To Bucaco

We left Porto this morning, travelling to see the battlefield of Bucaco. We are staying in hotel which is another different experience. This little town, Luso, is a spa, but definitely rather faded. The hotel is all polished wood floorboards, Turkey carpets, and old fashioned Victorian furniture with curlicues, powerfully perfumed with beeswax. There is a very nice pool and I’ve had a swim, and to top it all, the manager is a battle nut. He’s keener than we are. He’s given us some advice and maps, so tomorrow I expect we will have to report to him and sit a short test.

We stopped to have a look at Coimbra. It was really nice, although there are a lot of Salazar era university buildings, which make Moscow university look good. The old university is very nice, with a statue of King Jaoa, who was clearly Henry VIII’s long lost twin, and a wedding going on in the chapel. A lot of the guests spread their black student gowns on the steps of the chapel for the bride and groom to walk on, and they were serenaded by a band of male students in gowns, with pipe, drum, mandolin, guitar, and a chap with a tambourine, who leapt and kicked high enough for Bruce Lee. Then the bride and groom danced to the band. It looked good fun. It’s obviously wedding season, there were loads going on in Salamanca. They were accompanied by fireworks, so you couldn’t miss them, and vertiginously high heels, just the thing for cobbles.

I have to say something about our hire car; it’s a Fiat Panda,  which has been just wonderful for all the narrow streets, and the ”sit up and beg” seats are really comfortable and good for one’s back. Unfortunately it’s really underpowered for such a hilly country; we get frustrated drivers behind i.e. two feet from the bumper, until we can find a spot to pull over and let them pass. If doing a hill start, which one is doing all the time, it seems to be de rigueur to let the car roll back a yard or so before pulling away. We had some nasty moments until we learned to expect it. Talking of nasty moments, we were deeply impressed with the escape lanes on long descents. They are sand, some with tyre tracks but mostly raked, so we think they treat them like the long jump pit. “Oh, poor effort – this one was out of control and only going fast enough to get a third of the way up.” At the end, there are piles of old tyres – presumably if you hit those, a bell rings and you win an unfeasibly large stuffed toy animal.

Off out for dinner – we had a good snack lunch in the student canteen in Coimbra, which welcomed tourists but made us feel rather old.