Remote mountains and how not to behave in them

Prior to the trip I had read somewhere that there aren’t any mountains in Portugal - at least I thought I read it. My preparations had, as usual, been focused almost totally on getting the Landy ready and Dawn, who had been doing all the other jobs was much better informed. “What? You are kidding aren’t you? Have you even looked at a map?” were some of the words she used when I told her this vital piece of information.
As it became clear, there are mountains in Portugal - not massive peaks but high elevations are common and the extent of the ranges is quite large. The most remote and wild are the Serra da Peneda Gerês which rise to 1,440m but there are three others “Seras” in the Parque National da Peneda - Gerês, in which wolves roam free.
First stop on they way there was the town of Guimarães, the day after “Portugal Day” and the castle and buildings were in tip-top condition.

A Polish guy from Katowice who’s lived here for twenty years was selling bilberry jam in these cloisters, with 70% fruit content. Beautiful stuff!

We sampled the local specialities - on the left are lovely Douradinas and on the right are the even better Tortas de Guimarães which have to be eaten to be fully appreciated

The campsite (Lima Escape) at Entre Ambos-os-Rios is in a pine forest at the side of a large reservoir (sounds horrible but think Ladybower with bigger, steeper hillsides). The Cool Camping book describes it as a quiet place shdsgdhhsgd. Well not this weekend! The tranquility was shared out between a teenage rowing team from gfgff who were doing some serious training on the water and also practicing to stay-up late and a group of scouts with a leader who used his voice instead of a megaphone. They had commandeered the barbeque shelter nearest our pitch for mass catering. Actually i was very impressed with them, especially their uniform which was worn all the time and included those “proper” scout hats and not those daft berets that everyone in 2nd Hale and 1st Bamford had to wear.
On Sunday morning we headed into the mountains, crossing one of the many “Barragem” that are used to hold water for hydro electric power generation and the road was very “local” so it was easy to stop and walk over it to see the view. At first glance it’s a long way down but not paticularly “clammy hands”.

When you walk out along the wall towards the middle, then there's a lot more exposure. The wall is concave and pulls back underneath you so that you feel as though you are standing above nothing (which is true really). Then the hands start to sweat and you can imagine what big wall climbing might be like (or not to like).

The mountain villages all have the traditional stone “barns” for holding grain or at least the harvest for drying. We have seen similar wooden constructions in central Europe. These in Portugal and Spain however have been over engineered in stone and will last for ever. I think most were made in the eighteenth century and feature carved cills, lintols and mullions and they are mounted on posts topped with stone discs that wouldn’t be out of place as millstones. The slots are so narrow that birds can’t get in and I can’t get the camera lens close enough to see what’s inside. I think that some are still in use but many are now simply features in gardens and yards.

The views of the villages with all their terraces made me think of my own images of the Himalayas. This is the view down to Sta. da Pineda, to where we were headed. It’s teh village at the top of the photo.

As we approached the village we started to see another Land Rover at the various view points and by the time we arrived at the village we were ready for a good old chin wag about Land Rovers in general.
The village is in an incredibly narrow valley and is dominated by the church and a huge “staircase” of stone steps that stretch right down to the bottom of the village. It was here that we started our sightseeing and we were curious to see what was behind those red doors - especially as a small bird was trapped in one of the buildings.

As I peered into the darkness I struggled to get a focus on the camera
There was clearly something in there but when I got the focus and flash to work, I got the shock of my life..

Each building was the same, holding life-size figures of various New Testament scenes with another showing the presentation of Jesus to the Wise Men and a third showing the crucifixion.
We ate some lunch and then decided to follow a shortish walk that is mentioned in the Lonely Planet. Right behind the church is a huge rock-domed peak, a mecca for climbers and the walk was described as a short but steep 1km upto and around this Dome peak finally reaching a lake high in the hills. The book continued…“If you stay on the trail past the lake, you can make a 8km loop that leads back to the main road just uphill from Peneda”.
So we slogged up the 1km to the lake and it really was a slog. The book hadn’t mentioned the vertical hight gained but most of that 1,000m was uphill. We were so impressed with ourselves that when we reached the lake we had a good look around, a bit of a rest and then thought that we would complete the loop.

This is where all our experience of high mountain walking kicked in. Well that’s what you would think isn’t it as we have a lot. Unfortunately we didn’t take any notice, on this cloudy, misty Sunday afternoon. How could it be anything other than what the book says - "you can make a 8km loop that leads back to the main road just uphill from Peneda”.
We followed the yellow and red makers painted at intervals on the rocks and we pulled through a lovely valley with the mists swirling around the hill tops. A few goats were watching us and we managed to zoom in at x12 to get a closer look (yes i need a better camera).,

The path got less distinct but we followed small cairns and as it was misty we were careful to look behind so we knew where we’d come from.
It wasn’t long before that 8km was complete because we saw the road and were happy to spy a slightly more distinct path down to it. “Piece of cake that and soo beautiful to be up here” we said.
Straight onto the road we walked and turning right to complete the circuit, we expected to see the village over the first rise.
Except that it wasn’t there.

We walked and walked and started to doubt where we were. There was no signal on the phone so we couldn’t use the GPS and got a little worried, to the extent that we eventually flagged-down a car coming towards us (this isn’t a very busy road). The Portuguese were very helpful once I had managed to show them the little map photograph of a noticeboard that I had on my phone becasue they couldn’t understand my pronunciation of Santa Domino de Peneda.

They explained in sign language that it was about 20km to our Land Rover, that we had to first continue to walk to the crossroads and then turn right and walk more!
After a long time a car come in our direction and fortunately the old guy stopped when we hitched and he also expressed some surprise that we wanted to go to Peneda but mananged to get his car re-started on the hill and took us to the cross roads saying that we still had 12km to go.
We then set-off over the next pass to Peneda and this really is wolf territory. The few cars that passed us didn’t stop and we were already walking down the otherside when thankfully a young couple from Lisbon pulled-in and took us what remained of the walk back, which according to their satnav was 3.8km!!
So what happened? Well with some later research using Google terrain view on the internet, we worked out that we walked a much bigger arc than we thought, which pushed us too far west. We had walked into another valley and when we hit the road we walked north east rather than south. This was in fact the best way out of our predicament because the escape route in the other direction would have been even further. This road was running almost parallel to “ours” and only when we got to the crossroads did we then turn south and walk towards the Landy.

It was a salutory lesson in how not to behave in mountains. Take a map, know where you are going and preferably leave details with someone - although that’s not always possible.
"Why didn’t I use the compass on the iPhone"? Well I did - but it didn’t tell me what I expected so I ignored it for a long time on that first road.
"If you reached the road and realised that it wasn’t the right one would you have walked back into the mist”? Yes probably as we really could route find there, due to the wierd rocks and we had walked through a long valley so once we hit that, it would have been srraightforward.
Glup!