The beginning of chapter III. – On the Fisherman’s Trail
The beach in front stretched for kilometres. The waves left a long, washed-up line of foam on the sand, slowly evaporating into the air, and under the cliffs, the foam floated in pools of stirred water, circling around the tips of rocks eternally in the same pattern. Ocean wind came from the west, neither cold nor warm, neither strong nor weak—just constant—and with it came clouds, neither extremely dark nor extremely light. A few drops of rain fell occasionally from the side, indistinguishable from the drops of ocean ricocheting off the cliffs.
Down on the beach, a few hikers were making their way south, leaving footsteps in the sand. Two of them stopped, looked behind, and waved. I didn’t know if they were shouting something—their voices were silenced by the ocean waves constantly rolling over themselves and creating the static white noise of thousands of TVs without signal. I waved back to them. “Please go away,” I thought. I’d met them last night and preferred to walk alone—a resistance I would feel many times along the trail. I waited long enough and then went down the wooden stairs fenced by a thick green rope, stepping onto the sand hardened by the sea. I looked back towards the stairs and the cliff. Layers of flat rocks lay stacked upon each other like black dragon scales, and I could easily take them out one by one, slowly tearing down the cliff. I soon got bored, so I left the dragon-looking cliff alone and walked further along the beach. A familiar backpack rested on the sand, its light blue colour in stark contrast to the golden ground beneath. Isla walked around aimlessly, playing with the waves and following their tides along the coast.
We had met last night at the door of a hostel in Vila Nova de Milfontes, a quiet summer destination out of season, from which the locals had already left for their holidays to Bali, Thailand, or somewhere else warm and exotic. Vila Nova de Milfontes wasn’t the starting point of the trail. I had to skip the starting point—Porto Covo—as its budget-friendly accommodation was virtually non-existent. I would have either had to walk the first part of the trail in the middle of the night or sleep on the beach. I wasn’t yet ready for that. When I arrived in Milfontes, there were only Indian migrant workers walking through the village in groups, talking with their families on the phone, commenting, and waiting for the long winter to pass and the spring to knock on the door.
I knocked on the door of the hotel and waited a minute or two, then knocked again, waited a bit more, and then there were steps coming down the stairs. Confusion got me and got Isla when she opened the door because she greeted me in perfectly clean British English, and I greeted her back in Portuguese, thinking she was working there. She wasn’t; she did not speak Portuguese, and neither did I. After a few confusing seconds, I entered the hostel and followed her around.
“Well, the owner is not here. She left about an hour ago—she said she didn’t feel well.”
“Is she coming back?”
“She didn’t say anything; she was all hasty and hectic.”
Isla showed me around the hostel in about 15 seconds. Then we talked for about 15 minutes, and she had a wavy way with her hands while she talked. They were very frail, and she liked to dance around with them. She looked up to one side and then to the other, dreamy and unsure about her life direction, switching her stance from one hip to another.
“Would you like a beer?” I asked Isla hopefully. “I’m going to find a supermarket now.”
“Oh, no thank you. I would like to be fresh for the start of the trail tomorrow.”
I went outside to get cash and food. Maybe a beer. I got the cash—or so I thought, or I didn’t think at all—and then I walked to a convenience store. It was very tiny, and about five or six Indians squeezed in it, buying things and blabbering without a break. They looked at me curiously and without any anxiety, and I smiled back. I looked into my wallet—no cash. I had forgotten to take it out of the machine. Anxious, I walked fast back to the ATM and checked my account—still forty euros less. Then I took more cash, made sure not to forget it this time, and had forty euros less in my life. “You made somebody’s day,” I tried to cheer myself up. “It’s a lesson you paid forty euros for,” I remembered the simple wisdom of one friend. It did not cheer me up. I retold the events to Isla back in the hostel.
“No way, mate,” she reacted in disbelief.
“Well, I must have made somebody’s day.”
She laughed, and it cheered me up.
Down on the beach, Isla took deep inhales of the ocean air and let them out with a sigh of relief. She opened her arms into the sky and climbed on her toes, taking in as much as possible, like she was addicted to the ocean. “She really needed this hike,” I thought.
“Hello there,” a familiar British accent greeted me.
“Hey, enjoying the hike?”
“Very much so! Oh, I really needed this hike. There is just so much space and freedom and peace… And look at all this sand around!”
“Yes, it’s really beautiful,” I agreed, slightly ashamed I couldn’t appreciate it as expressively as she did. “Have you seen any fishermen maybe?”
We didn’t see any fishermen that day. We also didn’t see them that night when we walked around the village and took bets on whether that shiny orange star in the night sky was Jupiter. The village was called Almograve, and it had two hostels—one open, one closed—and a tourist office at the beginning of the village. When I arrived, I hiked into the office straight from the trail, hiking poles hitting the concrete announcing my marching arrival. I was excited like a true tourist, or a boy on a school trip, but the worker was as excited as he could’ve been in November. He gave me the leaflets and the map of the village, asked me where I was from, and then said goodbye. His lips were tight, his chin drained from all that smiling during summer, and I was probably tourist number 368,598 in the year 2023—or something close to it.
It was Jupiter. I had that application for stars, checked it, won the bet, and earned a kiss. Maybe it was a fisherman who approached us while we sat on a bench outside the hostel. He stormed out of a bar mumbling drunk in Portuguese, and we tried to understand, but there was probably not much to understand. “Drugs, loco, loco… many, many drugs…” He kept explaining some sort of dark happenings and bad people in the village. Who, what, or where—we didn’t know. We felt a bit intimidated, so we left. The poor guy, I imagined, like the rest of the men in town, lived through these long, rainy, quiet winters with nothing else left to do but drink in one of the two or three bars remaining open and imagine villains.
I left Almograve around 10 a.m., after a restless night in a dorm room next to a snoring roomate. Zambujeira was the next destination. I sang “Bamboleo, Bamboleo” on the way, thinking of that name and imagining Zambujeira and all the fun new unexpected things happening there. I sang it as the trail took me through beautiful forests, where I felt sorry for nudging my roommate during the night because he snored a lot. “I will apologise to him if I see him.” I sang it next to the ocean, where miniature sand dunes went up and down and made me think of Morocco and the desert, dreaming of standing on top of gigantic dunes, the sand in front stretching into eternity, carried around by soft wind. “I will sleep in the desert,” it was decided.
The sand dunes were beautiful, and purple bushes grew out of them, standing in surreal contrast to the golden sand and grey sky. Every colour was more prominent under that grey sky. Wind came from the west and brought rain and clouds. A lizard stood frozen on the slippery wooden pathway for a moment, blinked its eyes once or twice, and then disappeared somewhere in the sand. Now the trail went back into the forest where the birds sang. There was no sign of the ocean waves in the pine trees, only a sound distant like a memory. Then the trail went back to the ocean, and the high cliffs became even higher, and the waves roared up to reach their height splashing over. I reached the village, as quiet as the last one. My snoring roommate from last night was sitting in a bar. I went in, had a beer with him.
“Hey, I was trying to wake you up last night because you snorred…sorry” I opened up.
“Oh no, no…I don’t remember.”. He was pretending, I knew it , because in the middle of the night he had gotten up and slapped back on my bed.
After 5 minutes of trivialities, I got up and went out to drink the beer alone and look at the ocean. As every day of the trail—and probably every day that has ever existed—the ocean was beautifully powerful, and looking at it was a sufficient activity on its own. One couple 100 meters away, a few solitary migrant workers 100 meters the other way, and I; we all stood in admiration of the ocean, in silent agreement that no words had to be spoken ever again. The waves left infinite sadness on the shore that slowly transformed into peace and complete understanding. Back and forth, back and forth, “you are small, human,” the waves said, “surrender to the infinite”. I surrendered, and that’s where peace was, for a moment.
The only hostel in the village had no more free beds, so I had to book a private apartment—a spacious room, a private toilet, clean white sheets stretched over the bed to perfection. It was a luxury—an empty, lonely, depressing luxury. I went around looking for Isla and other people from the hostel. The night fell, and there were no fishermen in Zambujeira either. Jupiter hid itself behind the clouds in the rainy night.
