Morning aerobics,
Waking us from sweet slumber,
Calling us to bike!
Well, it's sort of a shame we didn't get to see anything of interest in Lisboa. I guess. I dunno, we just had some bad experiences when we were getting in: the bus station was really far outside the city to the north, and the bits of town that we had to ride through to get to Lisboa proper were not... very presentable. Also the trouble that we had procuring a place to sleep didn't contribute to good feelings about it. The place that we did wind up sleeping was charming, it's true, but this morning we unfortunately had to haul our bikes up the three flights of stairs to the exit because they wouldn't fit in the elevator and the girl working the desk didn't have the key to the back door. She did give us some breakfast as we left, though, and was generally very sweet about it.
Getting out of Lisboa was generally as complicated as getting into it. At the advice of the hostel desk girl, we headed out to the ferry ports just to the south and took one across the water. We managed to acquire a really large-scale map of the area (better than the nothing we had, but not good), and it turns out that we had to follow the south coast of Lisboa's bay for quite some time. The industrial area along that coast coated our lungs with general filth, and it took some rather large amount of water to relieve us of the putrid slimy coating on our tongues. Ugh.
In time, we made it out of the city area and into the countryside, which consisted of... desert. Apparently, the south of Portugal is vast, barren, and hot, at least at this time of year. We had a gruelling 120km ride over the sandy stuff along highways until we reached Évora, our goal for the evening and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It's a beautiful town, really, and we spent some time in the golden hours just before sunset appreciating its ancient ruins and old cathedrals.
It's going to be a hard few days to Tarifa. We're just getting warmed up now.. at least we've got local port wine to keep us sane.