DINGLEBERRIES

Scott became aware of a fun-sounding festival in a town a little over an hour to the north east of us. It’s called the Smuggler’s Festival or Festival do Contrabando and was scheduled for April 4-6.  There’s no reason why you should know this, but the southern-most part of the border between Portugal and Spain is delineated by the Guadiana River.

I stole this description from another ex-pat blogger named Nancy Whiteman.

Why reword?

We both wanted to go. It’s a 3-day festival and I thought that Friday was likely to be less crowded. However, the weather forecast was very unfavourable. Our plan was to take the train from Faro to Vila Real de Santo Antonio and then get an Uber or Bolt from there to Alcoutim. We decided to get the 7:20am train (yes this is really me). Wellllll, it was raining really hard early on Friday morning. We decided pretty quickly to wait and go on Saturday.  Of course, when I woke up again, hours later, it was a glorious day.

On Saturday, I seemed to have set my alarm later than I thought. Scott woke me sometime after 7, having just woken up himself. It’s all kind of a blur now, but we decided to try to get an Uber from our place to Alcoutim. Wonder of wonders, we were able to find a guy willing to do that trip. I could find nothing that gave a specific address or even area for this festival, except that there would be a temporary floating bridge on the river that would allow people to go across between Alcoutim, Portugal and Sanlúcar de Guadiana, Spain. The driver let us out at what we assumed was the outskirts of Alcoutim.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to go far to find the festival. Let me interject here that this part of Portugal is EXTREMLY hilly. Really, really, really hilly. We saw almost NO buildings for at least 30-45 minutes of the drive. Just hills. And wildflowers. But, hills. Really, a lot of hills.

The festival opened on Saturday at 10:30am. We arrived around 11 or so. It wasn’t too crowded yet, which was nice. We walked toward the river and easily found the bridge. It was €4 each to cross the bridge. They also gave us a cup and a “scarf”. The scarf was good as a ticket for all 3 days of the festival. We noticed they gave blue scarves if you paid on the Portugal side and pink ones on the Spain side.

The "scarf" was really more like a synthetic bandana you would put on a dog. I used mine as a pony-tail holder. A lot of people used them as a pirate-y looking do-rag sort of thing.

The bridge was interesting to walk on. It looked very stable and, I’m sure, was. Walking over to Spain it wasn’t very crowded and didn’t move a lot. But my gosh, coming back it was basically a full line in each direction. You could see on one side a lot of swells coming toward the bridge. Couldn’t tell why, there weren’t any boats moving around. Anyway, you really had to hold on or risk falling. I really don’t know how to describe the sensation. Once on land you felt like you were still being tossed about a bit.

We ate lunch on the Spain side and wandered about. If you’ve been to a Renaissance Festival, I’d say this was very similar. LOTS of vendors. It really kept going and going. AND there were also roaming buskers. I’ll post my photos and label them. One item of note, did you ever have (I did) or see at least a Jacob’s Ladder toy? Scott had never seen one before and was quite fascinated by it.

I suppose the observant among you are wondering about why I entitled this post “Dingleberries”. It's because that’s what Scott and I are from time to time. This was one of those times.

As I mentioned, we initially planned to take the train from Faro to Vila Real de Santo Antonio (VRSA) (see blog post from 9/28/22) and then get an Uber or Bolt from there to Alcoutim. The main reason being the train is really cheap and more or less reliable. We decided we were ready to leave and needed to get back to the dogs and started both the Uber and Bolt apps to see what was cheaper and faster. Ha! NO DRIVERS AVAILABLE ON EITHER SERVICE. What a coincidence. We couldn’t get a ride from VRSA in 2022 either. A lady called us a cab.

We looked up cab companies and I called one of the numbers, but they answered with some version of “Hello” and neither of us could understand the other.

By this time, my back was done. It was harder and harder to keep walking. I asked Scott to go find a police person and ask them for help. He found some cabs, but they didn’t have drivers in them. There was a phone number on one, so he called it. Eventually, he and the cab came and picked me up and off we went. The driver was going to take us all the way to the apartment for €120.

That seemed fair enough, but yikes! I guess Scott was thinking about that, because he asked me what time it was and then asked me if we could make the train from VRSA to Faro. It appeared so, so we asked the cabbie to take us to the VRSA train station, which he did.

There was no one in the ticket booth and no ticket machines. No problem, it’s perfectly ok to pay the conductor on the train for tickets. Yeah, except we had given the cab driver the last of our cash. We both suspected we had to have cash. I was kind of thinking, what are they gonna do, kick us off? And because the tickets are so cheap I figured I could convince somebody to give us the cash and I would pay them with MBWay (Portugal’s version of Zelle). But Scott worries about these things and felt compelled to ask one of the train security people. That person said, yes, you must pay with cash. Scott asked if there was an ATM in the station and was told No, but he could walk over to the Continente grocery store. Again, I wasn’t very concerned about this, but he was determined to follow the rules. So he left.

You may guess the next part of the story. The train arrived at the station. It was actually late, but it was there. Was Scott? Nope. I called him and told him the train was there and he said there will be another one, right? The ATM in the Continente was out of service so he had to hoof it to some other place. Awesome. The train left. Eventually Scott got back, with cash and it wasn’t long before the next train came. Phew.

We arrived in Faro with no further ado and got an Uber to come fairly quickly. I had left one of the sliding doors to the terrace open so the dogs could go out there.  One of them had pooped out there. We later discovered that one had peed on the rug (ours) in the living room. Sigh. Well, these things happen.

On Sunday, yesterday, we were expecting one of our new friends. Michele. She is originally from Cincinnati but had married (and divorced) an Irishman. And lived in Ireland for some time.  We met her at a meet-up, either here or in Ohlao. She had been staying for a few weeks in the Canary Islands. She came back yesterday to check into a place she has rented in Portimao, Portugal starting today. It was good to see her and have a guest again. She’ll be going back to the Canary Islands and has invited us to visit there. Fun!

More photos with captions below:

BIG cat

These guys were hilarious! One of them would act like the horse smelled something and he would take off toward a person and rear back when he got close.

In hot pursuit

Yeah. Weird.

I happened to catch this one with the open side toward me. What s/he would do was sidle up behind some one or to their side with the opening facing away. It would look like some sort of pilar just appeared. I wish I had watched for a while.

No. I do not know what any of this is. Nor do I want to know.

View of Spain and the bridge from Portugal