We caught a Flibus from Seville to Faro and didn’t do much at all on the first day because once we moved to Portugal, my prepaid Spanish Orange 20 stopped working. And basically despite us receiving a printed out map at the hotel on how to get to the city, we ended up going on the wrong street altogether and all we achieved was for us to get two pepsis at a fast food place where I could borrow their wifi to find us back to the hotel. For that entire day, the other landmark we visited was the Arco de Vila. The place I booked for dinner was right across the street and we ordered half a dozen oysters and the mariscada or seafood platter. It was two storey high with a whole crab and two oysters at the top and prawns and two different sizes of clams at the bottom. It was too much for two of us and I think we only finished half of it. The collection of the seafood together was also far salty for us (basically the sea in the region must have higher salt content than the Tasman Sea or whatever the New Zealand sea is).
Day 2, we asked the hotel to book a taxi for us to the train station and we did that every day at Faro (in general, we catch taxis a lot this trip because it’s that affordable. Usually each trip is under 10 Euro excerpt when we are travelling to and fro airports.) We bought a three day Travelcard for the Algarve Regional train line and went to Ferragudo. I thought I should be able to catch a taxi at the train station but the reality was that there was no taxi (it was a tiny train station and felt like situated in the middle of nowhere) and when we asked someone about it, apparently we had to call for a taxi with a number that should be posted at the train station. So the end result was that the entire trip just ended up being a Macca’s lunch following by an attempt to find a church that ended in a road that went nowhere. We called it quits. We could have caught the train back and stopped at Albufeira and a Google search suggested that it would take a whole hour to get to the attractions from the train station and we always wanted to have dinner early and just stay in our hotel after dark. So instead we returned to Faro where we spent the afternoon visiting the Cicada Velha which we went past on the first day but did not venture into it due to the steep street at the entrance and it being slippery to the pair of non-runner that I was wearing (it was a pair of shoes I bought from Hong Kong, sort of like first-gen Sketchers runners but with air). Anyway, the steep incline was actually just a little bit and it was no longer slippery when I changed to my Nike runners. But there wasn’t much to see- one big church and then the Arco de Repouso which was basically just an arched door. I cancelled all the dinner bookings after the first dinner’s experience and we ended up going for Hawaiian pizza. It was okay but didn’t have enough fillings for it to be really great- the pineapple did have juice but there wasn’t enough pineapple on the pizza.
Day 3 was Portimao and Praia da Rocha. We bought two pairs of sandals specifically for this beach trip (nowadays we buy clothes and everything trip wise online for the affordable prices) . We were a bit hesitant on going onto the sand initially because we didn’t like walking on sand but we finally took the plunge because otherwise we would have bought the sandals for nothing. We didn’t enjoy the sand walking experience- me specifically because I could hardly walk, my sandals kept wanting to slide off every few steps, but actually the sand were really really fine, so much that after we went back onto the non-sand area, there was hardly any that clung to our feet and we didn’t have wash them with water at all. And somehow time went past pretty quickly in that we spent way longer at the beach that I expected. We had lunch at 2pm or something at the beach as opposed to having it at the marina like I had planned. I ordered a tuna sandwich and Mum something else but actually my tuna sandwich was much more tasty. For dinner, we went a little further to a different street and had the seafood cataplana. It was okay- again tomato based but I found it tolerable.
The last day at Faro was spent at Lagos, the end stop of the Algarve Line. We walked past the Premenade which apparently was an attraction but didn’t see much in it. We went straight to lunch because it was pretty much that time and it made more sense to start the actual sightseeing after lunch than do a little bit and have to interrupt it for lunch. To be honest, we didn’t see much in Lagos. We went to the old town after lunch but didn’t feel like there was much. Then again, most people would have come for the Bengali cave boat tours but we were not interested in that due to similar things we had done in New Zealand (not the same type of caves but we just didn’t feel like it was an experience we would be keen in). Dinner was spent at the other place I didn’t cancel because I was curious in their crabstuffed. I thought it would just be the crabshell stuffed with things but actually it was still a whole crab and we also ordered sauteed clams and crispy bread to go with them. The crab shell had its own unique texture and flavour-very creamy in texture and the other parts of the crab that was the stuffing did feel like they ‘showed up’ (the crabs claws and legs, however, felt totally tasteless to us because they were boiled). But to be honest, such creamy texture usually gave us a feeling of fullness that shrunk our appetites (I remember I did write about how we almost left a truffle oil pasta untouched in Switzerland last year, or at least that’s what the waitress saw since it was a very big plate and we just took the top layer off which wasn’t very obvious, I have to admit. And basically it was the same thing). The waitress told us that the crab was 625g or something and Mum and I routinely have crab cooked in Chinese style up to 1kg. But on that day, we basically left half the crabshell with fillings and only had one each of the crab legs/claws (so 2 pieces out of 4 between us and we couldn’t even be bothered using the crackers to extract the meat from the claw or the leg). The clams were also very tasty so to be honest, it was a meal I had appreciated except for leaving so much leftover food that can only be discarded. The waitress did try to pack it away in a takeaway box for us but we had to decline it because we couldn’t possibly want to snack on it in the middle of the night and we never had seafood leftover from one day ago for fear of causing diarrhea.
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