From Lisboa to Albufeira

Welcome back to our Portugal chronicles, friends. As our youngest daughter advised, she of travel to Portugal in years past, we were visiting Lisboa, not Lisbon (even though it’s one and the same)! That’s how Lisbon is often spelled locally.

As to our short but so full couple of days’ stay in the gorgeous city, of Lisboa (Just learned it’s pronounced LishhhBOa, by the way) after being up for more than 24 hours travelling to get there, retrospect suggests that next time we take a couple of days to recover from our trip across the Atlantic Ocean before trying to visit every site in Lisboa though that’s all we had time for this trip as we were leaving for Albufeira in two days after arrival.

If you are just arriving on this site, this is the continuation of the chronicles of our first ever trip to Portugal from our home in eastern Ontario, Canada. To read the first page relating our travel to Portugal this point follow this link! 

How did we get from Lisboa to the Algarve?

Options for travelling throughout Portugal abound, including using the express high speed trains on which we do love to travel when in Europe. However, an excellent advisor in Albufeira suggested we consider the Flixbus to Albufeira instead of the train given the travel time between the two locations was the same yet the Flixbus cost was lower. We more than considered it, we took the Flixbus to Albufeira!

The main Flixbus terminal in Lisbon is beside the Oriente train terminal. Bus islands for various bus companies including Flixbus hang off one end of the train station like a concrete and asphalt wen. It is a bus terminal after all, and shows the grind of dozens of buses arriving and departing, passengers being careless with garbage and the hundreds of pigeons cooing and crapping from the concrete high  overhead.

We arranged for an Uber from our hotel to arrive at the Flixbus terminal. Make sure they know you are going to the Oriente Flixbus before you leave. Our Uber picked us up about 90 minutes before departure and we had an hour’s wait at the Flixbus island after arrival.

Where the Flixbus arrives and leaves is not the first, not the second but the third or fourth island from where a cab or Uber will drop you off. When slugging your luggage over curb, island, curb, driveway, curb, island etc. etc.,  be vigilant. Buses swing in and out with much speed.

If you traverse the rest of the islands towards the actual terminal there’s a dandy little shop on the left into which you can enter, sit, and get  coffee or drink or food, whatever, and use their washrooms if needs be.

I mention the WCs as even though the Flixbus website boasts that their coaches have WCs on board, for some reason the beacon for the WC on our bus  indicated it was not available during the entire trip from Lisboa to Albufeira. The driver did stop some time into the journey at a gas  / comfort / food station where facilities were available. Can’t promise that’s the way on every trip, but was on ours.

Time for break!

Typing is thirsty work. I’ve enjoying a glass of a very lovely red wine, purchased at one of the local food stores here in Albufeira. It is GOOD and a deal at $8 when purchased. Turns out when I checked the exchange, it was actually $7. For those that care, beer costs about half the price of Ontario too, and so far, I haven’t found a bad beer here in Portugal!

Now, back to our Flixbus ride.

Expect to sling your own luggage on Flixbus!

I was kind of taken aback when our bus rolled in and the big doors on both sides were lifted. The driver went back to the front door, and it was the passengers that both removed their luggage from their just completed trip, or stowed their own luggage for the trip they were about to take. Since I’m very clever, I managed to pile our very heavy bags on top of those of someone who had just arrived on that bus and hadn’t taken their bags off yet. Confusing? Yes, and a pain the … back, literally. Be aware!

As the buses roll in, and there are lots, there’s either a scrolling sign up top or a paper sign on the passenger side of the windshield that identifies that bus number and typically the END destination of that bus. The end destination for our bus was Faro.  Albufeira was a stop previous on the way to Faro.

The bus number you’ll want to take will be displayed on your electronic ticket. If the bus you thought was yours doesn’t show your destination ask the driver if they are going to where you booked for though typically when you book online (fast and easy) they get it right!

Our Flixbus was a typical modern passenger bus a la Prevost car (a Cdn manufacturer) meaning no real space in the overhead compartment except for squashed soft sided bags, quite comfortable if somewhat narrow seats and as is the norm any more, if you are taller than 5’8″ and have more than a whippets body mass, yeah, you’re gonna get scrunched.

We rolled out exactly on time for our 3 hours 15 minutes bus ride, including the one stop.

Experience proves that photos from a moving bus rarely turn out clear so I apologize for not having any to show. Perhaps it’s enough to say that once the trip over the Vasco de Gama Bridge was complete and we were rolling southwards from Lisboa, the scenery was lovely, with lots of vineyards, farms, and white house after white house dotting the fields and up the rolling hills. A nice ride. Also, a most impressive bridge I hasten to add. I tried to get a picture for you and failed – Google ‘Images Vasco da Gama Bridge’ if you wish to see this awesome structure!

Approaching Algarve

We felt a frisson of excitement when we spotted the first Algarve sign. It was another thirty minutes before we saw the signs for Albufeira, and not long after we were deposited at the Flixbus stop at our Albufeira destination. It’s an outside stop with almost no shelter. We thought ourselves fortunate that it was a sunny, warmish day on this 28th of January.

The Albufeira Flixbus stop is about 100  metres north of the Old Town. A walk down the hill from the Albufeira Flixbus terminal on Ave. Liberdade and you will be surrounded by old town buildings. We didn’t know this when we arrived in Albufeira, so we ordered up an Uber car from where we had exited the bus and in a few minutes we were on our way to our second Albufeira rental, second because the owner of our first rental sold the apartment we had rented!

The owner sold our original rental out from under us.

About a week and a half before we left Canada, Jacky – our rental agent in the Algarve – who has been managing apartments here for ten years, messaged that our rental apartment owners had decided to sell.

Fortunately, the rental agent had a number of other properties under his management, and sent us links to them but we now had only a short time to determine where we would rent before heading for the Canadian airport and our flight to Portugal.

Anyway, long story short, we had to make a decision quickly from the few properties that were still available so late in the game. We opted for the one that was closest to our original location, but still twice the walking distance to old Albufeira than the apartment we’d originally booked.

An Albufeira rental disaster!

We met up with our rental agent at the address of our rental building and he proudly took us to our apartment located on the 1st floor,  what I assumed would be the ground floor but here is the 2nd. There were stairs. Darn! Lots of luggage to carry up. Fortunately that issue was resolved when we found there was a lift, but only big enough for part of the luggage and one person at a time.

The elevator door opened to a chorus of barks. Our agent assured us that the dog next door only barked when someone came to the floor. Great!

With a flourish our agent flung the door to our prospective apartment open. We wandered in, feeling our hearts sink lower and lower as we moved from room to room. Our rental guy was surprised that I said I thought it was a dump. In retrospect that might have been a bit over the top, but then, this wasn’t the apartment we originally rented about six months before and this one sure didn’t have the amenities of that one. Also, we were very, very tired from travel.

Caution. The photos on the Air BnB and VRBO are usually real however, you have no idea when those photos were actually taken. It could have been years before. Nor do they show the bumps and bruises that reveal themselves after you’ve moved in and had time to actually absorb the reality of the new place!

A whizz bang Albufeira rental agent!

At the end of this paragraph I’m going to give you contact information for Jacky Fernandes, the rental guy that we found on Air B&B, because of how he handled the unfortunate situation we had when our originally booked apartment fell through. He manages a number of apartments in and around Albufeira. This is still the off season here, thankfully, so there we still other apartments we could view, some of which were not always listed on the rental sites.

Away went us tired, cranky two, Sue still feeling a little under the weather,  both of us groggy from too much travel for us seniors. He zipped us all around Albufeira showing apartment after apartment. Soon we couldn’t remember which was which and became confused with trying to keep them straight in our mind and where they were with reference to old town Albufeira which is where we wanted to be.

He and his partner Kenny worked hard and didn’t abandon us though no doubt we frustrated the heck out of them. Despite having a deadline to finish tasks for other renters in other apartments that same day and we were taking hours longer than was expected, he hustled us around apartment after apartment until he eventually presented a rental we considered appropriate and which we rented.

They then drove us back to where we had stored our luggage in apartment number one (the dump!), ferried us and our luggage back to the new digs, helped us move in, showed us how things worked (which we promptly forgot) then drove us to the local grocery store and waited while I zipped up and down aisles, trying to understand what the Portuguese words meant while chasing items on our short list of immediate needs. Once I had enough “stuff” to keep us going until we got our feet under us, he took me back to our new apartment again and helped me cart groceries in. That, my friends, is service!

Who is he?

Check out: www.myalgarverentals.com   (Top left on his home page the language is shown as Portugal PT. It’s a drop down menu where you can select the language of choice.)

Jacky manages properties that aren’t always on the big rental sites like Air BnB and VRBO. He’s honest, reliable, and already addressed every single issue we had about our new rental. You’d do yourself a disservice if you are planning a trip to Portugal and didn’t contact him to see what he has to offer. If you do, tell him Bill & Sue from Canada referred you. I’ll bet you’ll get a great deal!

Update: Over and above the info about our rental experience above, I’ll soon be adding a page about how to find your rental in Portugal. I plan on adding a link here when I do.

When we got to Albufeira, fearing we didn’t believe him, Jacky showed us the listing for our original rental and the notice of its sale.

Our Albufeira Digs.

We ended up quite a bit farther out from Old Albufeira than we wanted about an hour long up and down hike for this slow walker.

The apartment has two floors which we didn’t need or want. It is clean, spacious and that we did.

It also came with a higher rental cost. At our strong complaint he did lower the more expensive rental to a level that our budget could handle, just, though above what we expected to pay based on our original booking.

We haven’t even wandered around here yet, still settling in. Above is a photo out one of our bedroom windows. Yes, that is a bougainvillea flourishing off to one side of the lanai, flowers popping out all over, on January 29/24.

This is being written at the end of day two in Albufeira. We’ve only just begun to discover what the Algarve has to offer. The next page on this site will be about wandering Albufeira and all the things we do here, along with many photos, I promise. Do tune in, won’t you?