Finding the beach and back

I wasn't exactly lost, yet. I had gone to go find this beach which after a walk, a ferry ride, two longish bus rides and another 45 minute walk. By the time I got there I was able to take a few sunset pictures and watch someone parasailing off the adjacent cliff.

But it got dark. And it is a 45 minute walk to the bus stop. So I decided to try hitchhiking. The reason is that there are no buses from this beach to the next city and it took me about 45 minutes to walk there before. I asked a guy who was leaving, but he said he was going the other way. So I started walking anyway. The guy later passed me, but didn't give me a lift.

Later another guy did pick me up and dropped me off at the bus stop. It was really cool - like I had hyperspaced 30 minutes of space. He spoke Portugese but nothing else. Portugese and Spanish are not the same language, but I try some Spanish words, just in case they overlap.

While at the bus stop I went to buy something to drink. The lady owner - through an interpretive dance circling, jesturing and counting fingers towards the clock on the wall - told me that I had missed the last bus.

As I was over 100 km from Lisbon so I did not really want to wait and then see if I could get a taxi there. I expected that taxis might not want to do that run and/or it would be expensive.

So I started walking. A bus passed me! The dancing lady/soda vendor was wrong!

I chased the bus for awhile, hoping the bus driver would stop. He wasn't stopping so I kept running in a silly way, hoping the bus driver would think I was really crazy/desperate and that would somehow further motivate him to stop. That doesn't seem to work.

I was actually lost in the sense that I did not know where I was on a map. But there was a road sign for Lisboa so I wasn't lost in the sense that I knew which direction to go. If I knew where I was on a map, then maybe I could choose a larger town that might have later busses.

Anyway, I just kept walking on the trail to Lisboa, out of this small town and towards a forest. At this point the street lights stopped and if I continued further I would be in complete darkness.

So it was around 9. I thought I would stand near this lampost and see if someone would give me a ride to Lisbon. I figured I would wait until around 9:30 and then head back.

There weren't that many cars actually. Maybe one or two every five minutes. Some slowed down, some sped up. All went by. I have never hitchhiked before, so I wasn't sure what the best technique was to look pickupable or other techniques to pass the time.

I threw rocks to pass the time. I considered throwing rocks at cars, actually. I imagine alot of hitchhikers think about throwing rocks at cars. But this is probably a bad karma idea.

I walked around in circles too.

I threw out my thumb in some arbitrary way when I saw a car coming.

In anycase I wasn't paying much attention. Then as I was making another round in my circle dancing, I noticed that a big truck had actually stopped and was reversing!

A girl had the window half undone and asked where I was going. I said Lisbon (in English). They invited me in for the trip! All the way to Lisbon!

Turns out Jr (from Portugal) and Jessica (from France) are a camera crew and had just finished a long day filming a surfer and a fake Mauri for a cell phone commercial for an East European provider. In anycase they could speak Portugese, French and English. We spoke mostly English, because their English is better than my French.

So I got back to Lisbon! And I felt really lucky. Jr. thought it was really cool that this was the day that he found a Canadian in the forest.