Wednesday 10th September, day 53. 40° 53’.01 N, 008° 46’.73 W. On passage to Aveiro.
This morning we woke early to the mournful bleat of foghorns. Visibility in the harbour was down to a few hundred yards, almost blotting out the Christmas tree-like lights of the motor boat anchored next to us. We decided to wait a few hours, and then take a look outside the breakwater to see if the fog lifted a bit out from land.
Now Tomia is slouching, heavy shouldered, through an undulating featureless sea, bounded by a circle of fog 4 miles across. There is virtually no wind, so we are plodding on under engine.
The past four days have been spent in Leixões, the only place for a yacht to stay close to Porto. The marina has nothing to recommend it apart from as a base to explore the city (and the charming, doe-eyed Portuguese harbour master …) The loo block is smelly, and the door to the single ladies’ loo cannot be shut. Perhaps because of this, it is sadly obvious that some of the marina inhabitants decide not to bother with going ashore, but flush straight into the marina. You don’t want to know. One boat on our pontoon appears to have been abandoned; she has been here so long that clusters of mussels are growing off her hull and mooring ropes. Another abandoned boat is slowly rusting through her paintwork. Although we loved Porto, we are not sorry to leave and head off down the coast.
Porto itself more than makes up for the grubbiness of the marina. Built on the steep, rocky banks of the Douro, its narrow shaded cobbled streets, lined with laundry-strewn balconies, give on to white squares decorated with statues of victorious generals and navigator princes, and breath-taking azulejo-decorated churches.
Beneath the immediately impressive beauty there is a strong flavour of decay: in the steep twisting side streets, only a few yards from the triumphal centre or the cathedral-fortress on its hill-top, the tiles have cracked off the facades, the ironwork is rusting, and stone-work crumbling.
A flavour of lands further south is creeping in, among the smart air-conditioned shopping centres.
The central mercado do Bolhão looks as if it has been transplanted from Dakar. The centre of one city block is occupied by a shanty-town of stalls on two levels, within a crumbling concrete and wrought-iron enclosure. Far more fruit and vegetables seem to be piled up on the 30 or so stalls around the upper level, than would be bought in a week. Down below are the flower sellers, the fish-mongers, and the little butchers where you can buy every part (and I mean every part) of a pig, apart, possibly, from the oink.
On the way to the mercado, the route from the city hall takes us through an almost medieval concentration of iron-mongers. Eight or nine of them are cheek-by-jowl at the intersection of two streets. One specialises in cutting keys, two in door handles and padlocks (rows of drawers 8ft high stretch back into the darkness, each with an example of its contents stuck on the front) , while an outlying specialist carries hundreds of reels of different sized string and rope, jumbo packs of loo paper, and devotional candles. Thirty yards further on, we are back in the 20th century, with brightly-lit clothes and interior design shops.
By the way, on the subject of shoes and shopping, I would like to record that Anthony has bought three pairs of shoes so far on this trip. No comment, just a simple fact.
No visit to Porto would be complete without a trip to a port house, so we walked over the bottom layer of Gustav Eiffel’s double-decker bridge to Vila Nova de Gaia, on the south bank of the Douro, where all the port lodges are. Out of the 20 or so lodges that have tours, we chose Graham’s, for associations with a friend who sadly hasn’t been able to join us on board. The vast halls of barrels were full of a smell of something sweet and musty, perhaps wild mushrooms and walnuts, with a layer of redcurrant jelly on top? Some of the vats had little damp patches in the dirt beneath them, but despite running a hopeful finger around the bottom of a few of them, there was nothing dripping just then …
Two hours later: the fog has gone, the sun is shining, but there is still no wind, so we are still plugging on with the motor. I hate motoring: in my view it transforms sailing into nothing better than damp caravanning. But right now, the absence of sails means that, with a couple of cushions, the foredeck is transformed into the best armchair in the world.
