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Barcelona We arrived safely with luggage in tow in Barcelona. To keep jetlag at bay we wandered around La Ramblers and visited the Roman Walls and Barcelona's Cathedral. The next day we jumped on a sight seeing bus which took us around to all the major sites - Gaudi's “La Sagrada Familia Temple”, “Casa Batllo” and “Park Guell” (where Gaudi lived in his former years) and the Spanish “Arc de Triomf”. Quite a few of the attractions were covered in scaffolding as tends to be the case for these European sites.
We picked up the hire car (a 1.3 litre diesel Citroen) and headed out of town to the Monastery at Montserrat. High up in the mountains they built an impressive couple of monasteries which now attracts large bus-loads of tourists to dine at the ugly canteen that overlooks the valley and inspect the monastery. From there we headed to....
Zaragoza The stop here was mainly somewhere to sleep for the night however it does have a very impressive Cathedral and main square (Plaza Mayor). Inside the Cathedral is a pillar that somebody in AD 40 saw Virgin Mary ascend atop from. Following in the tradition of Popes, Lynelle
gave it an air kiss. Later on Lynelle became very excited when she thought she saw a monk coming out of one of the other churches but it turned out to be a cleaner dressed in bright orange drapes!
On the way to San Sebastian we had lunch in Pamplona where we walked the "running of the bulls" path from the holding yard to the bull fighting ring. Lynelle can be seen in one of the photos re-enacting the charge through the streets.
San Sebastian This is in the Basque region and most of the towns have two names, one in Spanish and one in Basque. We stayed at a pensions not far from the old town and bay. Tapas are popular here and we managed to find a bar that wasn't too crowded to feast on various two-bite sized tapas. At this point the weather started to deteriorate so we didn't venture too far within San Sebastian and decided to make a mad dash across to the west coast of the country hoping for better weather in the coastal town of...
A Coruna We wandered around A Coruna viewing the various statues and checking out their
famous Hercules Tower (now lighthouse). It too was covered in scaffolding. Near the light house a guy was hiring out Segways so we hired some for 20 mins and it didn't take us long to get the hang of them as they are surprisingly easy to operate. A Coruna is also known for its galerias (glass covered balconies) overlooking the harbour. Wanting to try out the local cuisine we tried the “pulpa o la gallega” for dinner. It's octopus sprinkled with olive oil and paprika, but surprisingly its sliminess made it difficult to stomach and so we didn't get through the dish (and Lynelle usually eats everything on her plate!)
Heading further south we stopped at Santiago de Compostela which is the end of the road for Pilgrims journeying along the Camino de Santiago. We were amazed by the number of pilgrims, and want-a-be pilgrims with walking sticks, that we saw wandering around the town. We still haven't worked out how far they actually walked. It was then into Portugal and on to...
Porto It started raining on the afternoon we arrived in Porto so we jumped on a tour bus to check out the sites around town.
Barcelona's highest building
Will leave it to your imagination...
It went out to the beach area and back along the river where they use to bring the wine barrels down from the vineyards to unload. The Port or Porto as they call it, is sourced from about 80 km up the river so the next day we headed west to see if we could taste some wines/ports. Drizzling rain meant that there weren't many tourists out that way and as a result we couldn't find any wineries open. The only exception was the Mateus Palace were we tasted some wines and ended up buying a bottle or red and a small bottle of port. The Mateus Palace is the building that is on the Mateus Rose bottles. So far we found that the the Spanish and Portuguese wines are not as good as the Aussie ones, although they do make a pretty good port.
Lisbon The next day we headed down to Lisbon stopping at the towns of Coimbra and Obidos on the way. Coimbra is a pretty University town with lots of narrow streets, small cathedrals, squares and decorated buildings and great custard tarts. Obidos is a more colorful village surrounded by high walls from Roman times,
complete with an aqueduct. Just out of Lisbon we visited the Palacio Nacional da Pena (near Sintra) which is a colourful palace from the eighteen hundreds.
In Lisbon we did the bus tour again. Hopped off at the main square, monastery and major monuments. The next day we went back out to the Torre de Belem which was build around 1515 in the middle of the river as a fort but due to movement of the river now lies on the shoreline.
Heading down to the south Coast of Portugal we crossed the 17 km Vasco de Gama bridge. We took the freeway for half of the trip and then headed along the coastal road for the second half. They are a lot slower as the speed limit on the freeway is 120. On the coastal road quite a few of the towns have speed radars and if you are not doing more than 50 km/h the traffic light turns red and you have to stop for several seconds! Traveling along these roads it felt like we were back in Australia as they are lined with Eucalyptus trees. One exception to this was the large number of birds
nest on top of the power poles. In some sections there might be four or five huge nests in a row.
We stayed the night down at Albufeira which is a popular holiday destination during summer. The next day we went out to Tavira Island as it was reported to be one of the finest beaches in the area. We were expecting a reasonably long ferry ride to get out to the island but it turned out to be just the crossing of a channel. The beach wasn't too bad apart from the freezing water and little biting insects. It was then back to Spain where we have to get back into the Splanglish since most of the Portuguese spoke English. Stay tuned for more exciting reports.
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