another tasting, this time of a ruby port. We made our way out to the terrace where we enjoyed the view and our port, before heading inside to the restaurant. We had a big and mostly tasty lunch, before walking the rest of the way down the hill to the watersedge. Along the way, we stopped in another port house where we did a tasting, but we didn't like the flavour of this port much compared to the first port house. Down by the river, we sat in the sun and spent a while being lazy. Then we went back across the bridge, this time along the lower section, climbed back up the hill on the other side, and caught a bus back to our camping ground. After our big lunch, we decided we would have a smaller dinner, so we bought a few things from the nearby supermarket. We had a bit of a walk around our campground, where we came across an ornamental lake with a little castle on the island in the middle of the water, fed some hungry ducks our stale bread, cooked ourselves some soup on our little camp stove, and then put our tired bodies to bed. Sunday, March 12. 2006Porto
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
After breakfast at our hotel, we were on our way. Our first stop of the day was going to be the Bom Jesus, a religious monument not far from Braga, but we were unable to find any hint of which direction to drive in to get there, so after circling around a bit, we decided to give up and make our way to Porto. Our drive was a bit slow, with lots of weekend traffic. Once we got to the outskirts of Porto, we took an exit that told us central Porto was in that direction, only to find ourselves lost in the suburbs of Porto. After a bit of random driving, we suddenly spotted a sign to the camping ground, and shortly after found ourselves at Parque de Campismo da Prelada, the exact spot we had been aiming for. A while later we had our little tent pitched in the middle of lots of trees and small hedges, and a nice spot to sleep in for the night. We decided to spend the afternoon exploring Porto, so we caught the bus from outside the camping ground into the middle of Porto. We got off the bus a few stops before the end of the line, and found ourselves somewhere at the top of the hill. We guessed that following was of the downhill streets would eventually get us to the river, which it did, and then went to the Museo do Vinho, supposedly a museum that looks at the history of wine- and port- making, that also does tastings. It seemed to be more a museum showing the history of the building, which used to be a port-wine storehouse, and the tastings were non-existent, but being a sunday, it was free entry, so after a look around, we wandered onwards. We stopped at a bar along the river for a drink before climbing up the steep and winding little network of streets and alleys until we were back at the top. We climbed up the 225 steep steps of the Torre dos Clerigos (one of Porto's churches) for a dizzyingly good view of Porto in all directions, and then climbed quickly down before the church bell had a chance to chime while we were standing next to it. Inside the tower itself, we saw what looked a little like a church organ, but what turned out to be the 'keyboard' for the bells in the tower. You could go in (asuming you could actually play the thing) and ring out your song of choice over Porto. Earplugs would be a must! After all those steps we stopped for a coffee and a snack of something that turned out to be a great big fatty sausage, brought to us sizzling in more fat on a plate. The waiters eager question of 'You like?' a short while later was answered with enthusiastic 'Si's!', and it was nice enough, but I can wait a while before I have another :) We walked back down the hill to the river, going along some different streets, and then sat at a restaurant called O Muro drinking wine, eating dinner, and enjoying the sunset. Across the river, on the far bank, we watched all the huge signs that advertise the various Port houses start to light up, and so after dinner, Tim asked the owner if he could try a port. We ended up being given two wine glasses full to the brim with port, one glass of tawny port, and the other of white port. They turned out to be a nice end to our meal, before we once again made our way back up the hill to the bus stop. We waited a long time for a bus, and in the end gave up and caught a taxi back to the campground where we slept for the night. Saturday, March 11. 2006Into Portugal - Braga
(written 22/3/2006 in Granada, España, by Liz)
Our first stop in Portugal was at a small bar-restorante for two 50 cent coffees. Our guide book says something along the lines of 'there is no such thing as a bad coffee in Portugal', and in this case it certainly seemed right. Our two coffees went down very well, and we continued on our way. We drove to a tiny beach side town called Esposende where we stopped for a while to buy some food and to work out what to do with ourselves while in Portugal. Back on the road, we drove inland a little way to Braga, where we had decided to stop for the night. After finding a parking spot, and then wandering a little way to find the middle of town, we located a hotel (Peninsular de Braga) and then went out to explore. The centre of Braga was very pretty, with long narrow streets filled with afternoon shoppers. We spent a while looking at various town sights, not really knowing what things were, as our town guide was in Portuguese, but enjoying ourselves all the same. We sat in some pretty gardens for a while and then walked back to the main town square where we sat and had more tasty coffee. (Sun setting down the shopping streets) Dinner was great fun, with the restaurant owner running to get the chef, who spoke a little English, to get our order, huge serves of very nice food, and the chef appearing every now and then to make sure us English speaking people were ok. The owner even got the chef to come and see us out the door when we left. We also tried a Portuguese specialty, Soupe Verde... basically green cabbage soup, that you have at the end of the meal, like a digestif. Tasty and different. Tim even liked it :)
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