Day 14 – Algarve Coast
Breakfast at the hotel again. Decent, but not noteworthy. We booked a tour last night to see some of the Algarve coastline by boat today. We were a little unclear on the exact agenda, but we felt it was important to at least leave the hotel 🙂
At about 12:00pm we took an Uber from Vilamoura to Albufeira, which is about 30 minutes away. The driver dropped us off toward the middle of town and we wandered the narrow streets of this hilly, cliff-top town. It’s definitely geared toward tourists, but lacks the high-rise mega-hotels of Vilamoura. We ended up getting lunch at a pizzeria (10 days of any one cuisine is about our limit) and then walked about an hour through town to the harbor, to meet up with our tour.
The group was mostly European (UK, France, Portugal) and there were about 12 of us on the tour. We gathered everyone together and headed to the dock. Our boat was a small catamaran with 8 kayaks strapped to the sides of the hull and a small zodiac. Most of the people in the boat coupled up to use of the two person kayaks, with two others going in solo kayaks. We started off near Castle Beach (Praia do Castelo) and just paddled around for a bit to get a feel for the kayaks, the waves, the wind and coordinating with your partner. Everyone did pretty well, except for one woman who flipped her kayak and had to be helped back to the boat. Fortunately for us, she ended up taking a sharing a few photos, so it worked out (for us) in the end.
We had the impression from the advertisement that we’d be doing a bit of kayak and a bit of cave viewing/exploring. There is a fairly famous beach/cave called Benagil that I thought we might visit. Instead, we ended up kayaking for 3 miles and actually kayaked through a couple of caves/pass-thrus. Not as Instagram-worthy as Benagil, but without a camera (way too rough water to risk it and forgot our water-proof case!) it really didn’t matter. The day was a great adventure and we definitely recommend doing the kayak if you are in the area.
After a long day and a sore back and arms, we made it back from Albufeira to Vilamoura and relaxed for a bit. We opted for dinner tonight somewhere off-campus, but walking distance from the hotel. The place was a wine bar named Teixeira. Great wine list from all over Portugal, meat and cheese platters and Linguica sausage, cooked tableside! Couldn’t have asked for a better last meal in Portugal. We leave for Amsterdam in the AM and then back to the US. More tomorrow!