The Marathon run is happening here today and it involves a route in front of the hotel. There is music being played through speakers along the route, crowds of people milling around excitedly waiting for the race to begin and spectators walking up and down the street looking for their places to watch. As a result we needed to walk up the street ourselves to meet the taxi that was sent to take us to the start of our first hike today.
Each day there will be two different levels of hikes offered, a hard one and an easy one. We have a total of 22 hikers and 2 guides on this HF tour. Wes has opted to stay in and sleep. I have joined Helen, Mary and Lynne on the harder hike. We are going to be introduced to the upper Douro Valley terrain by walking through terraced vineyards, hamlets and villages with panoramic views of the Douro and Regua. On the final stretch of the walk we will be able to stay on the new promenade by the river or explore the town before returning to the hotel.
We take the taxi up to the start point of the route which is near a church. From here we walk through several lanes uphill enjoying the views back of the valley and vineyards. I think that the best way to blog this trek is to simply make it a picture based blog and let you see the views we enjoyed. I would just add a couple of notable comments. The weather is extremely hot with temperatures over 30 degrees and with few trees we are often walking in full sun. The distance of this hike is about 14 km and the hike started around 10 and we returned about 4 pm. We are definitely tired but more because of the heat than the distance.
We lunched today beside the community washing tubs. These are large vats of water that are spring fed where locals meet to wash clothes. I am not sure if this continues today but historically these tubs were very communal. We were able to sit around under the shelter in shade with cool water flowing close at hand.
We had views of flowers throughout the walk and we took the time to enjoy and take pictures.
Wes stayed in to rest and when I returned he had been sleeping. He is not able to drink alcohol with his medication so when I joined the fellow hikers for a quick beer he decided to stay behind. We all were so thirsty that a drink was needed so it was a beer with some then tea with others. We needed to hydrate for sure but it was a really enjoyable day.
After we finished dinner and headed off to our rooms. When dinner starts at 7:30 and goes on for 2 hours there is little left of the evening but since everyone is tired so I am sure we all headed to bed. Tomorrow is a new day and we have a hike to prepare.
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