Blogs from Algarve, Portugal, Europe - page 32

Oh, the sun, the golden cliffs, and the golden sand of Albufeira - what a contrast to Ireland. We REALLY enjoyed the sun and the warm weather, but not the cold Atlantic waters. Albufeira is a quaint seaside village where the lifeguards wear bright yellow T-shirts that say, "Matador Salvador" (Lifeguard), where people spend the entire day lazing at the beach, and then party until the wee hours of the morning. Since I've written about Albufeira in the past, I'll concentrate on the very unique sand sculpture festival that we visited on my birthday. These were definitely the largest and most elaborate sand sculptures that we've ever seen. The festival theme was, "The Inventions of Mankind". It covered a variety of topics and historical periods. Funky jazz music was playing from concealed speakers which added a ... read more

Lagos…whew!....What a wacky crazy week! I must admit I wasn’t planning to go to Portugal but when every second person you meet is saying.. go to Lagos!... go to Lagos… its hard to ignore. So long story short ‘I went’ and it was loads of fun. Since being there I reckon I’ve told another 20 people to go and about half already have. Basically Lagos is the poor’s man’s Ibiza. It’s a massive party town down in the Algarve in the south of Portugal located right on a beautiful beach. Unfortunately however, the tourist population is about 70% Aussies’ which is a bit frustrating, especially if you’ve travelled half way around the world to get away from them in the first place. In fact, it’s the only place I’ve been where you regularly hear the words.. ... read more

We travelled to the south coast of Portugal on the 5th of june. Spend 5 hours in a bumpy, local train with no options for buying food/water, got us feeling pretty sick midway there. Live and learn kids, which has become our motto when somethings goes wrong(even though everything more or less has been going smooth so far!). Got to Lagos late a night and were in no mood for socializing. Therefore it sucked even more that we couldn´t find the hostel that we booked. Tired and hungry we finally found a sweet, old man who let us sleep in his guesthouse. Next morning we went out to find our booked hostel, the rising cock, in Lagos. And with cock they mean roaster.. ofcourse! Pretty sweet hostel and pretty sweet place on earth. The coastline west ... read more

This weekend my friends and I went to Lagos, Portugal. It was about a five hour bus ride from Seville. Me and seven other friends left Friday afternoon for our weekend getaway! We got to Lagos around 8 pm, checked into our hostel and went out for dinner. It was my first European hostel experience and it was awesome! Since there was eight of us, we actually got our own apartment with six beds (we had to share) and a bathroom to ourselves and a full kitchen for less than 20 euros a night! Mama (the owner of the hostel) even made us crapes for breakfast with fresh strawberries and bananas! On Saturday we laid out on the beach all day (got the full European beach experience for the first time if you know what I ... read more

Faro, Portugal. Why there? What makes it worth visiting? Why would someone spend 3 hours and 40 minutes on a train to get there? To me, it made sense. The transatlantic sailing finished in Lisbon…..my 3rd time there. Well, it turns out that there were no discount airlines between Lisbon and London…or none that went at a decent time and arrived at a decent time at one of the London airports…..not to mention the fact that I had to get from a London airport down to Southampton cause I wanted to visit with Stuart and some other friends for a few days. Ah….Faro had a slew of discount airlines to the UK and even had one called FlyBE which flew from there direct into Southampton!!! Faro is pretty much in the center of the touristy Algarve ... read more