Algarve Litoral

Day 1: Quarteira to Albufeira 19/6/22

the woman managing my stay this evening asked me why i was walking so much of the portuguese coast. i told her, "tenho tempo e gosto caminhar". i have time and i like to walk. Its beginning provoked a surreal familiarity. Long wide beaches, though the ones here are natural and the unsheltered people are invisible; eucalyptus, anise, juniper, ice plant, dessicated detritus, low inland hills, gulls, jetties and boardwalks. Hot, dry air and limitless water. a man asked me how long i'd been living in portugal. Another didn't believe me when i said "não falho portugués". I met another doing my same hike the opposite direction. The promenades and sidewalks and even people's backyards are paved in mottled marble.

on a narrow st curve away from the beach one of these mosaic pathways leaned from the road into a misplaced forest. not knowing if i was meant to turn or follow, i asked myself "isso é para mim?" Was this path was for me? up the low stone steps were the shaded remains of a building foundation and a carpet of untrod pine needles.

Dia 2: Albufeira to Armaçao de Pera

20/6/22

i walk because it's difficult and highly enjoyable. things that are pleasurable and easy are often not good for you. things that are difficult and no fun are chores. Distance demands naive balance. everything must sit right in my bag; not too heavy on either side, top or bottom. relentlessly mindful consumption; no gram for granted. The vitality of water is as apparent as its weight. It is the heaviest thing i carry. How much do i need? I do not need more than i can bear. A few hundred km of distant vistas to make up for as many hours in front of a screen. Burned/Earned calories.

Hang drying clothes is very punk. The entire solar system producing nice warm wind whether you need it or not at no extra cost.

Yesterday the key to my room was four sided, a grooved cross. Today it was four digits. I thought columbus was portuguese.

Dia 3: Armacao de Pera para Cavoeiro

A cup of sunshine named Carvalho: deep passages worn (like a necklace) by time in soft sandstone. Alcoves, recesses, hanging valleys, abysses. The missing spaces the attraction.

Dia 4: Carvoeira to Alvor

Why do distant things appear to move more slowly? Hazy, static and stacked between atlantic grey clouds and the atlantic itself, cliffs tiaraed in the whitewash of an entire city forced my breath to stop as I mistook them for the whitecaps of apocalyptic, roiling waves.

Temporarily adorned in the costume of custom and fences and walls, the cliffs belong to the sea. Property rights depend on what is left.

Suspended above water in between the shoulders of dunes I looked out at the sea just in time to see a beach umbrella, propelled by the wind, tumble all the way across my frame, chased by a person who would never catch it. Perfect mise en scene.

Dia 5: Alvor to Lagos

06/23/22 Walked 5km of train track, some of it in the rain, some of it between oyster aquaculture, all of it across wetlands.

Dia 6: Lagos

06/24/22 The german bakery here makes the best pasteis de nata (less sweet than traditional). I met Miguel, reigning champion of European skimboarding, at the burger restaurant where he works. We spoke through the small delivery pickup window, and a handful of people walked by to say hello to him, he is a local celebrity. I met three guys from Seville, and want to visit now more than ever, nearby Cadiz is one of the stops on the World Skim Tour. Apparently it took 200 years for the Spanish to retake the south of Spain from the Muslims, but it only took the Muslims one year to take it all over. Seville was the last to be reconquered, and apparently the architecture reflects it.

The first slave market in Europe was in Lagos. Most of the slaves went to the Americas, where the anonymous fruits of their labors were sent back to Europe. The docent at the museum told me that there are many times more slaves indentured today than even the height of the historical European slave trade. Ten percent of the slaves today are children. The fruits of their anonymous labor in cobalt mines utilized so that we can have lithium batteries.

Dia 7: Lagos to Salema

06/25/22 It is both legal and possible to walk 70 miles and arrive to a small beautiful beach with no appointment or reservation and then walk into the beachfront market and buy a bottle of wine, a bottle of sparkling water (agua com gas), a peach, an apricot and a sack of ice. For about $10. And then it is surprisingly easy to find a sandy cave on the beach all to yourself. And no one will tell me to leave. I could stay here all night and i'm considering it. I arrived at about three over the spine of an enormous sunbathing precipice and i can just sit here on the beach for hours and hours reading prose or portuguese poetry and there is no check or balance. The only crime is i have more ice than wine.

The 5 year old german boy (salema is apparently almost exclusively a german retreat) sat in place for an hour mumbling to himself, one tiny fingertip absentmindedly spinning the wheel of an even tinier plastic tractor in his lap, the other 99.9999% of him in absolutely engaged with his imagination. The beach a kind medium for the most central act of humanity. Mindful mindless entirely enraptured in the act of being whatever it is a person is. So long as one at a time can manage this at any given moment, humanity continues to deserve the excruciating privilege.

The same grapefruit flesh colored fish i'm eating, flayed and grilled, appears, whole and heavy, from the alley behind my left ear in a plastic bin carried by two grown men into the kitchen across the alley of the restaurant where i am eating.

how can the cliffs appear so static when there's evidence of violent crashing all over the place. people content to lie at the base of these looming faces in the shade of a massive shear that is guaranteed to one day tumble.

waking briefly at four in the morning on the beach, blanketed in the milky way, my binoculars handy i pulled them out to get a better look at one of the planets and the moment i pulled them to eyes i see a shooting star. the little waves crashing on the sand do not sound like they contain any moisture at all to me, they sound like when the material at the end of a match head is initially consumed in the chemical reaction of fire starting or like a sputtering gas leak too near a spark that requires some highly corrosive expanding foam to be shot at it out of a cannon from a coast guard boat nearby. an image of a nineteen fifties cellophane gift bag getting too close someone's cigarette instantly disappearing into heat. but each wave has it's own timbre and tone some are deeper and shorter some longer higher pitched and as my eyes zig zag across the sky from one star to the next some of them falling stars i imagine the when i focus on any one of them i am hearing the violent energy of their fission combustion however many light years away. peering down the coastline i see a number of collaborative lighthouses of different receding sizes. in my mind i hear them burning like torches.

Dia 8: Salema to Sagres 06/26/22 I didn't write anything, and I remember nothing. shame.

Dia 9