Kiwi Roaming

What is Camino de Santiago? – not sure if I wrote about this in the trip prep blog but it’s worth a reminder. A Camino is a religious pilgrimage, there are a tonne of them starting from various points, following different routes and all ending up in Santiago de Compostela in the north west of Spain. The main ones are – the Camino Francés, Camino Primitivo, Camino del Norte and the Camino Portuguese – which isn’t straight forward either. In Portugal the Camino starts in Lisbon and takes about 30 days. From Porto there are 3 main routes – the Central, the Coastal and the Litoral plus once you’re in Spain there is a variant called the Spiritual.

People walk the Camino for loads of different reasons, we are cause Steve watched one of the Camino movies and thought it looked like a good thing to do. Last year 500,000 people ended up in Santiago de Compostela having walked a Camino. The Portuguese is the second most popular after the French one – and we chose it because it’s mostly flat! We are going to walk a mixture of the Senda Litoral and the Coastal Way. You can walk as much or as little as you like. Some people don’t book their accommodation opting to walk as far as they can and stay where ever they find, we decided this wasn’t for us.

Short first day – This is Steve’s 60th birthday wish so he has done most of the planning, his strategy was to ease us into walking, get used to carrying our packs and have a short first couple of days. Our destination day one was Matosinhos the port suburb to the north of Porto, connected by public transport and still very much part of the city.

Botanical Gardens – We said goodbye to Oporto Yellow Villas and headed to the Porto Botanical Gardens mid-morning. The beautiful building there is part of their Natural History museum and houses part of Darwin’s evolution exhibit (we didn’t pay to go in). The gardens are a display of thousands of plant species, with roosters surprising you as you wander around. I hadn’t had breakfast so we stopped at the cafe for toast with ham and cheese on top and wrote the last blog post in the shade while Steve and Imogen explored the gardens. Also a necessary toilet stop.

Follow the river – from here we headed down to the river and followed it until we reached Matosinhos basically. It was hot – 26C – but the onshore breeze was cooling and nice. We all got a tad sunburnt with this combo. My main reaction once we reached the suburb was the smells, this is a working port and there are fish markets everywhere so we were never far from the smell of fish! not so fun. I’ve also never seen as many seagulls in my life as on this stretch of coastline (including the next day as we headed north).

Imogen and I had sussed out the vegan options and as it was already 2pm we made a beeline for Not So Vegan which turned out to be not a cafe but a micro bakery. 3 x savoury scrolls purchased and we walked a further 20 minutes to Cafetaria Terrárea for the best meal I’ve had in Portugal! it was a lovely light, cool, botanical feeling cafe as well and only 10 minutes from our accomodation meant it was ok for a beer / wine (my €3 white wine was fab).

My Trip Porto – sorry but you’re going to hear about our accommodation each day. Our first Camino night was pretty perfect to be honest. A tiny hotel with keypad entry instructions, we had 2 rooms next to each other and both were lovely, Imogen’s had 3 opening windows and was a great place to spend our evenings. Excellent beds too and so very cheap! we were thrilled. Steve and I did a run to Lidl and found terrible fruit and veges and bought me my pastel de nata for the day – which was the worst I’ve had. We ate the scrolls amongst Imogens washing line system and again had an early night.

Step count = 21,452. Distance 13.67km.