Porthminster to Portugal - fish heaven

Nhsontherun has been silent since India. Our blogs from India were such a joy to write. But the return to late winter in England certainly lead to a spell of writer's block. There's been little to report. And as my encouraging old mum used to say, if you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all. Not until 50 years too late have I started to question that statement. And turns out, on any level, its really shit advice. Imagine if Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King had been brought up believing that. But like many baby boomers, I've been brought up not to complain. I guess it made life easier for mum.

Nessa has been sent to the menders for sprucing up and perfecting as a preamble to getting her on the market and sold this summer.

She's been enormous (and) fun and it's three years since we got her. We are beginning to bore ourselves, and I'm pretty sure we've bored you dear reader with our deliberating! The plan is to convert the physical holiday vehicle into the equivalent cash vehicle for funding our fun.

With Nessa off road, we've been to St Ives by car for a very long weekend. Then we headed to Portugal a few days later to compare fish dinners. The lengths we go to, purely for your enrichment.

St Ives was a one stop long weekend staying in a friends holiday fisherman's loft conversion in Fore Street. Wonderful central location and St Ives has everything from some of the best bits of the Cornish coastline to The Tate gallery.

Our favorite place there is the Porthminster Beach Cafe where we had the most spectacular locally caught turbot with fabulous buttery caper sauce. An absolutely stunning meal that rated as one of the best we can remember. Perfectly paired with their Sancerre. Surely Portugal can't match this meal?

I do wonder, however, if we will ever be allowed back to the apartment. Great friends tho they are, I suspect we may have massively overstepped the mark when we contacted the owners to ask them if we we could repaint their canvasses. There were two perfectly adequate paintings hanging in the flat. But we were feeling creative, the weather wasn't the best, we had walked five hours to a long lunch at the Gurnards Head. It seemed like a good idea. Over two days we re-worked their masterpieces. And at the end, although we do reckon they are slightly improved, it's not a massive enough step up to justify the terrible liberty of painting over their work. Ah well. We were well intentioned, but overly confident in our own skills.

Before...

And after with apologies!....

Before we move on, apologies again to Nikki and Jeff, but come on, you know we are drinkers.

We will come back to the issue of the best fish supper later, but first of all we need to address the elephant in the room. I'm sure you've identified the issue immediately? With Nessa off the agenda, how many things can go wrong with conventional travel? Will it not be boringly easy, convenient and terribly dull? You will judge, kindly I hope.

Am I missing Nessa, yes of course. Dark skies, bright stars, fresh breeze, wet grass, red wine and fire pits will always conjour great memories for us. But equally, burst water tanks, complete electrical shut downs, immobiliser activations, gas leaks, fellow campervan owners, and the simple knotty issues of camping, are enough to justify annulment of our relationship with Nessa. And if you look hard enough, and Mrs NHSontheRun certainly does, the dark skies, sandy lanes and rustling pines can be found without a van. Portugal has proved that to us.

Europe 23 in Nessa:

So to the flight. We arrive early. Unsurprising if you know we live fifteen minutes from LHR T5.

It's early morning, just the two of us, so no need for the bank breakingly expensive trip to the champagne bar, or even Weatherspoons ! Instead we buy the usual pair of EarPod Pro's. Standard T5 shopping. Jo Malone free liberal application , Mac for eye liner, Telegraph and a free bottle of water, sandwich and bag of crisps for the flight. Three hundred pounds lighter before boarding.

I'll meet you at gate 5. Ok. No worries. Louis Theroux on the podcast blocking all airport noise. Even chatting over the repeated final calls for passengers Watts. Interesting and seemingly benign chat to Sharon Stone, with just enough basic instinct knickerless subtext to keep me hooked. 11.30 flight to Lisbon. At 11.15 I leap up and run to the boards. Gate 7. Louise is likewise distracted, and near to tears as we first berate and then apologise for what is clearly our fault. Pleading doesn't work when the gate is shut, fyi. We miss the flight. Suddenly living so close to one of the worlds busiest airports reveals its one advantage. Hardly believable, that we were delayed by only an hour and ten minutes before the next Lisbon flight. And we made up some of that time in the air. Thanks BA.

Mrs W had reserved a fiat 500 at Lisbon from lesser know rental company Gold-car. The price was the attraction of course, at £100 for two weeks hire. Although I do believe she was fully conscious that having the worlds smallest car would ensure fewer of those inevitable narrow city street parking moment's. I'm known for catastrophising at such times. Nessa has limited our city trips to edge of town Aldi car park experiences. So this offers a degree of liberation.

In fact Portugal proves to be very significantly cheaper than St Ives. It proves to be cheaper than anywhere else we've visited in Europe by about thirty percent. Wine, beer, food accommodation, and car hire. Also the Portuguese have a very soft spot for the British, and are endlessly helpful as a result. I think it's partly to do with a shared resentment and dislike of the French, which seems related to the bad behaviour of Napoleon, begging the question of how long are their collective memories? And how great is this for us!

Our trip here was fourteen days exploring. Again the nature of my blog precludes too much lyrical waxing. But I'll give you my highlights just in case you are foolishly reading a travel blog thinking I'm going to tell you anything useful.

We started in Lisbon, then spent a few days in Cascais. From here we travelled up the coast via Coimbre, as far as the hills above Pinhao in the heart of the Duoro valley. Next a few days in Porto, before returning to Comporta south of Lisbon stopping in Aviero, Óbidos and Sintra on the way.

Highlights were the wine and the food, and the people.

Our guest house in Cascais was like staying in someone's multimillion pound home as a favorite guest. It was superb and travelling around Cascais also gets a mention as Uber works within seconds and for the price of an Indian Tuk Tuk ride. Cascais (pronounced Cus-Caish) is a beach suburb of Lisbon, only minutes from the airport and full of great restaurants near the better known Estoril. Could be easily done as a weekend jaunt. We highly recommend.

Our trip in the Duoro was also a highly recommended experience, the views are spectacular as is the red wine. Getting there by car was simple and saves on the super expensive organised tours from Porto.

Porto itself is a place we felt we could stop and explore for a month without getting bored. The market and food tour were exceptional, as are the ubiquitous Pastel da nata (although originally from Lisbon you wouldn't know.)

Then our accommodation in Comporta begs a mention. The vibe here is super chilled. The rustic feel combined with dark skies and stars and the luxury of a private pool and nearest neighbour at half a kilometre fills me with confidence that our decision to trade in the campervan is a good one.

Be warned that the excellent value of Portugal applies everywhere, except, as far as we could see, the Comporta area where we ended our trip. There, celebs from The Beckhams, Clooneys, the Watts, Sharon Stone, Ronaldo and multiple other A listers congregate to successfully push the price of a plot of land up so high that locals are now unable to stay. The communist history of Comporta still entitles locals to a plot of land, so I guess there is some justice,. It seems the only people still truely local are very wealthy builders while others have cashed in or are waiting to do so. One expat we met whose wife is Portuguese spent 160,000€ on their modest place and reckons it's now worth 2million. Plots of land with sea view now change hands for 5-10 million euro. I see the attraction with a 60 km beach, wonderful dunes, chilled Lisbon fashion shops where you can spend hundreds of euros on a woven beach bag or drift wood lamp nestle next door to the working men's club where a 300ml glass of Vihno Verde still costs 1.80€ unless you are a member when it's 1.60€ and a coffee is 75cents. It's got fabulous beach clubs and exceptional restaurants, but if you want an Ibiza vibe, I'd definitely tell you to go to Ibiza. Seems a shame to be ethnic cleansing in an area that only escaped from fascism 50 years ago.

Above my negroni at Sublime club Comporta was excellent; but Louise Basil Crush was the standout cocktail

So we move to the knotty downsides of our trip.

Our expensive new Samsonite luggage is absolute rubbish, Primark bags are very similar quality and one of our zippers has already come adrift. Don't bother.

In Duoro we booked a stay in a vineyard with supper and wine tasting. Word of caution. This arrangement is highly unsuitable. It's like being in heaven without access to the nectar, a heaven with angels who feel that sobriety is your best bet. We made a similar mistake on a previous trip to Sicily. Please avoid these evenings at any cost.

We recommend also wherever you are in the world, if at all possible : choose bed without breakfast! It's always cheaper to find a dedicated breakfast spot, it's always at least as good, it's so much more adventurous, and there is absolutely no risk of sharing the silence of the breakfast room with the cast of Fawlty Towers, two deaf American tourists and a creaky suit of armour.

Please note the empty wine glasses and the fixed grins at the wine tasting

When guide books describe Aviero as the Venice of Portugal, they must mean some of the backwaters have a similar smell, rather than there being any remote physical similarity. It's charming but not Venice.

Sintra deserves its own page of critique, but I'll keep it short. Four hundred prebooked places are reserved for the tour around the palace interior every half an hour. The castle is in bad need of a coat of exterior paint. The interior is effectively a claustrophobic panic attack. Nose to tail human queue that moves forward at such snails pace, allowing just enough circulating air to sustain life. At the end, the release back into the fresh air lead to three hundred out of every four hundred people screaming with joy and doing a celebratory lap of the gardens, while the others just slumped to the floor.

The good far out weighed the bad on this trip. We love Portugal . We shall be back.

But before we go, we did promise the big one. The Cornish fish dinner versus the Portuguese. Porthminster Beech cafe v Porto.

And in summary it's a draw.

The Turbot in St Ives was a one off. Lifetime fish goals. But the variety, the consistency, the price, the incredible Fish stews, the cataplana, begs the statement previously reserved for Italy. In Portugal it's not possible to have a bad meal.

Cataplana (white fish). Sao Joao - Comporta

Como in Sintra and their incredible seafood with rice

Turbot in Porto - fabulous - 50% cheaper but not as wonderful as Porthminster Beach

snails boiled in oregano broth - a cafe bar in hillside village Duoro valley (not sea food but delicious!)

Truly amazing Scallops - guess where? St Ives !