Belem

After my detour inland yesterday, I decided to spend my last full day alongside the waters, both rolling seas of the Atlantic and the current-laden freshwater of the Tagus river. I hit up the maritime museum first for a brief tour of one of my favorite topics that nevertheless often reeks of deadly bore to others: boats. Especially boats with history. Preferably bloody, battled history with maybe a little pillage and pirated booty thrown in for good measure. I can't drive a boat to save my life (and my several attempts at sailing have laughable at tops), but oh, the feel of a well-worn wooden vessel. Inside they dry-dock in the rarified air of historical preservation, while outside their modern counterparts - of fiberglass, of light tin, even some still of tempered wood - rock softly on their anchors in the harbored seas outside.

Afterwards I wandered the river and the sea-fronts, stumbling first on the Tower of Belem. Like the fairy-tale castle at Sintra, the twisting turrets and intimately carved detail of the Torre de Belem brings to mind the Costa Brava - that stretch of Spain as far to the opposite edge of land one can go and still stand foot on the Iberian peninsula. The Costa Brava is the home of Dali and imagination of Gaudi, the architect-visionary that gave Barcelona its distinctive style and the church of ever-unfinished construction, the Sagrada Familia. Even long before rapid transport and global communication forced the homogenization of local style, these two opposite-ended towns possess a sense of the surreal, a sense of curves where others see linear, a sense of ornate in places where function usually predominates - like the tower that once guarded the river entrance to the heart of the city.

Down the coast I went, mostly just to spend a day at the beach. I dipped my toes in water that Homer never called wine-colored, but might as well have for how well the Mediterranean and the Atlantic look alike on reverse coasts of Iberia. I stopped a while in Estoril, an unassuming tourist trap that hit its heyday during World War II when it was a hotbed of spy-versus-counterspy activity in neutral Portugal. Or so say some pop historians in their attempt to account for why Ian Fleming located his first breakthrough novel Casino Royale in this otherwise sleepy town; other less sanguine scribes suspect Fleming invented most of the intrigue both to ameliorate for his own tragically uneventful tour there during the war, as well as to provide an apt facade for his once-unassuming detective novels and their hero, James Bond. No matter, these days it's a sandy beach between rocky outcrops where the kids toss about in the tepid waters while their parents watch from beach-front cafes, cocktail in one hand and cell phone in the other. Its days of intrigue have most definitely passed.

I lounged, I ate, I basked, I rode back into town along the same railway as yesterday. The next morning I took a break-neck early cab ride to the airport - traveling in the neighborhood of sixty miles an hour over surface city streets - and thusly having survived by far the most adventurous moments of the trip, returned to London.