Happy accidents are the gold standard of tourist experiences. You walk somewhere in the town centre of your destination, take a turn off the main street, then another turn and yet another, and before you know what is happening, you find yourself in a part of the city that looks dramatically different from the pictures in the official travel brochures – and where you are the only foreigner.
Now, your voyage of discovery can begin: you follow the old women into the small church on the street corner, you enter the local taverna where you will eat your best meal of the year, you pause in the cafeteria with the best panorama anywhere in town.
The Greeks used to have a word for everything, so it is said, but in this case, it was actually the Indians who came up with the term. The concept of serendipity derives from Sanskrit and is usually translated as the process of making “unplanned discoveries”, but for the purposes of designing a winning tourism strategy, I prefer the phrase “trust in the magical powers of the unknown”.
Trust is the key element here: you must be willing to let go, to abandon yourself to the whims of chance. That, after all, is how all adventures start: open the door to uncertainty and accept that what will happen next is only partly under your control.
Serependity with a One-Day Travel Pass in Porto
The Easy Hikers have done this for many years, and we have found that the most useful “serendipity accessory” is a one-day travel pass which gives you unlimited access to all means of public transport.
First you search out the sights (there is nothing wrong about that: nobody suggests you travel to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower), then you venture out into the unknown, the further away from the historic town centres, the museum quarters and the main shopping streets the better.
This does not work equally well in all cities, but Porto fits the bill. For one, it is large enough to house different quarters with different characters.
But it is equally vital that it offers a good public transport system, the backbone of which is a “Metro”, essentially a tramway where only a few stretches of the track (and a handful of downtown stations) are located below street level.
Tramways are always the best option for the adventurous traveller: you see the town (which is always a big part of the fun) while benefiting from frequent connections within a structured, easy-to-grasp “spider map”.
Porto also has buses, of course, but these are only second best because bus networks are complex and difficult to navigate unless you are familiar with the names of the stops and stations that are displayed in front of the buses.
Underground trains get you somewhere quickly, but in large cities like London or Paris where “underground” really means underground, the obvious drawback is that you don’t see much. So it is not a great problem that they do not exist in Porto.
What the city does have, is a historic tramway …
… which, however, operates one line only and is more of a museum on wheels than a useful part of the city’s transport infrastructure. (It is also not covered by the one-day pass.)
The best strategy to explore an unfamiliar town is to start by travelling to a distant destination near the outer boundaries of the network, perhaps putting in a stopover on the way, and then to zig-zag your way back to the town centre.
That is what we did in Porto, starting with the Douro estuary and leaving the bus just when the river is opening up to meet the ocean.
Just behind the bend of the road where the riverbank turns into the coastline, take a stroll through a pretty little garden called the Jardim do Passeio Alegre …
… and continue for a while down the sea promenade, views of the Atlantic Ocean on your left: thousands of miles of water all the way to America.
And, since you ask: assuming you travel from here in a straight line, you would land somewhere in the northern suburbs of New York City.
After the estuary, we took the bus to Gaia on the left bank of the Douro river. The warren of narrow inner city streets in Porto’s neighbour across the Douro resembles the scene on the river’s right bank, but there is an important difference: in those rare moments when the densely woven urban fabric allows you to peek through into the distance …
… you are looking right at the old town of Porto and all of the city’s monuments.
And if you proceed all the way down to the river, you will be rewarded by stunning panoramas of Portugal’s second city.
At this stage, a reward was what we felt we deserved, because until then, most of the accidents that had happened during the day had been of the unhappy variety.
The bus further down the Atlantic coast that we had been waiting for never arrived, while the bus that we eventually boarded took us in a different direction so we had to improvise our route.
On the other hand, however, this detour also allowed us to discover the Jardins do Palacio do Cristal (talk about serependity with a one-day travel pass….)
… and to enjoy their scenic views.
This was also when we discovered the cafeteria in the first picture of today’s post – and when we had lunch in a local taverna.
And since you are asking: no, this was not the best meal we had all year. Let us just say: we survived unharmed. I am only telling you all this to warn you: serendipity strolling may be fun, but it does not come without its own set of risks.
In the end, we did see everything we wanted, just not in the expected order. The seaside suburb of Matosinhos, originally number two on our list and full of seaside restaurants that we shall now never sample, slipped down a notch to number three, and it was already late in the afternoon when we got there.
On the plus side, the setting sun made the Tragedy At Sea monument look all the more dramatic …
… and I learned that, contrary to what I had assumed when first spotting Matosinho’s most famous site on the map, it was built not to honour all the people who had fallen victim to a Tragedy At Sea in the generic sense but rather to commemorate a specific event: the storm of 1 December 1947 that claimed the lives of 152 local fishermen.
Other than this monument, however, there is not a lot to see in Matosinhos …
… which is, of course, another risk of “serendipity hiking”: there is no guarantee that everything you will see is either pretty or interesting.
And so it happened that the coastal walk we had been looking forward to became the day’s final victim of circumstance.
But our luck was soon about to turn. For a better and more rewarding walk on Portugal’s Atlantic coast, join us next week!
