During our Algarve stay, we fought our way through the Portuguese road toll system to try and pay what we owed. The ability to get a pre-paid card thingy at the first toll booth was not working and the nice lady on the help button said we could pay on-line. Well, yes, it is possible but the website isn't great and the Halifax credit card we use for spend abroad was refused many times. A most frustrating evening. Maybe we need to get one of the automatic gadgets that works in Spain and Portugal to make things easier in future. One other strange observation - there were loads of scorch marked areas on the "hard shoulder" of the motorways. It seems that despite having huge government controlled MOT style testing stations, Portugal has way more vehicle fires than the UK. Or maybe it has some suicidal folks who BBQ there?
During our week in Tavira, we felt obliged to visit Albufeira as one of the "known spots" on the coast. After finding some freebie bombsite car parking we wandered into the town and along the seafront. Someone had designed and installed a lovely tiled tribute to the hippy / love era, most beautifully detailed too as you can see from this small section:
Walking towards the marina (somehow we have to go and look at them), this rather gorgeous set of apartments overlooking the sea tempted us:
Not the greatest photo but we felt that climbing over the fences to get closer might attract some unwanted attention. The marina area itself was quite a let-down. Here it is:.
Plenty of undeveloped land around it, flanked by a long row of relatively down-market restaurants with poor customer ratings and odd shops (most of which were closed for the winter of course). We did wander around but were suitably unimpressed so headed back into the town. Finding a lunchtime stop was tricky - we'd left it too late and most of the better rated places were already full. So, we did the traditional "Brits abroad" thing and had a curry.
The town centre had a few attractions:
and this rather nice tribute to the fishing families who lived and worked here:
All in all it was an OK place with a nice old town but not more. Will not be rushing back there.
In contrast, we did enjoy a lovely sunny walk along the seafront at Olhao which had a great promenade and a newly developed marna area towards the end of town, overseen by these two stoic characters:
The town had the usual mix of old and new, with some of the old showing very pretty signs of distress:
and revealing just how many colours they have been painted in the past. More beautiful tiled walls were in evidence:
again with amazing detailing. We discovered a great local coffee place too with one of the best flat white equivalents we'd had. We needed two just to check that our first opinion was correct of course.
. and interesting buildings:
unfortunately there was some cloud around too. We had a real blast from the past moment walking alongside the marina when we saw a Broom 37 Crown moored there. Most of those have retired to rivers now so to see one on the salty stuff was rare, bearing in mind that the last one built was in 1986 and many date from the late 1970s. When we had our little river cruiser on the Thames we used to look up at the Crowns, think how impressive they were and we had that "one day" feeling:
Only one day never came - we skipped the Crown and had the model that replaced it in the Broom range instead. The picture is a borrowed one by the way, not the boat in Portugal.
Having thoroughly enjoyed our week in the Algarve, which we'd planned as a taster of the area, it was time to move on again. Onward to Spain (or should that be back to Spain?)
