Alvor - Baía da Arquinha Beach - Samoqueira Beach - Batalha
Portugal 2020
In the morning, it’s a little sad. We are leaving the ocean and these beautiful beaches with golden cliffs. It feels as if yesterday was the midpoint of the journey, and now it has started to wane… The beginning of the end.
There will be no more deserted roads through olive groves, no more dawn on the outskirts of a small sleepy town with white houses, and most importantly, no more intense desire to finally see the ocean. It remains behind us.
As if in an attempt to prolong our stay by the ocean just a little, we drive to Praia da Baía da Arquinha on the west coast. The cliffs here are of a completely different color — they are dark and a little frightening. Beautiful, but somehow unwelcoming.
There is no one here but us. We climb the watchtower and photograph the surroundings. Then we wander along the coast, along the sheer cliffs. While we were walking here, we thought that maybe we would be able to swim, but once we get there, the desire to swim somehow disappears.
An interesting plant with sticky little leaves grows here. Maybe it catches gnats? By the way, there are lots of tiny flies here.
A plant with sticky leaves
In hopes of swimming in another, more welcoming place, we continue along the coast a little farther north to Praia da Samoqueira beach. There is a large parking lot near the beach. A couple of caravans and cars are parked there. The beach is large and long.
At the end of the beach, we find a natural saltwater pool — it formed during low tide. We decide to swim in it. The pool is shallow, but the water is still freezing cold. I dip in, and Volchy swims a little. For some reason, it feels noticeably cooler here than in the south. Probably because of the wind.
Wolf swimming in a natural pool
We return to the parking lot and drive on.
On the way, we decide to have burritos for lunch and look for a nice picnic spot. We find an entrance to a pine forest.
We open the trunk and realize that olive oil has spilled there — I hadn’t closed it properly. We take everything out of the trunk. We have almost no paper napkins. We wipe everything with pine needles. Luckily, the only thing damaged was my denim jacket — half of it is covered in oil. The trunk mat was also damaged.
Saving the car and belongings from oil
There are also plenty of tiny flies in the forest, which is very strange — I had never seen so many flies in a forest before. They are terribly annoying; we get tired of waving them away.
After we finish cleaning up, we decide to have lunch after all. We eat quickly because by then the flies have already become really unbearable. I think about how easy it is to disturb idyll and human peace — all it takes is a couple dozen flies that keep landing on you nonstop….
On the way, I notice a self-service car wash — great, that’s exactly what we need. We didn’t know how to wash the stain off the mat that was lying in the trunk. Volchiy says that if we leave it like this, the company that rented us the car may issue a fine for dirtying it.
Besides, we were planning to wash the car and, preferably, vacuum the inside — it’s covered in sand and dirt.
Washing a car mat at a self-service car wash
The mat and the car were cleaned perfectly - everything was like new :) And all for just 3 euros. There was even a vacuum cleaner that saved the interior.
And we keep going. It’s already evening. We don’t have time to visit the monastery we planned to stop at on the way, so we head straight to the hotel.
We arrive at the hotel only after it has gotten completely dark. It turned out to be a small private hotel. On the outskirts of a small town, the owners have a large plot with a garden, where they built a couple of cottages to rent out. The cottage is really great. Inside, everything is beautifully done. Large floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the garden….
In a separate larger house there is a shared kitchen.
I’m cooking dinner in the shared kitchen
Volchem really likes it here; he asks to stay here for one more night. We see that on Booking there is no availability for our house tomorrow, but there is some other unclear room left. We cancel our reservation in Coimbra and decide to stay here for one more night.
