Olá!

About three months ago I saw Jamie Oliver cooking Portuguese tarts on the TV and I decided, "Yep, if I only see one or two other countries, Portugal will be one of them." Then one day I was feeling really frustrated and I decided that the problem was that I hadn't been surfing for a long time.

The next day I saw my mate Florian. I asked him about his planned trip to the Greek Isles and he said "No, we've decided not to go, but I was thinking of going to Portugal to go surfing during Easter, what do you think?".

We had the tickets booked within 24 hours and on April 11th, the our international adventure team set out for Lisbon.

Florian (Germany), Per (Sweden), Phil (USA) and me. Sam (Sydney) is taking the picture so we'll meet him later.

Now I *could* tell you everything that happenned, but then I won't be able to write a book about it later and sell it for millions (=when I come back to Australia I won't be able to bore you to sleep with "Brian's Amazing Travel Stories") and so here are a just few sample episodes from the trip.

Lunch at the beach

After meeting Phil in Lisbon we hired a car and headed north towards Peniche which is a famous surf spot. On the way we stopped at Cabo da Roca which is the most westerly point of the European mainland. Per reckoned he knew a good place to have lunch if we just followed this dirt road for a little while. It looked pretty good from the top...

Finally we meet Sam!

It was perfect, completely deserted and the rocks on the beach were banging against each other as the waves came in. We had an awesome lunch thanks to really cheap Portuguese supermarkets and spent the afternoon trying to climb those big rocks you can see sticking out of the sea in the picture from the top.

At about 7 or 8pm we decided we should start heading towards Peniche. On the way we stopped for a break to re-arrange our really cramped Renault Megane but after we drove on Sam couldn't find his bag with his passport and everything. We went back to our last stop and were running around in the dark, waking up the local geese while trying to find this bag.

We asked some of the locals if they had seen it and just before we gave up someone said they had! Stoked! It turns out that this man also runs a really sweet bar and so he invited us in, gave us some drinks and loaded us up with a bottle of white porto before sending us on our way.

Our new friend and his (English-speaking) daughter. Behind the bar he has knobs and dials to adjust every light and speaker to make the place really cosy.

We reached Peniche at about midnight only to find out that all the hostels were closed or full. We had nearly given up when we passed a little place which looked to be closed. We tried anyway and a kind old lady greeted us (in Portuguese, and then Spanish and then she gave up and just used her hands). She seemed really happy to have us and let us use her kitchen to cook our dinner. We were also pretty happy with our luck and we nearly didn't notice when we started setting the kitchen on fire.

To be continued...

PS- Portogallo is actually Italian for Portugal. I can't remember what Portugal is in Portuguese (probably "Portugal") but I reckon the Italian one sounds better.