For a couple of days, we stared at St Aubin Fort, watching the water create a barrier between us and the medieval fortification. After being out and about exploring Jersey all day, our timing for getting back to St Aubin, our base, was just out. There was no quick fix. We had to wait until our arrival back in the town coincided with the waters parting like the Red Sea before we could make the short trek to the old fort. It’s a 500m walk from the harbour; not excessive, but far enough to warrant keeping an eye on the tides lest the waves devour the narrow concrete walkway that connects fort with town, cutting us off.

Despite St Aubin being a popular town with visitors, even when the sea did let up its guard, few others made the trip, leaving us as lord and lady of our island fortress.

In St Helier, the Elizabeth Castle is even more impressive and in better shape. So much so, it remains occupied by a faux military garrison who re-enact processions and the (eardrum-bursting loud) firing of cannon. The kilometre-plus walk to get there is a stroll into the past, albeit a contemporary version of it. But, again, our timing was out during a visit to the island’s capital as a pale turquoise film shimmered just above the long, submerged causeway. And then we saw the Duck (DUKW). I’m not sure it was a proper DUKW, but it had a similar shape and did the same job – a car/boat that could tackle the journey from dry land to islet irrespective of whether the tide was out or not. As soon as we saw it, we jettisoned other plans, and purchased a ticket for a unique method of slow travelling to get to somewhere we really wanted to visit. Elizabeth Castle is worth the effort, especially when getting there involves an amphibious vehicle.

There was no need to wait for tides at Mont Orgueil Castle. For once on Jersey, this is a medieval citadel which stands guard directly over its town, the fishing port of Gorey. No, you can just walk through its arched portal whenever you fancy (during opening hours, obviously). But Mont Orgueil still demands substantial effort if you want to experience it in all its lofty glory. The castle towers over the fishing port, rising in stepped sections like a fortified wedding cake. A labyrinth of halls, rooms, and narrow spiralling stairways lead to an uppermost level where the seagulls glide, a giddy height that many of those who enter the castle never reach.

Ease of accessibility for all apart, I particularly like places which require us putting in effort to enjoy. It makes the experience taste all the sweeter; a sense of achievement has an addictive, intoxicating flavour. Plus, from a purely selfish point of view, when there’s a lot of effort involved, fewer people are willing to invest their time. As a result, you often get the best bits mostly to yourself.

Turning back to the river, something catches my eye, movement by the water line about 200 metres to my right, on the far bank of the river. Squinting into the sun, I see what at first looks like the torso of a large man hauling himself out of the river, his withered legs dragging behind him, leaving a scar in the sandbank. Slowly, as he drags himself clear of the water, his torso upright from the waist only, I try to focus my eyes better, shielding them from the sun’s glare with my hand and realise it’s not a man at all. I have no idea what it is.

A footfall startles me as the tractor driver walks slowly past and steps onto the boardwalk that hems the river. His face is turned back towards the ‘thing’ on the far bank but I can’t tell whether or not he’s watching it. Suddenly, he steps off the boardwalk and disappears down the bank towards the water’s edge. Looking back towards ‘the thing’, I’ve lost sight of it. My eyes scan the far bank either side of where it emerged but I can’t see anything, the scar in the sand seems to stop at a clump of reeds. Then I spot it, beyond the reeds, heading towards the tree line, still moving awkwardly, dragging its lower torso behind it. Now completely distracted by what the hell I’m looking at, and wondering what on earth the tractor driver is doing, completely hidden from view down at the water’s edge, I wish Jack was here to provide a witness statement and second opinion to the mysterious goings-on by the river. But he’s on a desperate mission of his own and, as bizarre as my sighting is, I fear it may pale into comparison if he returns empty-handed.

We’re currently cycling from Ponte de Lima to Viana do Castelo in the Minho region of northern Portugal, following the ecovia walking and cycling path that flanks the River Lima all the way to its source on the Atlantic coast. The last time we stopped was at the tiny hamlet of Passagem where some picnic tables overlook the river. While I strolled and rested my saddle-sore backside, Jack went down to the river and into the hamlet to take some photos. Reaching this small picnic area some 4km or so later, we decided to stop for an energy bar and to take some photos of the gorgeous countryside that accompanies the ride along this stretch of river. That’s when Jack realised he’d left his camera on the picnic table at Passagem. Leaving his rucksack with me, he climbed straight back onto his bike and sped off, back down the ecovia in the hopes it might still be where he left it. As this is Portugal where, outside of the large conurbations, crime rates are delightfully low, the chances are pretty good that the camera will still be sitting on that table but it doesn’t stop a cold sweat from spreading across my back and I know Jack will be beyond frantic and peddling like crazy to get back there.

As I watch ‘the thing’ slowly crossing a large field towards the tree line, now some 300m or more in the distance, I find myself intoning the words: “Please let it be there. Please let it be there,” over and over again in my head. Anxiously watching the bend in the path where Jack will reappear, the tractor driver emerges some six or seven minutes later and strolls back to his cab in the shade. When I look back at the river, the ‘thing’ has disappeared.

Another hot, 20 minutes passes before I see Jack rounding the corner and cycling towards me. The lack of a camera around his neck and the disappointment on his face tells me all I need to know. The camera has gone. Amidst his self-recriminations and recounting his attempts to track the camera down by interrogating everyone he saw, my curious sighting slips quietly into the shadows and it isn’t until we’re about to press on that I tell Jack about it.

That was back in late July and to this day, I have no idea what ‘the thing’ was. I know it wasn’t a sealion because it wasn’t sleek and shiny, nor did it have those distinctive flippers that extend at right angles to the body. The closest thing I can think of that resembles what I saw and the way it moved on land, is an elephant seal. But in the River Lima? Of course, with no camera I have no evidence of what I saw to help me analyse it, so it will remain a mystery, one that unfolded in the midst of a drama.

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Beja in deepest Alentejo is proving somewhat of a surprise, in a nice way. Our landlady, Dona Catarina, had more or less dismissed it as being just ‘okay’ when we mentioned we were staying in the town for a couple of nights. It’s more interesting and prettier than we expected. But we’ve come to realise the Portuguese have a glut of jaw-dropping, picturesque towns and villages, so anywhere less than picture-postcard perfect is only okay to them. It’s exactly the same with beaches.

It initially feels like a typical, traditional Alentejo town. Quickly we realise for a smallish town there’s a livelier buzz than is usual in this region. The iron rooster reveals there is also an arty side. Graffiti on peeling white-plaster walls informs us Beja is a “cidade anti fascista” (something which earns it instant brownie points) whilst a poster on an ornate old lamp-post tells us an indie rock band will be playing in the Praça da Rebública at 6pm. We make our way through the ubiquitous cobbled streets to a narrow, neat square (rectangle) lined by trees and smart, two and three-story town houses. There are a handful of bars around the praça. At one of them, A Pracinha, a rock band is tuning up beside tables and chairs shaded by Sagres and Superbock umbrellas – it’s an intimate little scene that oozes a bohemian personality. A Pracinha is exactly the sort of joint where you’d expect to find a healthy cultural scene – part deli, part bar it’s instantly welcoming, a place we’d spend a lot of time hanging out if we lived in Beja.

It’s a sizzler of a day, weather which demands something cool and refreshing. Andy asks the waitress for a Porto tónico, a too-easy-to-drink mix of white port, tonic water, ice, lemon and maybe a sprig of mint. The name betrays it as a northern Portugal beverage; although, we were first introduced to it in Alentejo so…
The waitress hasn’t heard of it but, following Andy’s instructions, happily makes a decent effort of putting a couple together whilst we chill out in the hot shade listening to promising jazzy, funky music as the indie band tunes up. The guitar player shouts something to the band’s sax player, and a refined English accent slices through the thick Portuguese chatter rising from the other tables which separate us. Stumbling across an Indie rock band in a square in a small Alentejano town is surprising enough, discovering said band has been imported from Britain makes it feel totally surreal. Beja might only be an hour and a half from the resorts of the Algarve but this part of Alentejo feels like a starship voyage away.

Just as the band looks ready to begin their set in earnest a musical gauntlet is thrown from the northern end of the square as a harmonious choir drowns out the building guitar riffs and sexy sax notes. The Brit musicians hit the brakes as three men wearing red cloaks and carrying metal staffs appear around the corner of the praça. The trio are followed by what looks like most of the rest of the town, the ones who aren’t occupying the tables around us that is. The penny drops that today is Corpus Christi. The procession slow-motion marches its way along the praça, pausing regularly to to allow a stretched accordion of ditherers at the rear to catch up. Its progress is interminably slow. The singing might be hauntingly beautiful but we want indie rock ‘n’ roll and the clock is ticking faster than the footsteps of those in the procession. With sadistic timing the stragglers leave the square just as we have to head back to the Pousada de São Francisco to meet up with friends who’d decided to give the indie rock concert a miss. Ironically, they would have loved the procession.

Today’s the day we haven’t seen a Brit band perform in a small square in rural Alentejo. What we have seen has given us an enjoyable taster of a town we’d never have ventured near had it not been a convenient halfway house in which to meet friends staying in the Algarve.

Beja is better than just okay.

Our pebble-dashed, volcanic trail takes us from the edge of a sparse gathering of pines toward the coast and a sea which, after the island of La Gomera (on view) and El Hierro (hidden) dips beyond the horizon to continue all the way to the Americas.

This is an area where street names, chunky black letters painted on white tiles, act as a description of local features – Lomo Los Pinos, Los Madroños, Hoya de las Burras. We don’t dwell long on pondering how the last earned its name.
We pass through dormant hamlets of traditional campesino buildings with sun-bleached wooden door and window frames, and whitewashed walls which are broken by the occasional exposed boulder. Linking the hamlets are hard, rough paths of sharp pebbles which test the thickness of our walking boots. These are lined by water canals, troughs, threshing circles, and lime kilns – remnants of a not so distant past.

One building in particular piques our interest, Cabaña La Galipani. It stands out from others of its ilk because one wall is entirely plastered with newspaper cuttings. As we move closer to read the desaturated snippets, a dry voice announces itself to be the subject of the articles – Pedrito, a Portuguese footballer.

His face betrays the weather-beaten look of someone who has spent decades outdoors in a sunny climate. But there’s also a lithe youthfulness to him which makes it impossible to guess his age, something we only try to do out of curiosity because some of the photos of him at the height of his career date from sixty years ago. Pedrito eases onto a bench in front of his open air photo album and shares a few tales from a very different life. A time when he pulled on the national strip of his homeland Portugal to play against such masters of the game as Edson Arantes do Nascimento – Pelé – during the Brazilian football team’s tour of Europe, just before they went on to lift the World Cup in 1958.

He’s more than happy to pass some time with us, reminiscing on his Tenerife hillside on a warm January day, and he’s a joy to listen to – as well as being somewhat of a curio. It’s not every day you bump into a former international footballer on a quiet hiking trail on an island in the Atlantic.

As we say our farewells to Pedrito he asks us to wait and ducks back inside a gate to his house where we briefly glance a shady courtyard. He returns a couple of moments later with a handful of mandarins.

We smile and thank him for his time and generosity, and wonder about preordained paths.

Twenty minutes earlier we’d eaten two juicy oranges which had travelled in our rucksacks from a farm in central Portugal. There’s a satisfying equilibrium to the fact our Portuguese oranges have been replaced by mandarins grown on a Spanish island by a Portuguese football player.

For the past two and a half hours we’ve been enjoying our five course tasting menu in the Castello district while the rain outside the window has been sending the surface of the canal into frenzied stipples. Now the rain has stopped but as we emerge from our gastronomic cocoon it’s to a parallel world to the one we left when we entered the restaurant. Myriad refracted lights dance off rain-sodden streets whose polished cobbles raise their heads above the deluge, gasping for air. The restaurant tables and chairs that thronged with pretty women wearing pretty summer dresses and sipping on Aperol spritz are now stacked in dripping towers, forlorn.

No longer carried in a tide of tour groups, we stroll the near-empty streets towards Piazza San Marco which we have to cross to reach our hotel. At the entrance to the piazza, vendors are selling plastic overshoes at €5 a pair. There are hardly any potential customers on the streets so their sales technique is tenacious. Beyond their grasp we peer across the expanse of the piazza, most of which lies beneath the level of the water which continues to rise, fed by gushing fountains that are sending the manhole covers into swirling dervishes as if held aloft by the dancing feet of an underwater acrobat.

Declining every shade of neon plastic overshoe that is trust into our path, we thread our way through the narrow alleys, trying to find an alternative route back to our hotel. At each intersection we peer into the piazza to see if the water is receding but to no avail. Following the edge of the canal, we finally arrive at a bridge that isn’t flooded and we know we can make it back to the hotel with dry feet. We cross over to San Marcos and skirt the northern edge of the piazza.

“Just one more photo,” says Jack, disappearing down an alleyway. I follow.

Milling around the edges of the piazza are a few dozen people – some are just standing at the edge of the water like reluctant paddlers, others have removed their shoes and are walking through the rain, splintering the illustrious reflections and sending them racing in shards across the surface. From behind the façade of Caffè Florian, the strains of a philharmonic orchestra drift into the piazza lending the scene an ethereal romance. I’m already spellbound when the orchestra begins to play Time to Say Goodbye (Con Te Partiro), and a scene that was merely exalted, transcends into divinity.

Piazza San Marco is flooded.

In the midst of its flood waters, two young women begin to waltz barefoot. The water laps around their ankles; the floodlit façade of the Doge’s Palace pours its gold in rivers to dance around their feet; the arched portals of the Basilica look on in raptured silence; the orchestra plays, oblivious to the drama that is taking place off-stage. And I stand and watch, tears welling in my eyes.

Sometimes, just sometimes, life is tortuously beautiful.

An easy, early morning stroll beside the beach below Chora took us past a brace of proud swans and a family of geese which stood, alert, like the points of the compass, on the lookout for danger as their goslings foraged among wild flowers.

Although ridge one was barely 100m above sea level, it was enough for beads of sweat to gather on foreheads to share the view. Only 100m, yet of sufficient altitude to elevate the view of the town with its unusual ostracised rock lighthouse and broken fort to, maybe rather obviously, a different level.

Reaching ridge two at 200m turned the sweaty beads into an unruly crowd, running riotously down my face. The reward was even better views of town and a concealed cove, framed by a posse of spring blooms at their striking best.

At this point, the lowly valleys decided ridges had hogged the show enough and noisily muscled in on attempts to seduce our senses as tiny, hotchpotch Sinetti exploded into view. The cluster of pretty houses tucked into the slope on one side of the valley should have been the archetypal tranquil Greek village. However, one of the villagers had managed to procure the loudest fireworks in the history of pyrotechnics. As we descended, via narrow walkways decorated with simple chalk flowers, to a church bedecked with colourful bunting, ear-drum shattering/heart-stopping booms at unexpected intervals announced our increasingly nervy arrival.

The next valley was a far more tranquil affair, the only sounds being soothing ones from a gently gurgling brook. We’d hoped to lunch in the shade of old water mills, but the sun was high in the sky, making the shadows cast by their ruined walls too mean to use. We huddled under a slightly more generous dark band beside a dry-stone wall, which at least gave respite to hot heads if not legs. Munching our sandwiches, we traced the line of the cobbled path as it curved its way up the hillside to a point at around 500m, below the formidable walls of a natural rock fortress, where our ascending for the day would be over.

From the rocky fort we dropped on a wide, knee-friendly path through stepped terraces toward the welcoming smile of the crescent bay at Ormos Korthiu.

Mid-afternoon and Ormos Korthiu was a ghost town. The first living thing we saw was a swan which waddled from the shoreline to a shallow hollow in the centre of the sandy main street where it proceeded to have a long, leisurely dirt bath. The two cars which passed had to drive around the indulgent creature.

With our remaining water supplies more suitable for dipping a teabag into, we thirstily sought out an open taverna for some liquid that was refreshingly cool. Sanctuary was offered by Allegria, a tapas bar with shaded tables and a blackboard menu whose daily offerings were in Greek save for pizza and something called a ‘bapger’.

Using internationally recognised mime for ‘we urgently need cold beer’, two icy Hellas Fix beers were promptly ordered from a sleepy-eyed owner who had the demeanor of a friendly grandfather.
Sipping cold beer under a hot sun in a Greek taverna overlooking the sea is one of those travel moments which is akin to being able to press a big button with ‘AND RELAX’ printed across it. Both soul and thirst were quenched as time was put briefly on hold.

There was still the question of how we were going to get back to Chora from a town which, although of decent size, was doing a passable impression of the Mary Celeste. We decided to extend the feel-good factor by ordering another beer and worry about such logistics later.

I sauntered into the bar for another Fix to find the owner, head in hands at one of the tables, pushing out quiet Zs.

As I watched him snooze, mentally tossing a coin to decide whether my desire for beer was worth waking him for, I also wondered how I was going to describe this place; the term sleepy village being dismissed in travel writing as a cliché.

I opted to wake him. It was a question which required serious consideration. For that sort of pondering a beer was an essential accompaniment.

Even the flamingos we see in a lake border on the ordinary in this extraordinary wilderness, and upland geese are far too common to warrant more than one quick photograph. A punkish Magellanic woodpecker, however, is striking enough to draw us into a clothes-tugging spiky thicket in order to try to capture a decent shot of his flaming head.

With beauty comes the beast, in this case a swarm of beasts. As we cross a wide plain of coarse grasslands we’re assaulted by the most vicious mosquitoes I’ve ever had the displeasure of being bitten by. They are able to seek out the smallest patch of exposed skin. Even though we wrap our faces almost as thoroughly as Egyptian mummies in dated horror movies, we find each of us has picked up a few angry welts by the time we reach the sanctuary of a small bridge which landmarks the end of the battlefield.

A melting glacier has left a river crossing our path gushing enthusiastically with water which is bone-chilling blue in colour. There is no bridge, if there ever were stepping stones they’re now submerged. Our philosophy-studying guide finds a spot which is not so much shallow as less deep than other parts. We take off shoes and socks and roll up trouser legs as far as we can before gingerly stepping into the liquid ice. The river bed is rocky and the water pushes forcefully like a bully trying to knock us over. As for the temperature… it’s so cold it numbs legs instantly, making the crossing more bearable than if it were just cold.

Once safely on the other bank we warm our feet on a friendly sandbank before making our way to a small grassy valley. Beside a narrow but deep ravine, our guide sets up a blackened, oft used kettle on a small camping gas cannister and we lounge on the grass, chatting easily about all sorts over a lunch of simple things – dried fruit, nuts, an apple. We are flying high courtesy of this wild, wondrous world inside Parque Patagonia in Chile. But as we yabber, eyes occasionally flick towards the scar of the ravine and a narrow, flimsy looking bridge made of wooden slats which is our only way to proceed.

There are still a few chapters left in this particular Patagonian adventure.

A man-made lake on Crete proved the perfect setting for a couple of Slow Travel moments, appropriately as our remit was to enhance a Slow Travel holiday. The setting was scenic; the mirror-like lake backed by a decorative cornice provided by the White Mountains, snowy white against a typically blue Greek sky. The noises from the local wildlife put smiles on our faces; from strange bird calls we couldn’t identify to the manic laughter of ducks.

As well as the ‘don’t you eyeball me’ moment with a protective duck, there were proud little egrets with limited patience and a friendly little mongrel who joined us for a while during our early morning amble around Agia Lake before he toddled off to snuffle among the reeds.

The pace was slow, and the company eclectic. All in all, a perfectly relaxing start to a day of exploring the west of Crete.

Jack is co-editor, writer and photographer for BuzzTrips and the Real Tenerife series of travel websites as well as a contributor to online travel sites and travel magazines. Follow Jack on Google+