Sintra celebrates beauty. Here are some pictures to share.
Our quiet guesthouse:
Our breakfast, cafe com leite and delicious custard tarts called Pastels de Nata:
Garden paths, lovingly tended:
In the morning we’ll be on the train to Sacavem to resume our Caminho. Sintra, you’ve been wonderful!
8/27 – if you look way up when standing on the main street of Sintra, you can see the battlements of a castle on top of the mountain in the distance. Today we took a bus 3 miles up the mountain, to walk among the ruins of the 8th century Moorish Castle, Castelo dos Mouros. Time and earthquakes have brought down most of the structure, but the turrets and walls that remain provide a wonderful view of the countryside below.
One of the things you can see from the castle is the visually striking Pena National Palace. Originally a monastery from the Middle Ages, it was mostly destroyed in the 1755 earthquake, then restored in the early 1800s by young King Ferdinand. It has tiled walls, trompe l’oeil, minarets, Moorish arches, and whatever else struck the royal family’s fancy.
The tour displayed lots of rich-people stuff. My favorite was the kitchen:
We walked through the natural gardens that surround the palace, and climbed to the mountain summit to see the High Cross:
From the Cross, we looked down on the palace below:
Enough climbing for one day – time for a nap!
8/26 – there once was a millionaire who wanted the best estate ever. He hired landscapers to make the gardens magnificent, and added underground tunnels, secret grottoes, waterfalls, Rapunzel towers, and everything you ever dreamed in a fairy tale. He added secret Masonic and alchemy references, and threw in some stuff from the Knights Templar for good measure. The result is Quinta da Regaleira.
Here is the Inverted Tower, or Initiatic Well, that links earth and sky. Climb down the wet stone stair to reach underground tunnels to the chapel and the lake:
We climbed up winding paths, crawled down dark tunnels, hopped on stepping stones across a lake, and came home exhausted. What a place!
8/25 – As our train left Lisbon behind, we saw mile after mile of high rises and urban landscape. Then, 30 minutes later, we were in a land of fairy tale castles. Welcome to Sintra! On our first afternoon, we just walked around to get our bearings:
We peeked into a park with papier mâché animals, where a little old man played El Condor Pasa on his recorder:
We’re going to enjoy the beauty and the quiet for the next few days.
8/24 – we are in Lisbon for one more day. What should we see? Not too far away is the Igreja Sao Roque, or the Church of Saint Rocco. This is the oldest Jesuit church in Portugal, and perhaps the most ornate. At the time it was being built (1700s), the Portuguese explorers were bringing more gold and jewels home from Brazil and the new world than anyone knew what to do with. Many of the riches ended up here. Here is one of the large gold candlesticks, over six feet tall:
Here is a bone of Sao Roque himself, in a gold reliquary:
This church has so many saint parts, that there are two reliquary chapels on either side of the main altar, one for male bones, and one for female bones:
If you are not familiar with Saint Rocco, he is always depicted as having sores on his leg, and is accompanied by a dog offering him a loaf of bread:
We are staying at the Lisbon Amazing Hostel, so every morning we meet different people at breakfast. Today we met a Chinese couple who are going to grad school in Milan, and have come to Portugal for a summer holiday. They are getting Masters degrees in business. It turns out that David (his chosen Anglican name) already owns several factories, and the degree will help them to run the companies better. As we ate toast and jam, he asked us what type of vegetable oil was the healthiest – he was thinking of starting another company to import healthy oil to China! We marveled at his ingenuity.
As an antidote to the noise and crowds of Lisbon, we are taking the train 30 minutes west to the delightful town of Sintra, where we will spend several days walking through gardens and castles before resuming our Caminho. The New York Times featured a travel section on Sintra just last week, so we fear it is no longer an undiscovered idyll, but we shall see!
8/23 – For those who may not know, the reason we are in Portugal is to walk the Way of St. James, a pilgrimage walk of 385 miles from Lisbon north to the Cathedral of Saint James in Santiago, Spain. We completed the Camino Frances, across northern Spain west to east, in 2011, and liked the experience so much we thought we’d do it again from another direction. There are many routes, from different countries, all ending at the same cathedral. The Camino Frances is the most popular route, with dozens (sometimes hundreds!) of fellow pilgrims walking with you every day. This Caminho (the H is pronounced as a Y = CamEENyo) Portugues is much less traveled, and there are fewer pilgrim accommodations along the way.
So, today we start our walk. The challenge with this journey is that the towns, with places to eat and places to stay, are about 20+ miles apart. My definition of a good day’s walk is about 12 miles, and my personal best (without injury) is 15 miles. So! Fortunately, I am not the only person with this challenge, so we have learned some “work arounds” that should enable us to complete each step of the Caminho.
Our first goal is to walk to Sacavem, about 8.5 miles, then return to Lisbon by bus. Later in the week, we will take a train back to this point, and then walk the 13 miles remaining to the next town with accommodations. Easy!
We started out after our hostel breakfast of corn flakes and boxed milk, buttered rolls with jam, juice and instant coffee. The Caminho starts at the Cathedral Se, with a painted yellow arrow to show the Way:
We walked past the tourist part of Lisbon, and encountered a huge Saturday flea market that ran down several blocks. Lots of people, most with just a few, used household goods to sell.
We walked through the industrial edge of the city, until we reached the site of Expo 1998, Parque das Nacoes. There are many attractions for tourists here, including a large aquarium, the Oceanarium.
We spent the afternoon enjoying the displays of all the ocean habitats from tropical to arctic. We saw puffins, penguins and sea otters, and all manner of fish coexisting peacefully in huge tanks. The sharks and predator fish are fed by hand on a strict schedule, so that they leave the other fish alone. Remarkable!
Then we walked under the sky tram and the Vasco da Gama Bridge:
Just before the town of Sacavem, we saw our first waymark for those walking the Pilgrimage to Fatima. Both pilgrimages follow the same path until we reach Fatima – Santiago marks in yellow, and Fatima marks in blue:
We’ll return to this spot later in the week to pick up where we left off!
8/22 – today we crammed ourselves onto a tourist tram for the 30 minute ride to Belem to see the Monastery of the followers of St. Jerome, or the Mosterios de Jeronimos. 
As soon as we cleared the ticket queue and stepped inside, Jim and I both got an immediate rush of déjà vu. This monastery is EXACTLY the same as one we’ve been in before! Was it in Spain? Maybe Italy? We’ll have to consult the archives… Anyway, we got to see the tomb of the great Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, and learned a little more Portuguese history.
Belem is the port where Vasco and the other explorers set out from, so there is a monument at the waterfront of the all the Portuguese explorers looking outward toward the sea. Unfortunately, it was being refurbished, so we only got to see a few explorers, but you get the idea…
There was another tower to climb in Belem, but we’d had enough for the day, so we squeezed onto our return tram and made our way back to Alfama. On the way back, we spied one of many street performers on his lunch break, and another making his dog do all the work:
What did we have for supper? Portuguese Chinese food – an acquired taste!
8/19 – feel free to skip the following airline rant: we survived an overnight flight from Minneapolis to Frankfurt on Condor, flyer of planes with the world’s narrowest seats. My knees were jammed into the seat in front, which means poor long-legged Jim had to spend 9 hours practically in a fetal position. Needless to say, no sleep was achieved by either of us until our connecting flight to Lisbon. (And there was no choice of dinner or movie.) But we are here! End of rant.
We did a great job negotiating the Metro ride from the airport to the southern end of the city. We are staying in a small hostel in the historic Alfama district, a stone’s throw from the Cathedral Se. On our first (jet lagged) evening, we walked around to get our bearings. For supper, we ventured into a restaurant that looked like it had reasonable prices, and ordered two random items off the menu, as we could not read a word of Portuguese. We had studied words like frango(chicken) and carne (meat), but could not see any familiar words on the menu! I ended up with sausage and a fried egg, and Jim got purple meat (we found out later that it was pork marinated in red wine). Both dishes came with French fries AND rice – carb heaven! And so we survived our first day.
8/20 – Lisbon! A beautiful sunny city, not too hot, with narrow cobblestone streets as hilly as San Francisco.
Lisbon has it’s own version of the Golden Gate Bridge, called the Ponte de 25 Abril:
We enjoyed a variety of street performers as we walked up and down the narrow streets, including a statue that sprang to life and tried to cut off people’s heads!
As a result of my summer of hiking, I strode up every hill without huffing or puffing. Thank you, Jim, for making me walk 500 miles!
8/17 – a six hour train ride west on the Amtrak Empire Builder (which journeys 46 hours to get from Chicago to Seattle) took us from Portage, Wisconsin to St. Paul, Minnesota, giving us a glimpse of the Mississippi River along the way. Leg room! Reclining seats that you can actually sleep in! Dining car! Bar car! Snacks! Here is sunset in Winona, where we enjoyed a stretch-your-legs stop.
St. Paul is the first big city we’ve been to in a while. We checked out the neighborhood, and opted to treat ourselves to some excellent Thai food, then found the T-Mobile store to get a new phone that should work overseas (good riddance, Verizon!).
To get downtown, we had our choice of bus or light rail. We took the bus, and will use the Metro to get to the airport on Monday.
On Sunday morning we visited St Paul’s Cathedral, and participated in the high mass. I knew all the hymns! The cantor had a crystal tenor, and the pipe organ was fabulous.
The Cathedral just received a gift of a new statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and many stopped to admire The Lady.
Just down the road from the Cathedral is Summit Avenue, where F. Scott Fitzgerald and the railroad magnate James J. Hill’s posh estates are located. We looked for Garrison Keillor’s house, but couldn’t tell which one it was…
We ended our sight seeing by treating ourselves to some excellent Vietnamese food. (I guess we were too long in the Land of Cheese…)
Tomorrow, we fly!
As we prepare to travel abroad, I came across a blog today that spoke to my heart, written by a young woman who comes from the other side of the world. I hope some of these thoughts will speak to you also:
I will see the world with wonder, with gratitude, with respect. I will strive to stay, though ever moving, right in the happy middle: the intersection of longing and contentment. I will not close my eyes to the harsh realities of life and will endeavor to respond with compassion and action, but I will keep my rose-colored glasses on hand, in my carry-on, and remember to count my blessings.
I will not count how many countries I’ve been to, though I don’t think poorly of people who do. I will try to resist the temptation to count because I don’t want the number to be my motivation. I don’t want to travel just to tick a place off a list. I don’t want to say: “My name is X and I have been to Y out of Z countries,” though there’s really nothing wrong with that. I just don’t want to feel like I’ve left behind the rat race and joined the passport stamp race. I’m sure the number is much less than I would want it to be and much more than majority of the people in this planet will ever have the means to achieve.
I will travel because I want to, in the manner that I want to, and I will allow others the courtesy to do likewise. I hope never to catch myself saying those who can’t leave behind the comforts of home should stay home. I hope never to become the sort of person who thinks I have the right or omniscience to dictate who should and shouldn’t travel, and how. I hope never to get sucked into “traveler versus tourist,” a distinction that may have started as a well-meaning attempt to describe different levels of interaction with a place, but is now too often a none-too-subtle ploy to pat one’s own back: a traveler is me and a tourist is someone not like me. I will always endeavor to dive deep into a place, to hear the hidden drum beat to which it marches. But I will not judge those who rush from place to place, for it may be the only time they have, with the wealth they have or lack thereof, to see the places they’ve always longed to see with their own eyes. And I will not be the sort of self-validating traveler who thinks he is better than people who have never been outside their hometowns. I believe a person who stays in one corner of the earth all his life will still be capable of “broad, wholesome, charitable views of men,” no matter what Mark Twain says.
I will challenge myself. I will talk to locals and fellow travelers even though I usually keep to myself. I will try to capture an experience, in words and in images, the best way I know how, but I will also take time to just stay in the moment, that even if my notebook gets lost or my camera gets stolen, the memory will have been burned into my heart to keep forever.
I will not stop dreaming. Someday I will see Antarctic penguins, northern lights, cherry blossoms, Scottish highlands, sunny vineyards, gloomy cliffs, pink beaches, purple trees, glorious lions in the wild. And I will encourage people to dream. I will never tire of telling them: someday you will see Antarctic penguins, northern lights, cherry blossoms, Scottish highlands, sunny vineyards, gloomy cliffs, pink beaches, purple trees, and glorious lions in the wild.
I will inspire by being ordinary. There are too many “inspiring” stories of people who leave everything behind in order to travel the world. I will tell stories of people who stay, who find contentment in what would seem a humdrum life, who work and go home and save $10 a month in their travel fund, most of the paycheck having already gone to milk for their kids and educational funds and utility bills…and who, after 10 years, finally go on a 5-day trip to Paris. I will celebrate the courage of working with what you have, the heroism of looking at the banal and saying: “This is my life and I am happy with it.”
I will travel whenever I can, for as long as I can, and while doing so I will create a home worth returning to. I want to be excited to leave and excited to come back. I will create such a home that when my children and my children’s children go out, in their turn, to explore the world, they will always have a home to which they want to come back.
“The SMALL-TOWN GIRLS, MIDNIGHT TRAINS Travel Manifesto” was created by LSS for travel site Small-Town Girls, Midnight Trains. All rights reserved.
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Taking Our Time 