Silves to Loulé: a Better Adventure

Oct 13 2023


Loulé accommodations: Loulé Jardim Hotel

The Hotel Ponte Romana in Silves is older that our other hotels, and leans toward the funky-but-trying-hard. When I went to try to pay for the room this morning, no one was around except what seemed to be a cleaning person, who indicated I should wait 10 minutes. Uh, no — we needed to get going. She rounded up someone willing to take my money.

Our room was a rather cheap reno, with vinyl faux-wood floors and little decoration, but the bathroom was 21st C high-tech, like every bathroom we’ve had so far. Kudos to the Portuguese for beautiful bathrooms!

This was actually the Lagos bathroom, but typical. What you can't see in this photo is the rainfall shower head, which is the norm -- why, in a drought-ridden country, is beyond me.

There were oranges just outside the back of our room, a bonus

 

The start of today’s ride was on a country road that followed the Arade River. We were greeted by the usual chorus of barking dogs (fortunately fenced) and one startled rooster.

Things changed, though, and soon we were mounting hill upon hill. The hills were made manageable by cloud cover and cooler temps — at least at the beginning. It was going to be our longest day, at 53.9 km, more if you count the bits where we went off track. What was good about today and hills was that we knew what was coming because of the Ride With GPS track we were following. On the days we were using Google, we didn’t know when the hills would come or how long they would last.

When it came time for lunch, we pulled into an almost deserted roadside restaurant in a town appropriately called Alte (“high”), where we were greeted with blank stares when we said, “Ola.” EVERYONE in Portugal responds back with an “Ola,” it’s in their blood. We moved on.

And within 500 metres, found our magic moment for the day: a cafe-come-bicycle-repair shop! Elly needed a screw for her rat trap, which the proprietor immediately installed. Then he made us a lunch of “toasties,” essentially grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches, and provided a variety of pastries to bolster our energy. We wanted to order two Pastel de Nata, the well-known custard-filled puff pastry delight, but he looked crestfallen, because he had a carob cupcake, a specialty of the region that you can’t get just anywhere. It was delicious, and the answer to a mystery.

As we’d been riding, we would notice on occasion a kind of caramel scent on the air. I wondered if maybe the black pods I was seeing in trees were vanilla beans, but the bike-repair cook said no, it was carob. Back in my hippie days, I used to substitute carob for chocolate in baking (I know, an obscenity), but in this region, the carob is fresh from the pod, not a powdered poor cousin to cocoa powder. This stuff is delicious.

While we were eating, two women sat at the next table speaking a language I couldn’t place until Elly said to them, in Dutch, “It’s nice to hear Dutch being spoken.” Everything that happened at that tiniest of villages on the top of the hill in the middle of nowhere was so surreal, I tend to wonder if it was just my imagination — but the proof is in the new screw in Elly’s rat trap.

The Bicycle Café

This is the view in one direction

And this is the view in the other

The orange juice is freshly squeezed

Hills. We’ve learned to manage them by stopping on the way up, sometimes two or three times. My legs start burning, and keep burning, and it gets harder and harder to pedal, but I know if I take a five minute break part way up the hill, my muscles recover enough that I make it the rest of the way relatively quickly and painlessly. This explains at least some our stops in the least aesthetic of places: it’s all about managing the burn.

Our longest hill today was towards the end of the ride, and those ones are the hardest.

Halfway up a major hill at the end of the day, a bus stop. Just for us.

The RWGPS track for Silves to Loulé happened to end up exactly at our Loulé hotel. When we took our bikes down to the secured underground parking, there were another six cyclists locking up their bikes. Turns out this place is a common accommodation for cycling tours. It’s a beautiful hotel with a pool, a gym (because we need the exercise), a bar, and a breakfast room in an atrium. All for €69, breakfast included!

Loulé has a population of some 39,000 people, three times the size of Silves, and has a big-city feel. It’s really not a tourist town, its castle long since reduced to a single wall that they don’t even bother to light up. The big draw of Loule is the Saturday market, in a huge faux-Islamic arcade. We plan to go in the morning!

Tired of the same menu in every restaurant -- fish, seafood, salad -- we decided to go for pizza, and happened to find maybe the best pizza place I've ever been to. Every table was equipped with an iPad for ordering -- something new to me, and kind of fun. And the pizza was almost as good as the one I had in Venice that time, the one I've never forgotten.

Ordering from an iPad: who needs people?

Waiting for pizza, with fresh lemonade

Pizza, split in half, with Caprese Salad

And then we walked home.

Someone's idea of a good way to light a church.

Overhead hazard

Our hotel by night

Tomorrow is our last riding day, a manageable one at 42 km. We know from the track that the only real hill is between the 5- and 10-km points, and then it’s downhill all the way after that. We’re looking forward to an easy day.

Tonight we’re both exceptionally tired with the accumulation of two days hard riding.