Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  Our next objective is to locate the post office for the morrow, choose some postcards and buy something for supper. We accost the first person we come across who does not look Portuguese; a tall, fair-skinned, bewhiskered man in a baseball cap carrying a copy of the New York Herald Tribune under his arm. He turns out to be Tom, our neighbour on the American boat with the faded ensign. He and his wife have been cruising for 10 years. He hails from Michigan and is as helpful as they come. Nevertheless, as he talks he seems agitated, waving his newspaper and passing it from hand to hand. What incenses him, it transpires, is Bill Clinton’s definition of sexual relations. ‘If she does it to him,’ Tom says stabbing a finger at a photograph of his President in disbelief, ‘it’s not adultery!’ He sets off back to his boat, with his Herald Tribune back under his arm, a troubled man.

  We supper on oily yellow cheese so blissfully mature that it makes your gums throb, the most wonderful bread and a ridiculously cheap, very palatable dry white wine. Portugal’s national palate seems to be less sweet than Spain’s.

  It is a blustery night, with the wind howling in the rigging and a rattling for which, no matter how hard you try, you can’t find a cause. It is not particularly bouncy; the wind is blowing off the shore so there is no time for waves to build. But the holding here is not very good, and the likelihood is that we or some of the boats around us will drag, so we share a watch until it blows out around 3am.

  We spend the following morning aboard, writing letters and postcards. It is afternoon when we reach the post office but the queue is so long that we buy our stamps from the newsagent next door. Meanwhile, my attention is caught by one of the postcards David has written. The picture is of Sintra, site of the summer palaces of the kings of Portugal and of the Moorish lords of Lisbon before them. It’s a pretty picture but puzzling as we haven’t been there, so I turn the card over. It is addressed to David’s brother Tony and his wife and the message written on it says, ‘This is Sintra. We haven’t been here. Hope you’re both OK. We are. Sandra & David.’

  ‘David!’ I protest. ‘Is this the best you can do?’

  He is unrepentant. ‘Tony won’t mind.’

  The Jumbo supermarket has an amazing fish section, more a department than a counter. There are acres of trestle tables covered with salted fish: cod fillets three-feet long and preserved in salt, dry and stiff as cardboard. Since it takes hours of soaking in fresh water before you can even begin to think about cooking it, and the residual salt must have a devastating effect on the blood pressure, it is hard to imagine why anyone would buy it when fresh fish is so cheaply and abundantly available. But then, of course, in time you discover that it is part of the culture and a national dish, and that if you’d given it a moment’s intelligent thought you would have realised that salting fish has been a timeless way of keeping perishable protein without refrigeration. At the fresh fish counter, where I join a queue of local women, they automatically scale your fish for you, trim its fins and tail with scissors, and gut it through its mouth. It takes forever, and the queue is enormous but quietly resigned.

  The wind gusts all afternoon and by evening the wind speed indicator shows 34 knots or Gale Force 8. We share a watch again. Apart from concern about our own anchor holding, a Frenchman has dropped his own very close to our bow, and a small Australian sloop with a barbecue on its port side, has squeezed in between us and the American boat. When I go to bed at 2am the town is still busy with traffic, the streets having been regularly grid-locked with cars throughout the night, despite the availability of endless buses and trains.

  28

  Lisbon

  We catch a train next day. The journey from Cascais to Lisbon takes only thirty minutes but is a scenic tour in itself. It follows the coastline as far as the estuary and then it runs beside the River Tagus. It passes through the large town of Estoril, a name made famous by the Portuguese Grand Prix; and through smaller towns and villages in a way that is sometimes surprising. It leaves you wondering if they ran the railway down an existing street or built the village round the railway, for in places the train is hard up against pavements and house fronts. In between you hurtle through open countryside of fields and small farmhouses and get a splendid view of Lisbon’s famous suspension bridge.

  Julius Caesar used Lisbon as his capital in 60BC when he set about integrating the Iberian Peninsula into the Roman Empire. And it was from here in 1497 that Vasco da Gama set out on his voyage to find the passage to India around the Cape of Good Hope. This discovery of the sea route to the Orient ushered in Portugal’s ‘golden age’.

  What you see today is an 18th century city because in 1755 Lisbon was hit by an earthquake so great that its shock waves were felt as far away as Scotland and the Caribbean. It struck on a Sunday morning during Mass and the candles from all the altars added to the inferno that consumed the city. Fleeing inhabitants sought refuge at the waterfront, only to be swept away by a huge tidal wave. Around 15 per cent of the population was lost.

  Portugal’s king, Dom José, who preferred courtly pleasures to rebuilding the city – or even running the country – gave a free hand to the Marques de Pombal who not only took control of the rebuilding but re-organized the whole country as well. The centre of the city was rebuilt, to neo-Classical design, in less than a decade and the result is elegant and integrated. Built on a grid, it has spacious squares at either end while the names of the streets running between them reflect the crafts, such as silversmiths and shoemakers, which originally flourished there.

  It is a most pleasant city to walk around because, as well as the squares, one of the long central avenues and many of the side streets are pedestrianised which means they are filled with people and street cafés instead of traffic. However, it can be a little hard on the feet, being laid in mosaic, each little square of polished stone being not quite flat and thereby making its presence felt through the sole of your shoe. Its maintenance is as original to Portugal as its universal usage. No tar trucks here, nor cement nor heavy duty rollers; just two or three workmen on their knees, hidden by the passing throng until you almost fall over them, replacing missing pieces by hand.

  As if to make up for the pedestrianised areas, in the main thoroughfares motorists hurtle through at ferocious speed, or gridlock the few side streets still available to them.

  Although Pombol himself appears to have been something of a control freak, his achievement is still celebrated in a quite personal and unexpected way. It is somehow touching to go into a tiny shop in a small Portuguese town hundreds of miles from Lisbon and see on the wall above the till an icon of Pombal, fashioned in blue and white tiles with a candle in front of it, in the style usually reserved for the Virgin Mary.

  Lying between a triangle of hills, the city is built on two levels: the Baixa, Pombol’s city-centre grid; and above it (as viewed from the river) to the left the Bairro Alto and to the right the Alfama district. Both survived the 1755 earthquake and retain the jumbled houses, narrow alleyways and winding steps of their Moorish and medieval past.

  One of the ways to get up to the Bairro Alto is by Eiffel’s elevator, a wonderfully eccentric structure with design echoes of Paris’s Eiffel tower. Alfama, on the other side, produced not only da Gama’s sailors but also the lament for lost sailors and lost love known as fado, a word meaning fate. Once heard only in local bars and cafés, Portuguese singers now perform it around the world.

  Up a street only slightly less perpendicular than Eiffel’s elevator is Lisbon’s cathedral, or Sé. It is not somewhere for the halt or the lame to attempt on foot; they would never make it up the hill. As we climb a pavement with the type of incline that in other places you’d consider using crampons, a young boy on a bicycle sails past holding onto the rear of an ancient yellow wooden tram.

  The cathedral was founded in 1150 to commemorate the city’s re-conquest from the Moors. It is built like a fortress, and its organ pipes jut horizontally across the chancel like two brace of canon ready to do battle on behal
f of the Church Militant. A marble knight at rest on his tomb has a smug-looking dog at his feet; while his wife opposite, prim as a nun, has a nasty-looking gargoyle under hers, chomping its way through a chicken’s head.

  The cloisters are being excavated but visitors are still allowed in. We navigate our way between stone sarcophagi shaped inside to give a snug fit to the head and shoulders. And teeter across planks balanced over trenches which reveal the odd human bone sticking out of the soil and medieval drains. A row of burly men sit on the steps of the private chapels, hunched over buckets of water, scrubbing small finds from the dig, with a kitchen glove on one hand and a toothbrush in the other, gossiping like fishwives. Real fishwives, stately, black and silent, also with buckets at their feet, stand outside in the square, selling the day’s catch.

  On the way back to the railway station we take a detour into a dark, cluttered shop that seems to sell every foodstuff and drink you can imagine. Shelves of groceries rise from floor to ceiling, counters are piled high with cheeses while cooked hams hang from hooks in the rafters. Edging sideways past trays of salted fish, we make our way to the rear of the shop and enter the grotto where the port is secreted.

  It takes us a while to decide, among a wide range of prices and vintages going back to the 1920s. The owner materializes silently a couple of times behind us, two gringos with a backpack in his cellar of expensive port, but too polite to tell us to leave it outside. We keep it with us because it has our own valuables inside it, not least our ship’s papers and passports, but we have no way of explaining that.

  At the cramped little till he hovers at a discreet distance. While David pays, I studiously empty our camera and telephoto lens from the backpack and put the two bottles of port into its obviously empty insides. Then I put the camera and lens on top. The watchful man relaxes and wanders off. Only Christmas will tell us if this is a good buy.

  It is at the railway station that we discover Portugal is one hour behind Spain. It says something about the pace of our life nowadays that it has taken us four days to notice.

  We had fancied visiting the famous monastery of Jeronimos at Belam, which survived the great earthquake and is about 20 minutes away by tram. It was begun in 1502 to celebrate the return of Vasco da Gama whose body is buried just inside the doorway. But it is hot, and we are getting tired, so instead we return to Voyager, put up the awning, open all the windows to create a cool breeze and languish in the shade with a glass of cool white wine. The monastery will still be there another time.

  It is a gentle afternoon and evening and we dine on deck on a blue sea under a blue sky. It is a quiet, restful night.

  29

  Cascais to Lagos

  It is a long sail to Lagos (pronounced Lagoosh) on Portugal’s southern coast. This is the area known as The Algarve, after al-Gharb, a Moorish kingdom. We can’t hope to reach it in daylight and feel it is safer to be at sea during the hours of darkness rather than entering a harbour we have never seen before. So we leave Cascais after lunch to sail through the night and arrive at Lagos next morning. The forecast is for a northerly fresh breeze and that is exactly what we get for the first eight hours. It is a wonderful sail with the wind behind us.

  Mid-afternoon a solitary white adult gannet passes, leading a training school of mottled brown juveniles. It flies only inches above the water, demonstrating the finer art of dipping a wing, while its rag-tag pupils shamble behind. They aren’t very good. I regret not being able to stay around to see how they manage the typical gannet dive-bombing technique, wings back as they plunge headlong onto their prey. Later we see a single youngster practicing all alone – dipping, swooping, circling – a budding Top Gun.

  By nightfall the wind has become slight and we motor-sail with just one engine for the rest of the journey. Heavy rollers on the starboard quarter make us swing and toss. I do the midnight to 4am watch. It is overcast and moonless and very black with just a handful of stars behind a small tear in the heavy cloud. It is an uneventful passage but I find the darkness combined with this particular motion unnerving. I am glad when David takes over the watch and that when I get up again it will be light.

  During David’s watch the sea becomes slowly flatter. However, at the same time the horizon, already barely discernible in the darkness, disappears altogether as fog arrives. The combination of black night and thick, blanketing fog creates a sense of being completely cut off, for there is nothing whatever beyond your rails to give your world form and meaning, not even a light from a distantship. And as always with fog, everything gets very wet. By the time I get up David is in his oilies, staring at the radar screen, while the cockpit drips moisture from everywhere. I make us a mug of tea each. At least with the approach of dawn it is getting lighter, and once the sun rises it begins to burn off the fog. Soon it is reduced to heavy mist until finally, as if it has become too frail to hold together any more, it falls into wispy fragments and through them we can see ahead of us the great bare brown rock face of Cape St Vincent.

  Portugal is rectangular in shape and at its bottom left-hand corner is Cape St Vincent – or Cabo de São Vicente to address it properly – named after St Vincent of Saragossa, patron saint of Portugal. To the ancient Greeks and Romans it was a sacred promontory. It is not hard to see why. Cape Finisterre, so famous because of its gales and vicious rocky coastline, had been such an anti-climax in fine weather that David had gone below to check the GPS to convince himself that what we were passing really was Finisterre. Cape St Vincent, by contrast, towers 200 feet above you; exposed, brooding and unmistakable. As well as its height and prominence, it also takes a long time to sail round it and with nothing else to look at on this wind-swept corner it is in your sights for a long time.

  After you’ve turned left at Cape St Vincent there is a feeling that you are on the last leg. You are not far from the southern coast of Spain, from where it is but a short hop to Gibraltar. And when you reach Gib you are in the Med.

  Less than four miles along the coast from the Cape we are looking up at Sagres. This is where, in the 15th century, Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator set up his famous school for navigation and began Western Europe’s exploration and colonization of the rest of the world.

  It begins to get hot and humid.

  The last headland before turning into Lagos Harbour’s entrance is Ponta de Piedade. Its stunning cliffs are made of horizontal layers in the colours of yellow ochre and sandstone. In places they have crumbled vertically into something resembling ancient Greek columns. Below them, at the base of these cliffs, are large caves. Clustered around them are open boats full of tourists under brightly coloured canopies. Their festive air is a welcome contrast to a black and turbulent night and the oppressiveness of dense fog.

  On top of the headland itself there is an elegant lighthouse. As northern sailors David and I are used to lighthouses that are tall grey granite cylinders. This one is a cream-coloured Mediterranean palace with palm trees on either side. The charm of this stretch of coast is further enhanced by the fact that for some miles now the land above us has smelled of warm cinnamon.

  Down on the water, meanwhile, the humid air hangs like grey gauze in the airless morning. The heat is almost tangible. And all around us small wooden fishing boats, painted in primary colours, loll motionless on a flat shiny sea.

  30

  Lagos

  We enter Lagos Harbour at noon, pass the fishing dock and aim for the marina’s reception pontoon, where a trim Portuguese girl in a beige safari suit and a shoulder bag supervises the stocky youth tying us up.

  ‘Wow!’ I say. ‘There’s efficient.’

  When the youth has finished the girl tells David to go and register at the marina office. Once we have registered, she says, the swing bridge will be opened for us and we can go inside the marina and tie up to the berth we are allocated.

  We have been warned that the Portuguese are keen on officialdom and paperwork. No other EU country seems to be interested in the movement of Eu
ropeans and European-registered boats except Portugal although so far, despite being in Portuguese waters for over a week, no-one has approached us. According to the literature, Lagos boasts a fast-track procedure. At other Portuguese marinas checking in often takes several hours.

  David is gone a long time. He is hot and dishevelled when he returns. The report that follows is as he gave it.

  It was a very long counter, he says, divided off into four sections. The first was Marina Administration. A woman in her late 20s, blue and white uniform, mini-skirt, black stockings with suspenders, stilettos, rubber truncheon, torch in the eyes. She wanted our home address, date of birth (both of us), the date our passports were issued, our ship’s registration papers, where we’ve come from, port of registry, our Small Ships Registration number, engine number and mast height.

  I hold a cold compress to his forehead and he revives a little.

  It just went on and on, he mumbles. The security code on our credit cards, pin numbers, past life experiences, the colour of our upholstery, which football team I support.

  After Marina Administration had finished with him, he and our documents had been slid along the counter to Customs – a swarthy man with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  Have a cigarette, Tommy. They all talk in the end, you know. Resistance is useless.

  Then Immigration and finally the Maritime Police (Coast-guard).

  ‘And the good news?’ I say.

  ‘E51 and 52,’ he says. ‘The whole finger, and someone will help us in.’