Categories
algarving

walking the marathon distance

for a while now, we’ve been following a youtube channel from a guy called beau miles. beau is very much into “backyard adventures”, a concept that i find fascinating — why do adventures need to be big and require huge planning and logistics? why do we feel like we need to go halfway across the country or the world in order to have an adventure, when there’s plenty of adventuring that can be had right around the corner? the pandemic made the whole idea seem even more attractive to me, and we ran with it… so to speak. more like we walked with it.

the goal of this adventure was to see if we could walk the marathon distance. turns out, between our town and the outer skirts of faro is a few meters over 42 kms on paper, so that seemed perfect — let’s walk to faro! the only issue with this plan is we were a bit short on daylight to complete the walk in december (which is when we did it), and the last stretch of it would be practically just walking on the road’s curb… which on the N125 means cars zooming by a couple of meters away at unsafe speeds. :( still, we decided to go for it, making up for the lack of daylight with an extra early wake up call.

which is perfect, because for me, the proper feeling of an adventure comes only if they start before the day dawns. so we got up really early, donned our little dorky headlamps and off we went through the salt ponds! the sun came up as we were reaching santa luzia and it was pretty magical to see. we sat down at a café there and had breakfast and a rest.

we repeated this walking + café breaks throughout the day, eating sandwiches and bolas de berlim, and powering through. many birds were spotted, conversations were had, new scenic spots were discovered that we want to go back to and check out again. walking is so easy, and yet so nice — just one foot in front of the other, again and again, until you get to where you’re going. i really enjoy the long walks, boring stretches and all.

blister packs are usually the thing that saves my poor little feet on long walks, but after so many kilometers, it would take a miracle to finish without any little pockets of pain. when we reached the train station in faro after many kms of walking, it felt like every little muscle hurt… but every little muscle was very happy too!

with this long walk, we’ve walked the portuguese coast all the way from vila real de santo antónio to faro and then from lagos to sagres, and from there turning north to porto covo, which is already a significant part of it! maybe one day we’ll continue the adventure and complete the walk all the way to caminha… that would be an adventure!

Categories
in thailand traveling

riding a scooter

“seriously ana… did you do nothing but eat in thailand?!”

pretty much — but let’s give it a break and talk about something else for a change. in between meals, temple-hopping and other shenanigans, i discovered my love for riding on the back of a scooter!

these were practically the only way to cheaply move around the island (€5/day, gas not included), so we decided to give a try, and lo and behold, it was a blast. the first rides were scary, sure, holding onto the boy for dear life… but the strangeness of it quickly gave way to delight as we zoomed around with our friends. after a few rides, i could already navigate with one hand while taking pictures with the other! :D here’s a 10 second clip from the gopro:

the village roads are chaotic, with people and traffic coming in from all sides, but my favourites were the small roads between the coconut plantations, where water buffaloes grazed and birds did their thing.

the videos do a poor work of showing the pure joy that was riding then, and we found ourselves making excuses to ride just a bit more each day. i even (briefly) considered getting an electric vespa for our trips to the butcher or into town back home… but the traffic on the 125 is still way too scary for me to venture out like that. well, who knows — maybe someday! :)