DAY 9 - SAGRES TO SALEMA - 22.7km
Our last day on the Rota.
The Literature - blog, travel book or official web site - all agreed that this was the longest, most arduous stage in the whole trail system. None of them agreed on how long or how arduous. We had conflicting reports between 17 and 24km, and between 4 and 8 hours hiking time.
So we do what we usually do: hedge our bets, get up early (ish) and… first thing’s first, find una galão.
We’d identified a pastelaria that claimed to open at the unheard-of-in-Portugal hour of 8am, but when we arrive a piece of paper taped to the door says 8:45. Of course. So we backtrack along the tourist strip where we’d had our amazing tapas looking for another miracle. It’s a ghost town.
So we double back again. There’s a mercato on the way where I content myself with a pre-packaged sugar-milk with caffeine, but Antoaneta is dead-set on an honest galão. By the time we meander back to the original cafe they’ve opened. We get one more relaxed sit on a patio before we brave whatever ‘longest and most arduous stage in the whole trail system’ actually means.
We get stuck briefly in a hotel parking lot - good start - before making it out of Sagres and onto some familiar ups and downs over headlands and across beaches and coves.
The trail then shifts slightly inland and onto a wide, flat field punctuated only by a big abandoned property at the far end.
The field is swarming with clouds of midges. It makes me so appreciative of the relative lack of insects the whole rest of the trip. I think I swatted maybe two mosquitos the whole week. But this is a horrifying reminder of how things could have been. We can’t even talk, the waves of them so frequently envelop us. You’re constantly brushing them off of your limbs, your face. More often than not that just crushes and smears them rather than actually getting rid of them, leaving you with a worse problem. It’s bad enough keeping them off the exposed parts of your skin, on your clothes where you’re not being as diligent they build up in piles. They have mass. Antoaneta eventually just wraps her scarf around her head as a shield.
One bright spot in the middle of the field is meeting a praying mantis, who I scold for slacking off on eating these midges.
EUROPEAN MANTIS
One of the two common mantis species in the Iberian Peninsula (the other is the conehead mantis).
Mantises only consume live prey, we believe because their hunting instinct is so predicated on movement that they can’t see dead bugs as food. While hunting they’ll sometimes do a back-and-forth dance that is thought to mimic the movement of plants in a breeze, as a form of active camouflage.
The whole ordeal is summed up perfectly in one photo. A little plane is swooping low across the field and I track it with my phone, waiting for the moment when it’s perfectly overhead. When it is, and I hit the shutter button - a midge darts in front of the lens, the phone desperately tries to shift focus, and I get a photo of a blur (plane) and a blur (midge).
Around the time we cross the abandoned house at the far end of the field, the midges start to abate though I don’t dare say it out loud - because that would jinx it and because then there would be midges in my mouth. I’d convinced myself we’d entered some vast midge zone and they’d be with us the remainder of the day. But by the time we finally leave the field behind for another descent to a crescent of beach, we’ve left the midges entirely behind too.
We stop for a break on some rocks at the beach, watch dogs frolic in the surf and a geriatric hiking group pick their way down the descent we’re about to ascend.
Atop, not only do I spot what I think is a churchyard beetle.
CHURCHYARD BEETLE
Also called a cellar beetle or to use their much more fun scientific name Blaps mucronata. When threatened they raise up their back legs like they’re gonna do a handstand and spray foul smelling liquid at you.
But Antoaneta spots an honest-to-god stork in its honest-to-god nest on a distant pinnacle. My iPhone camera can’t deal with the distance but I at least make the effort to get some blurry, over-processed proof.
Another dip down to a surfer-infested beach with a beachside snack bar that we’re more interested in for its washrooms, but it turns out to have just closed for the season - a whole crew is actively deep-cleaning vats and fryers. Washrooms: locked up.
The next beach provides. More surfers, and a beautiful restaurant set back in the cove with ample comfy seating and what looks like wonderful food, if only we were hungry. We stick with soda.
I’ve really been enjoying not having sand in my shoes, so while Antoaneta crosses the beach I elect for the overland route, since it seems they’ll meet up at the far side anyhow. This turns out dumb. I scrabble up a steep (for the Rota Vicentina) rocky ascent to the top of the cliff, cross about a hundred meters, and then scrabble down a steep (for the Rota Vicentina) descent to the exact elevation I started from and meet Antoaneta, where we continue on to another ascent.
On the way up we say hi to a trio sitting on a rock. A young man and woman, and an older man who I’m 80% sure is the Scandinavian (German?!) guy we met at the cafe in Vila de Bispo, but none of us acknowledge it. The three of them seem to have just found each other on the trail, and we wind up doing the dance with them, getting a little ahead, falling a little behind, until we all stop at the same spot with the same choice.
We’re on another beach, and it looks as though there are two options forward. We can cut up the cliffs on the official route. Or we can clamber or skirt the rocks jutting out into the water and try to walk the beach as far down as it’ll let us. There’s no guarantee of a way up on the other side and the cliffs can often be sheer, but from what we can see there’s enough stretch of sand to make it plausible.
In the end, we and the younger two of the trio decide to try the beach route, while the German (Scandinavian?!) guy takes the overland path.
We attempt going over the rocks, but it requires a leap of faith over a crevice on wet stone. We realize how pointless the danger is when we can hike up our shorts and go around the front of the rocks while only getting wet a little past our knees. The surf is roiling but weak. A couple of waves swamp our shorts but we get around none the worse for wear.
It turns out our timing could not have been better. Down the beach aways I think to check a tide chart and realize we ended up here at the nadir of low tide, the only time we’d get such an easy crossing.
We all find ourselves on a lovely stretch of sand that weaves into some rock overhangs and arches. It turns out it’s also a nude beach, so we have to be a little more careful with photos.
Halfway down we stop so Antoaneta can take a dip. The tide still makes me nervous. The cliffs look imposing and unscalable. There’s not a ton of space between them and the waves, and the sand looks flat and packed - as in, it’s frequently underwater. I imagine at high tide, there’s no beach here.
A memory resurfaces of hiking in the Bay of Fundy - highest tides in the world - as a kid. We’d crossed an isthmus to explore a wooded island while ignoring those tides - until they swept in underneath us. First the rocky shore disappeared and we had to climb through the steep wooded slopes to safety, then high-tail it across the island to cross the isthmus before it was swallowed up as well.
All that to say, I want an exit plan. So while Antoaneta frolics in the surf I stroll further down the beach until I identify an escape route and can breathe easy. Which I do sitting on a jut of rock, not wanting to get soaked and sandy and just feeling generally lazy, until we keep going.
We hold to the beach as long as we possibly can, eventually running out of runway on a sheltered little rock cove where we take another sit to let our feet dry so we can de-sand them. We share the place with an older British trio who are convinced they see a whale - or at least its plume - out in the waves and keep calling and pointing. I see nothing, but Antoaneta confirms some sort of something out there - maybe a dolphin or porpoise?
We clamber up from the cove into a deep forested valley that we skirt the edge of in a wide arc as we ascend. On the other side we’re walking adjacent to white stone walls of luxury properties at the edge of… Salema?
It seems totally absurd that we’ve basically arrived. This ‘longest, most arduous stage in the trail’ was a cakewalk. If you really squint and look at it melodramatically, I guess this one maybe had a few more ups and downs? And maybe some of those ups and downs were closer to a scrabble than a straight hike, I guess? In any case - the Rota Vicentina is a very forgiving trail and difficulty should be graded on that relative scale. It certainly did not take us eight hours. Maybe our beach detour dodged some truly heinous hiking. We never did see that Scandinavian (German?) guy again…
The last road to our final accommodation is up a steep hill, after which we realize we’d been walking through it the whole time: it’s a ‘beach village’, basically a rental subdivision. We’d decided to splurge on our last night. And ‘splurge’ is relative, it’s still eminently affordable. But we figured we’d appreciate the luxury after a week on the trail. Not that we’d exactly been roughing it so far.
Even so, the beach village is overkill. We have a townhouse to ourselves. Two bedrooms, three bathrooms - one with a whirlpool tub - a vast upper floor living room dining room combo, a fully featured kitchen, a big deck and rooftop access. The rooftop is just a flat expanse but still.
It also has the feeling of being haphazardly designed and quickly built. It’s perfectly functional and there’s nothing wrong with it. Part of it is just the lack of decor. But everything is a little off. The fake fireplace in the living room is weirdly off-centre. The kitchen has two full walls that are just empty. There are odd surfaces and corners and half-spaces everywhere. But to be clear: all just quirky as opposed to annoying.
We also have access to a vast pool in the middle of the ‘village’. I want to take advantage of it while it’s still warm enough to want to. It’s also heated a little more than the courtyard cold plunge from a few days before. Having not taken advantage of the beach, washing off the day feels even better now.
The beach village offers a shuttle service into town so residents don’t have to debase themselves with a steep hill. There we find a beachside bar for drinks and nurse them as we watch locals come and go - though ‘locals’ is relative. I get the sense Salema is a transient town.
The table next to us is a Guy Ritchie movie in waiting. A corpulent Danish man is overflowing a chair, leaning as far back as physics will allow and holding court. He drawls self-assuredly and punctuates by barking ineffectual orders to his dog Maxi, who chooses to lie in the middle of the road and does not listen.
He is joined by an absolutely sun-cooked cockney couple with leathery skin who discuss the details of wood sales with him, and all agree that fifty percent of Americans are complete morons (the presidential election still fresh in everyone’s minds).
Rounding out the cast of characters are two cherubic twins who get very enamoured with the cafe’s mas-cat.
We finish our drinks and aim for the local grocery store, to find it closed. Plan B is a ‘deli’ further up the road which fortunately turns out to be a quasi-grocery store as well. We grab snacks and a bottle of wine, the better to enjoy our luxury accommodations with - plus a celebration of finishing the hike.
But first, dinner. We end up back at the same beachside bar as nothing else is open yet. Uninspiring dinner but good atmosphere.
We’re past time for the shuttle service back so we take the long hill on foot, then luxuriate on our balcony with our bottle of wine and snacks and nowhere to walk in the morning.
Trying to take as much advantage of the place as possible, I also try the whirlpool tub. Good idea. It’s like I can feel all those muscles that only engage when walking in sand relaxing at once.
