May 14, 2018

Another day on the Portuguese Camino, another early start. We left Tomar at around 6:00am, just the 3 of us this time, as most of our newly made Camino Friends had gone their separate ways, at different departure times, and different destinations. 

The journey out of Tomar was quiet and uneventful, and we were soon out in the countryside. Today was going to be another long day (31kms), but at least the weather was ideal I(max of 19 degrees) and terrain was much varied.

The first stage was mainly farmland, walking through agricultural properties that have probably been around for centuries. I haven’t specifically been told this, but looking at the general state of the farms and surrounding villages, there seems to have been a lots of abandonment of properties and businesses. I can only assume that it has something to do with the GFC of 2007 / 2008.

We passed through countless sleepy villages, farmlets and towns, each with precious little sign of any sort of life, until we reached some forest / bush area which afforded us some good challenging climbs and some good descents as well. I think we all enjoyed this, as there has not been enough of this so far on this camino, so to use different muscles was a real blessing.

The morning wore on, with journeying through more agricultural areas, more forest and bush, more hills and even some cork plantations (see photos). At this point, we had not seen a single walker on the trail, even though we knew that there were others also walking.

We reached a small hamlet called Cortica, which we had hoped would be our destination for today, but no such luck – another 6.2kms. As luck would have it we came across one of our Camino friends, MIchelle, who actually caught up to us, and who has been an absolute delight to travel with. We trudged wearily back onto the road bound for Alvaiazere and started chatting as usual. After we had completed about 500 meters, one of the locals, a very kind and lovely woman, rushed out of her house and stopped us in our tracks to warn us that we were going the wrong way. We were extremely grateful to the woman who had probably saved us all from extra kilometers which would have been a big problem, considering how far we had already come and how tired we were getting.

The rest of the journey was uneventful and we reached Alvaiazere at around 3:00pm.

The albergue is pretty good – we have a room to ourselves; as usual we cleaned up, had a bit of a rest and had a look around the town, which did not take long at all – not too much going on in this town. We’re having dinner with some Camino friends tonight, but I would anticipate an early  night, as it’s another long (32km) day tomorrow.