Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Road Trippin'... in Portugal

Last month we did a  small road trip along the coast of Portugal. Was my second ever outside of Guatemala. Well, kind of. Me and my friend drove from Asheville to Ann Arbor a few years ago but no sure if that counts as a roadtrip.

It was awesome!

But, what does it have to do with hitchhiking if you rode inside a car for a week? That has nothing to do with hitchhiking you bastard! Wait for it, wait for it... of course it has to do at least a bit with hitchhking. How? We picked up three hitchhikers along the way! ha! there you go: it's hitchhiking related. Besides, it's my blog, I can write whatever I want.

Anyways, instead of using the motorway, we only used small roads. We traveled the entire length of Portugal from North to South. We started in Galicia and after a couple of hours we started to work our way down until we would reach our final destination: Graná (Granada).

I have only been to Santa Maria da Feira and Lisboa. Although it was a short time, quality prevailed over quantity. I promised myself that one day I would come back to Portugal... little did I know that I was going to end up living there. But that's a story for another time (or post).

Even tho it was a short trip we had the opportunity to see many, many small towns. Cruising down small national roads, sometimes even rural roads was awesome. We never stayed at hostels or guesthouses or whatever, instead we opted to sleep inside the car.  We had not one but four tents. Don't ask why. But it was still a bit chilly to camp on the beach so we just looked for a place to park the car and that was it. It's not like we stayed in any car park or anything. No, no, no. We stuck to the coastline therefore we almost slept on the beach every single night. Portugal is I think one of the most underrated places I have been. To be honest, I don't know. But then again, I think it's better this way as it won't get massive flocks of tourists. Let me give you an example: I was in Lagos for Páscoa and it was not as crowed as let's say Granada. Which was by the way not so nice to walk around as there were people everywhere.

We took the motorway from Ourense to the border. Right after the border we got off the motorway and started on smaller roads. We avoided at all costs Porto (I'll leave for later) and Lisboa (where I'll meet with a friend of mine next month). The end of the road for us was Granada.

The towns we visited are: Viana do Castelo, Aveiro, Figueira da Foz, Nazaré, Sines, Sagres, Lagos and Faro.

I won't write about the cities as this is not a place in which I will write about "the top 10 things to do in Portugal". You are can figure that out by yourselves. You can google them. Or even better, you can just go with the flow and discover your own top 10 things to do anywhere.

I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Viana do Castelo

Aveiro

Figueira da Foz

Nazaré

Sines

Sagres (photos taken by María)

Lagos

Faro