We picked Olhão over Faro for two reasons. The food scene seemed more vibrant and it’s right across the bay from sandbar islands that we wanted to explore. Last night put us at ease concerning the food. Today we got to see how right we were about the islands.
We started our day at the only place that seemed to serve specialty coffee: 📍Café Tinto. They offer a limited number of sandwiches (a grand total of four) and coffee. We ordered both and enjoyed the result. The sandwiches are good and the coffee great. We were surprised to learn it’s run by a couple from Ottawa of all places. They engaged us in conversation recognizing our Quebec French. I think they were very pleased to meet fellow Canadians. I’m not one to care much about the origin of the people running a food establishment but if they make something good and I’m planning to return (as we clearly are planning for our time in Olhão), I’ll exchange small talk if required. Karine is much better at that than I am. I much prefer taking meal times to write these logs.
After breakfast we ran errands at the local 📍Pingo Doce. A surprising large grocery store right in the downtown area of the city. Usually we have to walk 3 or 4 kilometres toward the edge of a smaller city to get to the larger locations. Score another point for Olhão. The city feels not quite like a dedicated beach town despite having whole islands with kilometres of beach just a short distance from the port. It’s not a surfer town either even if the outer edge of the sand islands seem to see some waves. Its downtown has only small hints of being a mass tourism destination. All of that makes the city feel relaxed, lived-in and visitor friendly (we do hear a lot of British and French accents). It probably helps that it’s Sunday, it’s past noon, it’s 30°C out, everything but the essentials are closed and, Portuguese school year either started last Friday or starts tomorrow, keeping parents and kids focused on that. The street arts also helps.
We jumped on the 13:00 ferry to Culatra, one of the two villages on the furthest of the island from the shore of Olhão. The ferries around here are spaced about two hours apart. The last one leaves the islands around 20:00. The ride lasts between 30 and 45 minutes depending on a number of factors, including of course which village is your destination and in what order the ferry will serve it. We were off the ferries a little before 14:00 and started our hike to Farol, the second village on the island. The way there is just beautiful and perfect for a relaxing hike. It’s a little more than 4 km from one village to the other with most of the way walking on the beach. It took us a a smidge more than one hour to do most of the way, walking in the surf and enjoying the waves crashing on our legs. We stopped at 📍MarAmais, a simple but extremely well positioned beach bar. It so much “on the beach” that we were warned of the sea spray coming from the rising tide hitting the rocks just bellow the counter where we were sitting.
We jumped on the 16:00 ferry back to Olhão, went to our terrace and drank wine and ate fruit while waiting for the sunset: The exact same thing we did yesterday. We loved it and we don’t mess with the hits.
Dinner was a disappointing affair at 📍Cestaria. The food was fine, not great, some of it good some of it okay. The service had two modes: we suck at this thing or we’re really good at it. We were initially seated right next to two tables of 10 of young (we were told Americans) who were in a celebrating mood. We barely could hear our waiter or each other. Everyone around us had the same issue, the child at the table on the other side took it as a cue to vocalise as loud as he could. Another waiter, seeing our plight, moved us further away, to our great satisfaction, and went on her merry way. Our waiter came back to take our order. While being informed of my nut allergy it sure seems like it didn’t make it to the kitchen. Our starter came covered in almonds, which would kill me dead. That (third) waiter was scandalized by the mistake and made sure we were brought safe food after that. The fourth and last waiter for the evening came with the bottle of wine we ordered, opened it and was quite annoyed by the lack of wine glasses on our table (or so the deep “thunk” our wine bottle made when he put it down to go and get us wine glasses). After all of that we got all of our food but the trust in food safety was broken, the loud Americans were still loud so we skipped dessert, stopped by the local home made gelato shop (📍São Gelados) and headed home.
