It’s funny how a simple trip down the wine aisles at Dan’s can transport you to another time, another place, and that’s before you even open a bottle!
Look, the weather was closing in and the hoped-for swell had yet to show itself, so I suppose I was in the mood to leave Noosa for an existential trip somewhere, anywhere. And that was when my eyes fell upon a colorful, long-necked bottle containing a nicely pale rosé. Lisbonita, it shouted at me, its artwork depicting the #25 tram (or funicular) climbing the most central of Lisbon’s ridiculously steep Seven Hills from the Praca da Figueira to the historic Santos and Lapa neighbourhoods.
I walked up the #25 route one night in 1973, looking for a bar whose name I forget, having missed the last tram departure at 9pm, and I remember being in the thrall of the hills neighbourhoods ever after, although in later years the route of the #28 offered greater choice and a later service, even as the bar districts became overrun by organized pub crawls.
But even as late as 2018, my wife and I stayed in a guesthouse far above the city in Alfama, where after dinner one night, I was pushed into a Fado bar for a nightcap and stayed for hours, swept away by the sad, poignant love songs performed by locals who played with their eyes shut, perhaps to hide their own tears.
I first went to Portugal for surf, and, with my surf buddy, discovered that Lisbon had so much more to offer us, while we tried to sell blood to pay for the next leg of the trip. Later visits were slightly more salubrious, but I’ll never forget ’73, free-camped at Peniche near the rock wall of the harbour, surfing out front every day, or walking up the beach to what became Supertubos when it was flat in the corner, crossing the river of blood that emptied into the ocean from the sardine factory behind the dune, creating a handy left into the channel. Who knew that the break we called Sardinhos would one day be a stop on the world tour! And the lingering stench of the sardines meeting their fate didn’t stop us cooking over a fire in the sand the excess catch the fishermen would throw to us as we walked past their boats to drink cheap wine out of plastic bottles at Madame Sirly’s bar.
Ah, memories. Saturdays we’d watch the world’s oldest soccer teams (all the town’s young men were fighting wars in North Africa, hence the market for blood) go at it on the rough pitch down the road from our camp, before tramping back up to Madame’s to toast the winning team and console the losers.
We also discovered Nazaré on that trip, but it was not yet winter and while attempting to surf the placid waves that rolled into the wide beach in front of that old and beautiful town (which sadly turns into a human zoo every August), who could ever have imagined that just beyond the lighthouse the biggest waves in the world thundered in from Atlantic depths from December to March.
Although we visited Figueira da Foz and surfed there in the ‘70s, it was only while living and working in France 30 years later that I got to know and appreciate the north coast of this little pearl of a country, particularly the historic UNESCO World Heritage-Listed Porto, which dates back to the first century BC, when it was a Roman port and fortress. Today it is culturally and architecturally magnificent, but it is also a surf town, and while the town beach, Matosinhos, is about the equivalent, surfwise, of Access 11 on a bad day, the locals are surf-mad and proud of it.
After a trip to the even stranger surf nuttiness of the Gliding Barnacles surf festival, down the road at Figueira a few years ago, my favourite Porto surf-nut, Jose Pedro Esteves Marcos (Madi for short), invited us back to Porto for a few days of surfing and partying with the local crew. Sounded great, but little did I know it was going to be the “Fete du Phil” at Hang Five, the Matosinhos surf shop. On the strength of a few surf books and a couple of docos to my credit, the locals had dug deep on YouTube and found enough footage of me to put on a wonderful dinner and movie tribute night at a great restaurant adjoining Hang Five.
Slightly embarrassing? Hell, yeah. Good fun? Well, of course. The next day a local magazine wanted to get a picture of me standing with a longboard in the hilltop old town. What could I say? Refusal often offends.
A convoy of Sado 550 smart cars got us and a nine-six up to the summit and the old town, we somehow avoided decapitating the crowds in the narrow lanes, and finally took the grainy picture you see here in front of the Igreja do Carmo. It didn’t make the cover.
I’m back from Portugal now – snapped back to reality when the Lisbonita was drained and the swell started to pick up – but I will return soon. Hopefully for real.
