Portugal to Fiumicino to Singapore :
Day Trip to Sintra:
Lisbon’s ornate Rossio station: morning peak. Commuter crowds pour from suburban trains and squeeze onto escalators down to Praca Dom Pedro. An even larger crowd, much of it organised tour groups, clambers into a recently-vacated-muggy-warm train for a 40 minute standing-room journey into the cloud-washed mountains of Sintra. Once a summer retreat of the well-heeled, Sintra is festooned with hilltop fantasy palaces and Moorish fort, surrounded by dense forests sweeping down to small farms, red-roofed villages and rugged coastline beaches.
For more than 120 years, a twisting narrow-gauge, single-track tramway has been the link from cool mountain tops to the coast. The original open toastrack trams still run. (On my previous visits this vintage tram was either unable to be found, or not running due to its financially perilous history. I was keenly anticipating the journey. Sir R, my stoic travel companion, was becoming very stoic indeed).
We left the packed train at Portela de Sintra in search of the tramline, which a few times a day from an out-of-town siding. The steep and winding return trip is under parabolic wiring, 12 kilometers each way of hard-wooden-seated lurching, rocking, bouncing, jerking; grinding brakes and squealing flanges over uneven tracks. The journey twists through front and back yards of picturesque villages, crossing the busy N247 roadway at crazy angles on a breezy, open tram with brilliant views up to the exotic mountaintop Monserratte palace before rumbling into the coastal town (and glimpse of Atlantic Ocean) at Priai das Macas.
The anticipation of a gorgeous afternoon travelling joyously between ethereal palaces, gazing across extensive long-distance views of Lisbon, Cascais and the Atlantic… struck ugly reality at lunchtime at Sintra station bus stand. The much-advertised simple loop bus ticket was gone, replaced by a day ticket at a 150% mark-up. Sorting out options in amongst a stroppy crowd in a “queue” left us with the option of travelling the long loop to see the mountaintops, then taking a shorter loop to meet our booked entry time to Pena Palace.
Of course it didn’t: The traffic up hill was a 45minute stop-start chug of tour buses and self-drivers reversing alarmingly across the jam of traffic at blind corners. The Facebook friend who said: “That place is bonkers,” has it about right. The lovely Gail, my colleague who had spent a leisurely week of walking the hills of Sintra without the day-trip craziness really had it right.
Good news: there are lots of attractive photos-from-stalled-bus across the landscape and castles/palaces/fort.
Bad news: we arrived an hour late at the spectacular Pena Palace where the printed tickets scolded that we would be denied entry if late. Instead we were fast-tracked, overtaking a long queue of the 4.30 entries, ushered on cobblestoned courtyards through Moorish arches into the ornate final living quarters of the Portuguese Royal Family before they were unceremoniously removed in 1910.
5pm: the calm: warm, relaxing, sunset shots of Romanesque Romanticist archways, turrets, domes, clocktower of the converted convent, golden views of Lisbon in dusk; tourists at peace… before the hideous, crammed bus back to Sintra station.
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Very Minor International Incident #1:
Santa Justa Post Office, Lisbon: 30 minutos into a much longer wait…
I have a ticket number: nine others are in front of me. I have been waiting for 25 minutes already. She-who-has-just-been-called strides towards the counter. The server: a slight and short woman, stoic, in her 60’s with a “seen it all before” expression, very methodically works through the numbered customer queue - lots of seats are available and occupied. She looks up. The customer’s voice commences at a level of moderately high shriek in a mix of Spanish, Portuguese and North American. Waving some kind of coloured entitlement card, demands were seemingly being made for a Portuguese version. The server, bemused, waits for a pause and gently advises her customer that she needs to see a passport. Customer volume and pitch rise as she EXPLAINS that the passport image is ON HER PHONE and she HAS THIS document (flourished) and THIS document (flourished) and she has the right, the RIGHT to whatever it is she is demanding.
Once more, the quiet murmur from behind the counter reinforces the need for a passport. This provokes a fine, Shakespearean reaction (FULL MODALITY: penultimate scene of your favourite tragedy prior to sword fight). Somebody (it may have been me) called out something like: “Come on… there’s a lot of people waiting behind you…”.
Customer reacts by diving into copious handbag and produces a package.
Server helpfully asks what form of post might be needed, and what might be the address? Customer doesn’t know either, might be in handbag somewhere…
Server, with tired smile, offers a pen and suggests that the lovely customer might move to one side to address the parcel so another person (in the growing seated and standing and shuffling scrum of spectators) may be served.
The next customer numbers are ponderously typed into the paging machine and appear for 20 seconds each on the telescreen… all eight of them in quick succession as those customers have given up waiting and departed in search of their lives. I am next. Nice!
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After collecting Sir R from one of many local Baroque churches (mass celebration was significantly shorter than the post office ceremony), we wandered to the Dom Jose I memorial to join a really good inner city walking tour (It’s free to join up: just tip what it’s worth as it concludes). Adjacent to the 500 year memorial to the mass murder of Jews and other non-believers during the extended Inquisition, we are offered a taste of GinJinha, a syrupy local hooch, before being led up hill to a small square of Largo do Carmo. Here, two sentry boxes are outside of a small building house a 50th anniversary pop-up museum of the largely peaceful Carnation Revolution of 25th April, 1974 which overthrew the dictatorial regime, with public support. These are "the rooms where it happened".
Carnations were a widespread symbol of peace, placed in the barrels of guns and cannons by members of the public who were directed to stay home but swarmed the streets in support of the army. At the back of the deceptively extensive building is a large balcony where leaders of the Estado Novo government could survey the downtown population under their iron-fisted control and one of their charming facilities for political prisoners. One of the drivers of the 25 April revolution was that the regime was sending young men to colonies demanding independence to fight hopeless wars against local guerilla forces. The collapse of the regime led to power vacuums and conflict in Angola, Mozambique, East Timor… Soldiers guarding the exhibition are in MFA uniforms: the army faction leading the revolution. They stand proud.
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It is – just – possible to do a return trip from Lisbon up to the Douro River Valley of traditional port-wine-growing terraces and pretty whitewashed wineries. We ignored the horrible weather of the outbound journey which made the landscape indistinguishably foggy and smeared through running water across the sealed windows of our much-graffitied diesel train. After a warming cheese and lettuce soup in the Pocinho station café and an outbreak of sun, the return journey in a classier train (this one with opening windows for photographers) was a series of spectacular high-terraced vineyards above the winding river shoreline railway with the traditional whitewashed or ochre red-tiled wineries clinging to the slopes and distant hilltops above.
Following a wander and dinner in Porto Sao Bento, we patiently waited in the blustery wind for our 7.30 express from Sao Bento to Lisbon. We did-what-the-locals-do and patiently awaited our train to roll in, as it must eventually arrive, 90 minutes late…. The arrival back into Lisbon was at 1am, after the metro had gone to bed. The early morning walk through well-lit and largely deserted traditional inner-city Alfama to deserted Praca do Comercio and our downtown apartment was an unexpected delight…
The subsequent lazy day was spent paying respects to Prince Henry The Navigator at the Maritime Museum and the grave of Vasco Da Gama at Belem. “Meeting” Henry and Vasco took me back to Lecture 1 of UNSW "History 1A - European Expansion and Asian Resurgence": one of my better choices in the BA course. It has coloured my travel and teaching experiences ever since.
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Grand Designs (Pedrogao de Sao Pedro edition):
So, my Victorian "Cultural Attache", Dom Simon, received an unexpected inheritance during his extended Covid lockdown in Melbourne. With the assistance of excellent European agents he purchased - sight unseen beyond a computer screen - a grand 110 room house (and its collection of outbuildings) on the main square of a small village 3 hours north east of Lisbon near the Spanish border. The house had been abandoned 30 years previously by owners moving to Lisbon, taking their light fittings (but not their winemaking equipment) with them. It’s a huge project and, with the assistance of a tight network of expats and local tradies, and financial encouragement of the mayor who wants to shovel EU grants in his direction, the initial works to create a select hotel, restaurant, performance areas and an antique business have begun. About 6 of the rooms are now habitable and comfortable, including the formal grand stairway entrance with orchestra balcony. It took several hours to explore the extensive site.
We were suitably amazed by the plumbing alone(!) and by the brilliant hospitality as we met the tight-knit expat community at a farmhouse birthday party which included fresh meat and produce from the farm we were visiting. All of the expats seem to have restoration/renovation and business/farming projects on the go. Our first night at a local café/sports pub was a chance to try bacalhau: dried, salted cod, which is rehydrated and grilled to have a thick, heavy, meaty texture. It hung off the plate like an overly generous Argentine steak. We passed on the offer of Chocolate Salami.
Drinking in Portugal: Schweppes Tonic is 4 times more expensive than gin.
Driving in Portugal: If you approach a village traffic light, travelling above the speed limit, the signal will turn to amber and red to slow you down to a stop, before letting you proceed.
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The Sunday morning walk around Pedrogao de Sao Pedro was in a wide circle around Simon’s block at the central church square. The village was eerily silent apart from birdsong and a very occasional vehicle. During an hour of mid-morning wandering we saw but three other people. About two-thirds of the traditional stone houses are empty/abandoned and for sale. (A spare 20-30,000 Euro will score you an excellent “fixer-upper!!). The busiest and best maintained building in town is the In-Home Care office and Nursing Home. On the distant mountain top, seen through straggly olive plantations, is the village where “Game of Thrones” was filmed…
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Homeward flights started with TAP Portugal from Lisbon to Rome Fiumicino (an overnight stay to pick up a Singapore airlines flight 23 hours later). I’m assuming the Portuguese call their airline “TAP” because water is the only free refreshment on offer on the 3+ hours from Lisbon???
Many passengers were part of a large and lively and semi-organised Portuguese tour group (identifying and reallocating seats, and the crew trying to keep bums on those seats during take off was hilarious). So: not your usual sullen, quiet regional flight experience.
Rome-Fiumicino: The 80’s Resort Brutalism of Hotel Tiber overlooks the squat maroon Pilot tower facing a narrow outlet of the Tiber River. The riverside is village strip of inviting and diverse restaurants and cafes and gelato bars facing the water with a salmon-painted town hall and churches set further back. Suburban salmon-red row-houses of fishers and airport workers cluster north along the Fiumicino Airport security fences. As the sun began to dip into the Mediterranean Sea, several fishing boats arrived at the wharf opposite the hotel, unloading boxed catches for direct sales or local delivery. The desperation of a couple of boat crew flogging boxes of shellfish suggested it was pretty much a buyers’ market.
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Very Minor International Incident #2:
Fiumicino Airport: 9.30am. Queueing for Security is incredibly smooth, surrounded by tele screens informing you that 90% of passengers pass through Security in less than 10 minutes. The usually stoic Sir Ronaldo was not to be in that 90%. If you’ve ever watched Border Security you can guess the rest…
Sir R’s crates of worldly goods followed mine through the scanner, to be deviated into the suspect siding and searched. Following signs informing passengers to leave water bottles in bags, Sir R had obediently done so. But it was a metal bottle. It was taken, inspected, carried over to be inserted into a sampling machine for drug testing (clean), taken over to another insertion for explosives testing (negative), then returned to rejoin his wallet (gone: missing from the tray, subsequently found and presented to me).
Meantime, Sir R kept pinging their lovely machines, being returned, patted down, returned, patted down (maybe the patter-down just liked him… a lot!), returned and patted down yet again. At this point, he was Led by a Pair of Uniforms to the Room To The Side where the door was shut... ... For a cavity search, perhaps?????
Patter-down appeared from The Room To The Side with Sir R’s knee braces which were ceremoniously crated, scanned, collected, and returned to The Room. Some time later, Sir R was Let Out to claim his worldly goods and to go in search of working wifi to recover from the ordeal….
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After a 13 hour overnight flight we had 20 hours in Singapore before the Sydney connection. Time for a Zzzz in the Airport Sleep Zone, a $10 coffee, then a relaxing ride into town for a wander around "Everything Raffles", and a rather good lunch at Colony, which began with:
Very Minor International Incident #3:
Exiting Singapore Airport is a simple passport tap-and-go.
Except when it’s not.
Sir R escaped without issue. My gate loved the passport, three times, but refused to let me past the ID camera gate, 3 times. The bored Uniform on playground duty just looked at me balefully, then directed me 50 metres back to a bunch of Naughty Seats behind a security counter, where two more uniforms directed me to “Sit, Sir” and “Wait to be called”. My Naughty Seat companions were an elderly Indian couple and a Muslim mother with three small children, one of whom was being asked to provide repetitive thumb prints on sensors several times while the family looked on. Sir R was waving in my general direction from beyond the distant cattle gates.
After 10 minutes I was summoned to the side counter and asked once, then twice, then three times to thumb print the sweaty glass and face the camera. I was becoming a little tetchy at this stage about whether I would be “let in” for a good lunch, and asked why I was being held at the counter and possibly denied entry to Singapore.
There was a longish pause… the fingerprint guy was composing an English sentence in his head: “Sir, it is because our new security equipment is not able to photograph your eyes.”
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