The majority of the day was spent driving to Lisbon. It’s a 3-hour drive from Olhão and we’re not about to get up early to cram more visits in a day. We focus our FOMO on the planning stage of our vacations. Once we’re actually on vacation, we work at the most relaxed pace we can. Want to do five visits in one day? You shouldn’t plan your vacation using our method then.
The best coffee in Olhão is closed on Mondays. We had to make due with a different breakfast location. 📍Figo de Pita made an average breakfast. By average we mean: it’s not offensive but we wouldn’t come back for more. They probably share staff with our last night’s dinner as our food was forgotten for half an hour too. More superstitious people than us would take it as a sign that the city is done with us. We would take it as just bad luck with our food destination.
The road between Olhão and Lisbon airport (where we’re dropping off the car) is mostly highway with some pastoral landscapes once in a while. The only positive things Karine had to say about it that there are service areas about every 30 kilometres and the one we stopped at had clean bathrooms. It made her and her bladder very happy. Having dropped-off a car in Lisbon airport before, we knew what to expect and where to go. It made the whole process less stressful. Traffic is still crazy and 3+ lane roundabouts are kind of a mess to get in and out of so I would not go as far as calling it not stressful.
We’ll be pedestrians and riding public transit for the rest of our trip. We took the metro to our Airbnb and dropped our bags there. It was already past 16:00 and we wanted to be a little active. The best thing for us to do in that context was to go out and walk from viewpoint (miradouro) to viewpoint to get a sense of the city. Lisbon being “a little hilly” (I’m sure people from the prairies or Holland would disagree with the adjective there) and being good hikers, we fueled up before going to the top of some of those hills. We went to📍Castro for pastel de nata. We first experienced Castro in Porto and loved them. We already knew they were from Lisbon (they proclaim it right under their name on packaging after all), making our decision very easy. We didn’t want to mess with a good thing and did miss their flaky pastel da nata.
We first walked to 📍Miradouro de Santa Luzia then kept going up to 📍Miradouro da Senhora do Monte. Being from a hilly city we didn’t mind the climb. What we found quite a bit harder is getting back into the land of the tourist tuktuk, people doing selfies everywhere and tourist crap stores on every street corner. Mass tourism is a normal part of being a large city open to the world. The culture shock of coming from further in the country where these things exist but are easy to avoid made it more of a shock for us and we’ll need a day or two to get back into our habits when we’re in those environments. Keeping our head on a swivel to see and avoid collisions with the lemming groups with their earpiece following their guide blindly or the couple with their phone following the arrow on Google Maps instead of looking at where they are going. We kept our heads up and saw that the city is beautiful (at least the portion we saw).
Dinner was a little over half an hour away on foot. It was mostly away from the earlier miradouro, affording us the chance to see more of the city. It seemed also away from the more visited sections as we barely saw any tuktuk, no tourist buses and nobody tried to talk a tram driver into doing a different route to make it more convenient for the tourist (something we actually saw earlier in the day)
📍Pigmeu was a fun and friendly restaurant. They made great food even if their cooks are a little too intense about Dijon mustard. Their passion for using the whole pig and adjusting their menu constantly shows in the quality of the food. We truly enjoyed ourselves and made it worth the longer walk to and back.