To Olhao
13 April 2010 | Culatra at anchor
Took the littlepassenger ferry to Olhao, the nearest town on the mainland. The ferry was a wooden boat, seemingly an oldfashion style fishing vessel around 20 meters LOA and it runs between Faro, Olhao, Culatra, Farol (the other village on the Ilha Culatra) and then the next island to NE, that I tend to forget the name of...
Anyway, nice to be able to critically watch the docking maneouvers of the crew of another vessel for a change- being very critical to my own attempts usually - and after 25 minutes we were in town together with lots of islanders with those 'shopping bags on wheels' apparently for their weekly provisioing.
Olhao os smaller than Faro, some 30000 inhabitants and not at all very touristic, esp. compared to Portimao and Lagos. We walked around, did some provisioning in our backpacks and had a lovely lunch buffé for 5 euros each. Very good and right at the waterfront! The further eastwards we'll get the better prices apparently. Fewer tourists as well as an added bonus.
We also had a look at the town museum, which in all honesty was a fairly quick affair, and saw the replica of the local fishing boat, 'Boa Suceso' which crewd by 17 local fishermen in 1809 undertook the adventurous voyage to Rio de Janeiro and back to bring new about the war against the French to the people in charge in Brazil, at the time of course still a Portuguese colony.
The boat and a beautiful tiled monument can be seen in the Photo Gallery.