Today was a long long trip. We saw a lot of places and we drew few hundreds
km as well. We first visited city bordering with Spain, city named Vila
Real de Santo Antonio. It was still morning when we come there. (BTW: this
car is crap canīt drive more than 100km otherwise rear axe will say bye to
the rest of the vehicle or our brain jump out from vibration :-))))
Well lets come back to the small city. We found really shopping fever
here. In one main shopping street it was really boiling and Viera joined
the crowed :-) I was happy to leave soon and visit near by castle named
Castro Marim. Nice fortress, looked like original even too much original
,looked like some kind of movies must be done there before. It was nicely
in that kind of shape like one can image it used to be 400 years ago. Old
things were wooden and used and rubbish on the ground. I did quite a lot
shooting there. Then we went to Alcoutim. Road was bringing us through
burned country. A lot of placed damaged by the resent forest fires. I was
looking for safe place to stop on this narrow curly road for some time.
When I finally found one I completely scared Viera, as she wasn't expecting
me to break so suddenly and even wanted to stop in this dead places. I hope
you will be able to see some of the shots which I did on the places. It is
sad place. Yesterday I have read in some local paper published in English
for tourists, that most common cause of this fires is cigarettes from
cars!!!
Alcountil was in stage of complete rebuilding. A lot of road works was
going on so we only take ice tea and moved on as Sun in lunch was really
heavy. Maybe some other time we will visit this village which is above the
river/border to Spain. One can see on other side of the river fortress.
At the begining of the afternoon we arrived to city named Mertola. Very
nice small streets lead us to the castle, which tower was in
reconstruction. Small streets were nice place for walking seeing local
people living there under the castle in small houses. We wanted to get
dinner here and we choose restaurant O Nautico mentioned in lonely planet.
Unfortunately we have to wait until 19:30 to be open. Nice person offer us
some local foot, Which turns to be extremely similar to meal we use to eat
back in country of our original Slovak Republic, which was shock for him
:-))) Anyway we had a nice chat with him and than head back to Quartiera.
We went by small street and in night it was a kind of magic you canīt find
in The Netherlands, it was total dark there only new moon and light from
car. Nothing else. Than we reached highway and to our surprised it was
paid. 3.30 euro to get us for last 100km home.
