Thursday, January 8, 2026: Rhys Hughes's "A Walk Along Portugal"

 

Rhys Hughes was born in Wales but has lived in many different countries. He began writing at an early age and his first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995. His work has been translated into twelve languages. He is currently working on a novel and new collections of prose and verse.

Until I visited the country, I assumed that Portugal was a Mediterranean land lapped

by a gentle sea. The truth, of course, is that its coastline is wholly Atlantic and bashed

rather than caressed. My first trip there changed certain of my perspectives in various

ways on sundry matters, including custard tarts, dried cod and the wisdom of paving

streets with flat stone fragments in a mosaic pattern (pretty but also more slippery in

the rain). Primarily, however, I won a respect for the sea that was quite different to

the respect I already had inside me for that seemingly limitless expanse of blue. For

the first time in my life I became aware that swimming in the sea on a perfectly fine

day without a breath of wind can be as hazardous as doing so in rough water in bad

weather, and that this danger is due entirely to the acquisitiveness of the waves rather

than their apparent force. To be clear, Portuguese waves want to acquire you, to drag

you back to their watery bedroom, strip your flesh and lay your bones on the seabed,

a fate that blends passion with melancholy, a typically Portuguese recipe. And it’s a

very large seabed, the size of an entire ocean.

This insight came during a walk from the coastal town of Figueira da Foz to the

city of Aveiro, a journey of 60 kilometres by road but closer to 100 kilometres along

the beach, which is actually several beaches divided by a number of headlands. I had

come to Portugal to attend the first Fórum Fantástico and to give a reading of a story

that I wrote for the occasion that has still only been published in Portuguese and not

in English. I caught the overnight train from Madrid, where I was based at the time,

to Lisbon, a train full of hippies and the pungent fumes of marijuana, for this was in

2004 when smoking on trains was legal and normal. The hippies remained as far as

Cáceres, where they got off to attend the WOMAD festival. I was sorely tempted to

go with them, but I had a literary conference to attend. Tempted because I adore what

is referred to (somewhat awkwardly) as ‘world music’, and sorely because I was

sunburned to a condition of crispiness from a hike the previous week in the Montes

de Toledo, where shade from the glaring sun was scarce. From Toledo to San Pablo

de los Montes with a heavy pack on my back had been my longest non-stop hike in

one day, and I was burning not merely with sunburn but also the urge to outdo myself

in Portugal, but I didn’t yet know how or where.

The train crossed the unannounced border from Spain into Portugal in the rushing

darkness but dawn arrived not too long after. Half asleep, I happened to glance out of

the window and saw a most remarkable castle standing on an island in a river. This

river was the broad Tagus and I learned afterwards that the castle was the Castelo de

Almourol, a stronghold of the Knights Templar in the 12 th Century, and I vowed that I

would return to explore it one day, although I still haven’t managed to do so, but the

intention of returning to finish something seems to be a deep part of my nature. The

idea alone is the first step of the journey; the other steps often wait many years and on

occasion these other steps fail to complete the journey and they too transform into an

idea, the impetus to try again and redeem the failure. That is how it was with my

coastal walk from Figueira da Foz to Aveiro. After the literary event in Lisbon I set

off on a tour of the country. I went north and ended up on the Beira Littoral, a remote

stretch of coast devoid of all but the smallest settlements. Leaving Figueira in the late

afternoon, I found the direct route blocked by the Cabo Mondego cement works and

had to veer inland. I entered a forest, the sun went down, and to avoid blundering like

a buffoon I decided to camp in a clearing. I must have been tougher back then. I had

no tent, no sleeping bag, just my body and a coat.

I woke in the middle of the night to a display of fireflies. They moved slowly in

elaborate patterns and dangled their legs behind them in a way that made them appear

much longer than they are. The sight was magical but also amusing. I stood, walked

forwards and they avoided me with hesitant indecision, exactly in the same way that

two pedestrians on a narrow pavement (one of the Portuguese mosaic streets?) step

first to the right, then to the left, and then back again, before finally managing to pass

each other without a collision. This dance of indecision, a dance fuelled by politeness

rather than music, takes on a different meaning when done with an animal, especially

one as small as a firefly, but what that meaning is I can’t be sure. I kept walking and

within a few minutes I broke out of the clearing and found myself on a ledge that was

as spectacularly sited as a belvedere, with a view along the coast to the north as far as

the lights of Praia de Mira. The series of long beaches were illuminated by a moon so

red that for a few moments I wondered if it was actually the sun that had got stuck in

sunset mode and decided to climb back up the sky.

I had no doubt that I would resume my hike the next morning and that it would be

an easy affair, a saunter, a shoreline stroll, and that I would reach Aveiro within a day

or two. The reality was that the sand was abnormally soft, and that with the weight of

my pack, stuffed with books from the Fórum Fantástico, I sank deep, and every step

required an extravagant effort. This beach, and all the others connected with it, were

almost completely deserted and remained so. I persisted with my absurd walk until

the sun increased its strength to the point where I decided that a refreshing dip in the

sea might be a good idea. This is how I learned that, in Portugal, even though one’s

chest stands up against waves with the same fortitude they display in other lands, the

legs will prove weaker, as the cunning Portuguese breakers tackle you from below

with the unforgiving arms of the backwash. It truly felt as if there were mermaids

down there trying to drag my legs away, perhaps to garnish a favoured reef with my

knees, trophies of the scoured hiker who dared to attempt a swim on the Beira

Littoral, where nobody swims who is sensible; indeed where nobody seems to

venture for any reason at all, no matter what state of mind they might be in. Wading

back to shore was like wading through a vast custard tart that is sliding off the tilted

tray of a titanic waitress in a Brobdingnagian cafe. These custard tarts, incidentally,

are known as pastéis de nata and I once ate no less than fifteen in a row at a vintage

car show in Bragança because they were given away free. I am not proud of the fact;

I record it because it happened and I have very few custard-based anecdotes to serve

as alternatives.

My battle with the sea left me feeling exhausted; the sun was pounding me with

appalling glee; the sand was sucking at my boots. My progress was ludicrously slow

and I realised that I was running low on drinking water. I turned back, yes I admit it,

but not until the evening of the following day. I failed even to reach Praia de Mira, a

point less than halfway to my destination. I was so dehydrated that when I returned to

my starting point, I knocked on the door of the first house and pleaded for water and

was given a large full bottle, which I drank down completely and too quickly; it came

up again, as if it too had turned back on its journey, judging the conditions unsuitable

to continue. My walk was a failure. I curled in the shadow of the coastguard’s hut in

Praia de Quiaios and read Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive until sunset, and then

I made an attempt to find the clearing I had camped in before, but in the darkness this

was too difficult and I ended up in a different clearing, and there were no fireflies this

time, no votive lights to commemorate my passing. I had failed to pass anywhere. A

circle is an achievement, but a linear shunting up and down a beach, almost retracing

my steps exactly, is nothing special at all. On the contrary it is a sandy fool’s errand.

The book I had been reading was full of fools too, men who rode bicycles hard over

bumpy terrain and exchanged so many of their own molecules with the molecules of

the machine that they became more bicycle than human. But I vowed to return, that

thought was uppermost in my mind, return and finish the job, for a job is what it had

become, unpaid and without opportunities for promotion, but a job nevertheless. Ten

years it took before I returned with my determination.

And not just with that, but with an umbrella too, an expensive and sturdy one that

I had obtained in Lisbon, where I had gone as a guest of the ninth Fórum Fantástico

to talk about Latin American Literature and also to read a brace of Donald Barthelme

stories on radio. It was November and weather conditions in the Beira Littoral bore

no relation to those I remembered. It rained heavily from the moment I stepped off

the train in Figueira da Foz, but that didn’t matter, I had my umbrella. I could even

twirl it as I walked, to cast off the excess raindrops. All was fine. No, the weather

wasn’t fine, that was a misleading sentence, it was atrocious. This umbrella remained

in one piece until it encountered the wind of a cliff top path that turned out to be short

cut past the Cabo Mondego lighthouse and then it turned into a flapping thing of no

use. I refused to turn back, I don’t know why, and pushed on into the driving rain, and

after an hour the rain stopped and the clouds cleared. I was vindicated but I was wet.

Everything I had was wet, all the objects in my rucksack and pockets, my money and

passport, the clothes, sleeping bag, books and food. But they would dry out if I kept

going, walked my damp little socks off, walked and walked and never stopped. And

that’s what I did or nearly did, because the fact of the matter is that I did occasionally

stop for an hour or two, here and there, but an unnatural energy filled me, an

indifference to comfort, a need to keep walking. The rhythm took over utterly.

Walks like this, alone and heedless of whether it is day or night, often feel surreal

and dreamlike, partly because one walks oneself into a trancelike state, also because a

lonely coast really is host to a variety of peculiar phenomena. There may be perfectly

rational or even disappointingly mundane explanations for the weird lights in the sky,

the noises that come out of the sea, the sound of hoofbeats where there are no horses,

the alternating cold and hot zones that one passes through, but when one is immersed

in the experience, it is sensations that matter more than the mind, and we can believe

that we have ghosts for company with great ease. I have been told that the collision of

freak waves far out at sea is the source of the rumbling that startles the darkness of a

beach at night, and I believe this explanation, and I never question why I don’t hear it

in the daytime (except cautiously now) but rarely do any of these phenomena feel

malign. They are simply there and one is a temporary guest in their domain and one

moves out of their territory and they don’t follow. It could simply be the case that we

generally don’t do enough night walking along beaches and therefore the reality isn’t

the way we expect it to be, and we interpret the difference as ghostly, paranormal, just

slightly odd. The Portuguese coast was strikingly atmospheric on my walk, luminous,

dreamy, moonwashed, peaceful but with a mysterious power lurking beneath the

surface of things as they appeared to be.

I kept the umbrella and used it as a walking stick and I passed the furthest point I

had reached on my first attempt. I kept going. I didn’t attempt a swim this time, I had

bottles of iced tea instead of water, less books in my rucksack. I passed Praia de Mira

and reached the watery wedge of the lagoon that detaches the beach from the rest of

the coast. Prai da Vagueira was the next settlement, deserted at this time of year, the

absolutely geometrical streets muffled by drifting sand, silently forlorn before dawn,

and the stories of J.G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands came to mind, the abandoned beach

resorts and air of lassitude. But I have always found such environments to be pleasant

in a way I can’t really explain. They seem safe and warm, unpatrolled by threats, easy

to negotiate and understand, the streetlamps casting an illumination for the benefit of

nobody until I turn up. It is welcoming in an oddly indifferent manner. That book has

always been my favourite of Ballard’s, it speaks to my experience on these long hikes

along beaches where I am apparently the only human being in existence, my solitary

course parallel to that of the glowing surf that is like a verge to my entire life, and my

head full of music that I never requested to be played.

This is something else that I will never understand, one of a great many things,

the way that my brain will dredge up a tune from the depths of my memory and

present it to me in remixed form, the same musical passages being repeated, altered,

often juxtaposed with passages from similar songs. During the frequent deliriums that

accompanied his arduous crawl from the crevasse into which he had plunged, the

climber Joe Simpson was assailed by a Boney M song; the notion he was going to die

to ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ dismayed him to an extreme. Vastly less challenged by

the circumstances of my own linear progression, I nonetheless was subjected to ‘Easy

Lover’ on endless repeat, that Phil Collins and Philip Bailey hit that is certainly

unobjectionable in normal life. The song would speed up if my pace slackened and I

realised that its function was to urge me along, to compel me to flee from it; yet it

came with me wherever I went, an exasperation one can’t escape. Beyond Prai da

Vagueira, the narrowing peninsula was soon due to come to an end, but there was a

bridge connecting it with the mainland. I crossed from the west side to the east side of

this spit of land and obliged the stars to reflect themselves in the lagoon instead. The

settlement before the bridge was Costa Nova where many houses are painted in blue

and red candystripe patterns, making one’s mouth water, as if they are domiciliary

lollipops, awkwardly square but delicious.

The bridge itself was devoid of traffic when I reached it, a few hours before dawn,

and the pedestrian walkway clanged beneath my tired feet as I crossed it. I was happy

that provision had been made for those who wished to cross on foot, but on the other

side I discovered that the walkway abruptly stopped and that the main road to Aveiro

was for vehicles only. I had to make a lengthy detour, unsure of where I was actually

going, down numerous little residential streets, stopping only briefly in the middle of

a clump of trees in order to change my comfortable but scruffy walking trousers into

a pair more suitable for public scrutiny. But it was hours before I reached Aveiro and

the journey I thought was now over had a lengthy hobbling coda. Eventually I ended

up where I wanted to be. I had arranged to stay with a friend; he wasn’t at home when

I called, so I dawdled in the park opposite his apartment block, swinging my sore feet

on a bench and wondering why I regularly subject myself to these ordeals. There’s no

satisfactory answer I can devise. Too much comfort and ease agitate me; then I am

suddenly compelled to go off and deprive myself, maybe to teach my body to better

appreciate the simple luxuries when the ordeal is over.

My friend eventually returned from wherever he had been and I followed him up

the stairs to his apartment. I was gleeful but I kept my glee concealed for the sake of a

blasé exterior that heightens the joy within. I spoke about my hike as if it was nothing

special, just a little jaunt along the coast, certainly unworthy of making a fuss about.

This modesty was my victory, or so I imagined, but he defeated me easily with a brief

mention of the time he had walked the entire coast of the country. Later we went for a

meal with a mutual friend and ate black pasta. Although Portugal is a southern land it

has a slightly gothic sensibility or rather it is not as averse to phantasmagoric props as

we generally assume a sun-drenched culture should be. When I contrast and compare

my two attempts to walk from Figueira da Foz to Aveiro, I’m mildly surprised to note

that the first, despite its shorter duration, resulted in more strangeness than the

second, not merely in the form of the fireflies and scarlet moon, but also in one of the

very rare encounters with another human being I had on either walk. In the distance,

as I lumbered in the soft sand, a shape distorted by the heat haze was approaching me

on the stretch between Praia de Quiaios and Praia de Mira and there was something

not right about it. The distortion wasn’t wholly an optical illusion.

As the distance between us gradually narrowed, I finally worked out what it was.

A naked man carrying a small dog. He had no equipment with him, nothing but a pair

of sunglasses on his face and the animal cradled under one arm. The relentless heat of

the midday sun didn’t appear to bother him in the slightest; the fact there was no fresh

water available for many kilometres daunted him to no obvious degree. His gaze was

fixed resolutely on a point behind me and his pace was strong, his motion easy, as if

the sand he trod was different to mine. But they were the same. We drew level and

then passed each other. No word was spoken; I nodded but I don’t believe he inclined

his head even slightly. It was the dog that matched my glance and the dog that had the

courtesy to nod properly, just once, but in unmistakable greeting. I didn’t dare or care

to look back once we fully passed. And now I wonder if that man was a real person at

all or some sort of delusion or phantom, a bronzed perambulating ghost that had

forgotten to bring his attire along to the other side. But the dog was real, of that I am

convinced. And now I remember The Dalkey Archive and am intrigued by the idea

that close jolting proximity can exchange so many molecules between a man and dog

that their identities will be exchanged. That’s another solution.

© Rhys Hughes