A squat lady backpacker with mousy features and chin-length, straight-brown hair stood at my elbow. She opened her mouth and jawed emptily for a second, visibly fumbling with language. She chose Portuguese, and even through the toothy buzz of my nap’s inertia, it was clear that Carl was right: the woman was jabbering excitedly about one of the numbers on her ticket, and was almost overwhelming my armrest in her urgency. Carl and I swept our arms about our seats, gathering our baggage and trash in a few easy scoops—“Obrigado; desculpe,” I chanted apologetically, trying to get her eyes to stop bulging. We sidled out of the aisle swiftly, taking refuge temporarily in another pair of empty seats. “Well,” Carl said, once he had finished decrypting the ticket stub, “it definitely seems that the Portuguese train system assigned us seats.” I snuck a look at the irate backpacker, who was setting up her nest, and surely stealing my butt-heat. “Now we know,” I said, thumbing my Ray-Bans back over my eyes, and laid my head against the softly thrumming carriage window.
The landscape outside could have been lifted, roots and all, from the south of California. Yucca and prickly pear supplied the only bright greens for miles: the rest of the desert was a stony Mars red, broken only when we passed the carcass of a farm, or struggling olive orchard. Our southbound train was racing pell-mell away from Lisbon, away from the small luxuries and attractions we had grown used to in the last couple of days. “What concerns me,” Carl said, frowning aggressively at his ripped-out guidebook map, “is how we’re getting to Sevilla from Salema.” I shrugged, not sure if this was a concern that needed my input. He flipped open his MacBook and began autopsying the train schedule left up on his screen. “Because this suggests,” he traced a finger down the dusty screen, “that trains from the south of Portugal just don’t go to Spain.”
His frown evaporated as I whipped my head up suddenly. “I smell,” I began, hesitantly, “but do not see, salt.” Carl groaned, and I turned back from raising my nose toward the slit window at neck-height. “What’s up?” I asked, looking quickly over his book, his map, his compu- “No,” Carl said, smiling only slightly. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just... you know... see salt?”
Bad puns aside, I wasn't too far off; soon we trundled out of the rust-colored waste and into the dusty tile of a station marked “LAGOS” (LAH-goshhh). The port town marked the end of Portugal’s hardpan reach for the sea; the mouth of the Mediterranean began just out of sight, beyond the stony tidal walls. Eager to clap eyes on the waters, and starved for some non-jostled naptime, we were swift to board a bus to Salema, the secretive fishing town that marks the west-most point of Portugal.
Walking into Salema, dust billowing off the bus behind us, with the sun winking off the metal of a deserted bus stop, has to be one of the most pleasant moments of my trip so far. The small fishing hamlet, a pinprick even on any local map, was a footnote in a travel guide I researched this spring. The gushing reviews—love letters to the locals, and their hidden beach—inspired us to bend our itinerary towards the Algarve coast.
A weathered old man with eyes like marbled sapphires and deeply wrinkled, tan skin sat alone on a stone bench in front of the beach wall. The broad granite boulders were inexpertly mortared, providing him some shade from the bronze sun of two in the afternoon. With surprising ease, he shuffled to his feet, and scooted over to the bus stop, were I had stopped clicking my luggage down the cobblestone main street—the only street—to gape, openmouthed, at the sea.
The Mediterranean is the color of an afternoon daydream; a smokily bright turquoise that swirls, idly, with the ruffled whitecaps of small, hip-height waves. A few stupefied French tourists float in the surf, their bleached faces uplifted in exaltation, or thankfulness, or both, at the broad dome of a perfectly cloudless sky. Fishermen, and their boats, are red-hulled sparkles halfway to the horizon, and announce themselves with pennant flags and the miniscule, precise ballet of their nets as they billow and catch at the air. The sand is blemishless; the tanned color of pie crust, and crunches satisfyingly underfoot with a loamy, rich heat. Carl and I could only smile, and smile, a fact not lost on the grandpa trying to catch our eye.
His Portuguese included the words: “quarto,” “quilarse,” “euro,” and “cinque”—a string I was willing to bet offered us lodging, probably at an eye-gouging rate. Carl confirmed that the man was tourist-poaching, then offered to guard our bags at the low-slung wall adjacent to the beach, while I looked about for a room to rent. Only too eager to shed my suitcase, duffel, and gravity-happy backpack, I lit out for Salema’s back alleys, armed only with my wallet, a determined expression, and an imperfect command of an unrelated language.
The pavement ended a few meters past the old man’s perch; a narrow road lined with the beaten, broken remains of fishing boats reached up a hilly incline, bending away along the beachfront. It was la hora de siesta; every door was shuttered against the heat, and porches were empty of fishermen or their wives. With no particular plan in mind, I knocked at the swinging saloon doors of casa after casa, asking about alojamiento in Spanish, which worked as well as speaking Italian to a Spaniard. Prices were steep, until a charming couple in their golden years offered us a full apartment, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a veranda overlooking the sea, for 45 euro a night—easily undercutting their competition by twenty euro or more.
With our deal struck, I returned to fetch Carl. As we hauled our freight up the hill to our new home, the duffel’s wheels clicking off the whitewashed eaves of the deserted alley, shutters swung open behind us, and leathery faces peeped from their inky depths. It was the click of tourist money, late in a dry, dry season, and from the way their faces fell as we past, it was clear that Salema had seen a tough year.
“I’m impressed, Rob,” Carl said, from somewhere above me. I shaded my eyes against the sun, and let a sliver of the beach light through my lashes. I followed his gaze to the four corners of the blanket I had set up on the light slope to the water. I shrugged, and let my head fall back to the pillowy, quilted sands. “Like I said,” I murmured, my mouth thick with the prospect of my first European beach nap, “lashings are relevant to my interests.” Carl shucked his shirt, his shoes, and joined me on the blanket. Sometime later, we were both fast asleep, toasting, lightly, in the Algarve sun.
The rest of the day was spent in and out of the waves, sometimes venturing into town for a bathroom (marked, inscrutably, “W.C.”) or a beer. We took our lunch at the only real beachside restaurant—a recommendation of the travel guide—and I had the best fish (a monkfish kebab) that has ever crossed my plate. Carl’s sea bass came unadorned, the honest product of a morning’s fishing, and he spent a furrowed ten minutes dissecting its charred midriff. And when the time came, we left our tip and bill on the table, and descended, dream-like, back into the surf.
The night air in Salema was restless, a tidal surge from the sea. We walked along the beach aways, then retreated to the cobbles of the main square. To pre-empt our hunger, I steered us towards the lamplight of an Indian restaurant on the plaza’s corner. Our requests for “spicy,” were met with a laugh, and no small success: my garlic chicken tandoori came rioting from the kitchen in a cloud of steam and the sharp, vinegary scent of good curry. Afterward, with our mouths still glowing from the curry’s revenge, and our teeth buzzing from our cervejha, we slunk up the hill to our apartment, closing the door firmly against the fitful, lonely breath of the sea.
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