PORTUGAL PARIS DAY 1 – BAIXA & BIFANA

We travel for lots of different reasons.  Adventure, relaxation, work, family.  Although we didn’t know why when we planned this trip a year ago, we know now.  Recovery.

LaCompanige is a boutique French airline with just a few routes, one of them being Newark to Paris.  Their hook is that they take Airbus A321 NEOs and outfit them with just 78 full laydown business class seats.  This, and the fantastic discounts they were offering both fit nicely into our current long haul flight strategy:  find the cheapest business class flight into the general region, then take the cheap-o shuttles to our final destination.  It allows us to sleep as comfortably as possible on overnight flights and add another destination to each trip.  Hence our Portugal trip became our Portugal Paris trip.

The flight is a very civilized affair from the get-go.  Separate zippy lane through EWR Terminal B security.   Lounge & Co. – that’s the super creative name for their hospitality suite – during the wait for a nosh and a few drinks.  Boarding takes all of 10 minutes.  As we settle into our pods, we’re welcomed with nice flutes of champaign served by an attractive staff with French accents.  It’s the 60s, and we’re getting to fly Pan-Am.  Push away right at 7pm and it’s the fastest gate-to-sky we’ve ever experienced. 

Bong.  Seat belt light goes off, dinner is served.   Salmon for Mandy, duck for me, both very nice and paired with some excellent vintage wine.  Lie back, sync up a movie on our screens and doze through the ether into another world.

We land at Paris Orly, which is nice for not having to deal with the giant habitrails and decaying infrastructure that is Charles De Gaul airport.  Another cut-the-line lane for us through security, then a bit of hang time for our connecting flight.  TAP Air Portugal is a basic as it gets,  but it’s clean and efficient.  Two hour hop, no wait at the Thrifty desk and we’re down the road in a black Renault Captur crossover.

In no time flat we’re in Baixa, in the bustling hub of one of the world’s busiest travel destinations.  It’s Wednesday noon and the happy energy is palpable as we get our first time in Lisbon.

We’re starving so we aim for Lisbon’s king of street food.  Philly has cheesesteaks (of course the best version of food-define-city-define-food on the planet.)  Rajkovich has hot dogs.  Venice does fried seafood in a paper cone.  Here it’s the bifana, tender, thin sliced pork marinated in white wine, garlic, bay leaves, thyme, paprika and chili powder, then lightly fried in lard then slow cooked with the leftover marinade in giant pans.  Stick that into a perfect Portuguese roll, crusty out, fluffy in, add a little mustard or chili oil and a cold beer chaser.  An no better place to sample this delicacy the Bifanas of Afonso, 30 minute line be damned.  You don’t have to know what a good bifana tastes like to know that this is a great one.  It would be like having your first car be a Porsche 911.  You don’t have any other reference, but you just know that it’s not going to get better than this.

We check into the Eurostars Lisboa Baixa Hotel, a swank city joint just a few blocks from the river, and crash for an hour or so.  Then we’re back out on tonight’s adventure, a walking food tour.  Our affable host Daniel starts with a little history of the country and weaves the evolution of the cuisine through the story of Portugal’s politics, conquests, defeats ad explorations.  Some highlights from the tour:

-  There is such a thing as “green wine”.  You can get it in the most basic establishments.  It’s a distinctly herbal white wine from the rainy, or green, region of northeast Portugal.  It’s not famous for a reason.

-  All bifanas are not created equal.  Having now tried 2 examples, we can clearly classify ourselves as The Authority in the Bifanious arts.  Isn’t that how the interweb works?

-  Salt cod is pretty  much the national dish of Portugal, even though there is not a swimming cod withing thousands of nautical miles from here.

-  Apparently, if you mess with a completely unappetizing raw ingredient for enough centuries, you can finally figure out a few pretty good recipes.

-  If you smash a thousand years of world exploration into a single piece of dough, fold it like a newspaper hat and deep fry it, you get a samosa.

-  They have a thing for ceramic penises in this country, especially if they are very big and filled with ginjinha, that syrupy Portuguese liquor that tastes like the inside of those individually wrapped chocolate coved cherries they used to sell near the cash register at the supermarket.

-  Canadian honeymooners, especially those named Barbara and Hamilton, are a lot of fun to hang out with.

-  French chefs can make anything taste good, even blood sausage.

It’s been an actual 40 hour day.  Sleep comes easily.

AMAZON AND THE GALAPAGOS DAY 14 & 15 – QUITO AND OUT

After that incredibly peaceful visit to Cerro Dragon, we climb back into the panga and board the Sirius for the final time.  Breakfast is at 7:30 followed by a scurry of activity to pack and get our bags out into the hallway.  Then it’s making sure we get everyone’s contacts… Instagrams are exchanged, e-mails gathered, Facebooks faced. 

We pull into a small harbor right near the Quito airport and mug with the local Brigantine newspaper for the folks back home (it's a small town thing...)  We disembark and are transported to the departures door.  Check-in is quick and our guides Fernanda and Fabien perform their last duty by  taking us to the VIP lounge.  Hugs and very genuine thanks.

 

It’s about 2 hours in the lounge with our yachmates.  The group dynamic fades away as we’re all in anticipation of the next thing.  The Latam flight is easy and efficient, and in a few hours we’re back in Quito.  A driver with my name on a sign (that gets me every time!) whisks us from the airport to the EB hotel, where we’re warmly checked in.  It’s going on 6, we’re tired and hungry. 

When we ask the nice woman at reception for a local restaurant, she knows exactly what we’re after.  No hotel dinner.  No Michelin chef.  Somewhere she would go with her family on a Tuesday.  It’s a $1.33 Uber ride to Nuna-Restaurant in downtown Tababela, the closest town to the airport and home to just 2000 residents.  It’s tiny, charming, bright colors, lots of flowers, rough wood tables and chairs.  The waitress couldn’t be nicer making recommendations for house and Ecuadorian specialties.  I open with the liter of Pilsner beer ($5) which comes with an Octoberfest sized frosted mug.  Mandy and I split absolutely scrumptious green plantain soup and thank god we did, because the $7 bowl was at least 2 quarts.  The upside is that it made my ridiculous 40oz beer bottle look normal sized in the picture.  Mandy’s salmon has a beautiful papaya glaze (the house speciality) and I score the nicely prepared Churrasco (traditional steak with sunnyside eggs and fries).  Full, happy and a bit buzzy, we crash hard.

We don’t remember much before, but we’re both moving.  Awake? Maybe.  It’s pitch dark.  The ship is lurching, bucking wildly side to side.  It’s the Minnow in the storm.  We’re both trying to make it to the bathroom but are being tossed wall to wall in the short hallway.  I’m trying to save her, but I can barely stay upright.  One at a time, we make it.  The trip back is just as harrowing – the waves may have gotten worse – and we’re trying to not end up dumped all over the deck.  We have no idea what time it is.  It’s pitch dark.  We’re in a hotel room.  On dry land.  I think we just had a mutual hallucination, a joint trip within our trip.  Many hours later, this will be very, very funny.

Sunlight around the edges of the shades.  Our flight isn’t until 6pm, and we figure we can sleep on the plane.  Or when we get home.  Or maybe never again after what happened last night.  So we Uber back to downtown Quito.  It’s Friday of May Day weekend so all the kids are off from school.  We started this trip on Easter weekend in Quito, so it’s somehow fitting that we close it out on another holiday.  This is not an early city, but we like starting when the streets are quiet and we can take a moment to enjoy the art culture that captures the joy of this place. 

As we get closer to noon the town is in full swing.  We’re some of the very few foreigners, so we're extra apologetic to make up for our lack of language skills.  Thankfully. everyone we encounter is kind and accommodating.  We have fun with the street vendors.  The licensed vendors display their blue permits and set up tables on blocks designated to be outdoor markets.  It’s vibrant and colorful.  Their goods are regulated to be produced in Ecuador but after a half a dozen tables the merch gets pretty repetitive. 

The unlicensed vendors wander the streets, selling only what they can carry.  Early in the trip we learned that there is no social net in Ecuador (unemployment, welfare, etc.) so most of these folks are just doing what they can to get by day-to-day.  There is a very significant police presence (at least one uniformed officer on every block) but they generally leave the vendors alone as long as they keep moving and don’t get overly aggressive in approaching anyone.  The vendors sell a very random assortment of products.  One woman is just selling wash rags.  Another, a yellow liquid packaged in random used bottles that we suspect to be some sort of liquor.  But hey, those wooden spoons are nice….

There are also the meringue vendors, little men in retro blue and white uniforms with ridiculously tiny carts that dispense a sweet treat for a dollar.  They’re everywhere and they make us smile each time we see them.

The blocks are arranged such that all the shops of similar products are bunched together.  Two blocks of just party supplies.  Three whole blocks of barbers.  A few blocks with only butchers.  Our favorite blocks are home to the spice merchants.  Huge buckets, barrels, crates and sacks of fresh and dried herbs, legumes, spices of all kinds and dried fruit are piled to the ceiling of narrow storefronts no more then 10 feet wide.  We squeeze in and out of a few before picking $3 worth of cinnamon sticks (which is about 4 pounds in pieces almost the size of a paper towel tubes).  We also get $1 of the salty roasted corn kernels we have been loving on (about a quart) and another $1 of dried, salted fava beans that are kinda like a corn nut mated with a crouton.   

The altitude, steep streets and general exhaustion has officially caught up with us.  We find a rooftop with nice shade for our last meal in Ecuador.  The food is good.  The views are fun.  The Virgin of Quito watches over us all.

Our flight delivers us to JFK at 1am.  3 until we get home.  We sleep late into Saturday morning dreaming of tiny monkeys, mystical sea creatures, and birds with colorful toes. 

AMAZON AND THE GALAPAGOS DAY 14 - LAST STOP IN WONDERLAND

It’s been a whirlwind.  The Amazon jungle seems like a lifetime ago.  Our dream time in the Galapagos went by in a blink.  And here we are, the last time we’ll wake up on the Sirius.  If we get up really early, and half the passengers do, we can hop on the 6am panga to Cerro Dragon on Santa Cruz Island.  Here at the equator, sunrise and sunset is always the same time, 6am and 6pm, so we watch the sunrise as we board the little boat.  The blaze of fiery yellow hair on the sun portends the heat of the coming day.

When we disembark the sun is hidden behind the tall volcano at the center of Santa Cruz, the same one responsible for this island’s existence.  This gives us an opportunity to see an entire second sunrise from behind the mountain as if a single dawn was not enough to say goodbye to us.

We’re greeted by a female sealion.  She’s clearly exhausted, but her social instincts are stronger.  She addresses us several times, plopping face down between each greeting in fatigue.  We say hello, then stay with her in silence for a few minutes of peace for us all.  Take it in.  Breathe.  Be.

The colors of the world are rich and deep this morning as if the photo saturation slider was turned up in real life.  Browns glow gold.  Blues are bluer.  Landscapes look like golf magazine covers.  Wildlife appears to be cut from 1960s puzzle boxes as a great blue heron crosses our path.

It is still.  Quiet.  A few black winged stilts cause the only ripples in a puddle-depth lake.  We only walk a few hundred yards to take in our surroundings.  No one speaks.

Our walk continues.  We step quietly as to not disturb the Sunday morning vibe.

We walk back to the beach as the island begins to wake.  Our sea lion friend is still there.  In the background a blue footed boobie sails close to the water's surface, tracked by its ripply reflection.  

The sea lion give us a deep courtsey as a farewell.  In her meditation voice, our guide Fernanda says a few words to encourage us to imprint this moment, this place, this time on our mind.  It’s 7am.