We already know that four full days in Lagos will be too much. The original plan had us spend the extra time to recuperate from the four days of hiking. We’ve rested in Sagres already and are unwilling to change our plans further than we already have, resulting in our current predicament of having to spread our activities. With wind in the forecast today, we’ve elected to push back doing another beach day and go walk along the cliffs. The cliffs overlook the beaches so we’ll get an opportunity to scout some of the offering was we walk.
To fuel up for the day of walking we stopped by 📍Black & White coffee for brunch. We saw their menu and decided it would be worth the lineup and boy were we right. Black & White is an efficient operation and while the place is crowded we only had to wait about 20 minutes to be seated. The coffee is good and even though they don’t offer choice of origin, I have to give them that it would definitely screw up the high efficiency setup they have, we’ll forgive them. The pancakes are something else. They are fluffy, good on their own but, obviously, better covered them in maple sirup. Some heretic might even go and say they are better than the bacon they are served with. We pretty much decided that this would be our brunch spot until we leave.
Fueled up we got on our way. We picked an 8km loop that goes through the city and returns along the clifftop. The original trail starts from a parking lot 4km away from town. We chose to start from Lagos and follow the portion that cut through the peninsula before making our way back along the cliff. To exactly nobody’s surprise, the walk across Lagos’ suburbs to the start of the cliffs is boring and just a necessary part to make it a loop (crossfitters will call this the buy-in). The beauty of the trail really started on the first beach and kept going throughout the eroding cliff side. The beginning is a “little” overgrown (by little I mean we had to squat walk a vegetation tunnel for about 50 meters). With the one dodgy eroded set of stairs along the cliff, that was the only real technical portion of the hike. We could have done more than half on boardwalks but they are so far removed from the cliffs’ edge that we wouldn’t have seen a thing: the star of this walk is the dramatic eroded rocked planted into the crystal clear blue ocean water. To see them. You need to be closer to the cliff edge than the boardwalk allows. Seeing the numerous and recent landslides explains why the boardwalk is far away from the edge, and why there are myriad trails along the cliff edges. And the numerous « danger! » signposts. Like pretty much everybody else we chose to use the dirt trails (probably more a consequence of all the people wanting the views than anything planned). Staying close to the edge afforded us plenty of opportunity to take pictures of rocks over the water. The pictures are all good but there’s a limit on the number of pictures of rocks one can publish. While there is no law against it, a bit like archeology museums should have a limit on the number of pieces of pottery they can display, there should be a set limit on the number of vacation pictures of rocks one shares. Don’t get us wrong: the dramatic cliffs and erosion effect over the blue waters is magnificent. It is also a great practical example of how wind and water erosion work.
Post hike we stopped back home to charge our devices and rest our feet. The originally planned 8km got extended by all the side trails for viewpoints to an almost 12km. Around 18:00 we went out to the 📍Collab Bar that also happen to serve Asian street food (Bao buns). There’s no view and these day, after 17:00, it gets windy and cold quickly around here. We opted to sit inside, get two glasses of wine and sample the “local” buns. Turns out they can do Asian buns really well. We were surprised by how everything was just right. The bun wasn’t soft but not sticky nor did it have its center pasty. The filling was crispy and warm just as it should be. The wine was good too. Its only downside was the lack of view. Place it with a view of the ocean or on a rooftop and we could have spent quite some time there. In the current iteration, the fourty-five minute to an hour turnaround time was just right.
Dinner was at 📍Mar d'Estórias, a combination rooftop bar, bistro and souvenir store. How the the shop makes sense with the rest we will never know. It requires, however, to enter and leave through the shop. The bistro section, where we thought we had reserved, is closed. We made our way to the rooftop bar where they did have our reservation. It was also 17°C and windy. Good thing they offered throw blankets to keep patrons warm. We ordered a mix of starters and mains covering vegetables, meat and fish. The food was nothing fancy and the chef seems to have a weird fetish for ginger mixing it in anything mashed. It was OK but not great. We even skipped desert to get back home to the warmth.
