Tag Archives: Cityscape

More looking around Lisbon

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Monday 24 August 2026 – The weather forecast for the morning was not one that encouraged tourism in any way at all, so we treated ourselves to a lie-in and a late breakfast. The Plan A for the day was to take the 15E tram to Belém, admire the monastery, tower and statue dedicated to Henry the Navigator before retiring to Belém’s famous Pie Shop to have one of their pastel de natas, which are world famous in Belem. We’re very fortunate that Jane checked out this plan in some detail in the morning, at which point we discovered that Belém is shut on a Monday. This gave us a fair chunk of the day back, and we decided that a visit to the castle was likely to be a decent thing to do. We relaxed for the rest of the morning whilst comparing the Met Office and Accuweather versions of the forecast to see when we could venture out.

In the end, the Met Office was more sanguine about the rain clearing so we decided to believe its version of the truth and headed out towards the castle via a coffee stop, which was educational in its way, both for us and the café staff. Our serving of choice for coffee is a flat white, which we thought translated into Portuguese as a meia de leite. The waitress insisted that a galão was what we were after, so we trusted her. Not that it’s a huge issue, but future coffee-drinking travellers might like to to note that a galão is effectively a latte, so if you want a flat white, don’t ask for one of them. We pointed out the similarity between galão and caffe latte to the waitress and hope that future visitors to that coffee shop will benefit from our experience.

We also passed some nice tile work,

particularly fine examples being at the viewpoint the Miradouro de Santa Luzia

which rather flattered to deceive, since the view it gave one was mainly of cruise ships in the harbour. I read that it’s at the head of an elevador, and indeed followed a sign pointing me at it. But I couldn’t find it and further research (thank you to my editor) informs us that it’s well disguised and looks like part of an apartment block, so it’s one of those things that IYKYK; Google Maps won’t help you find it.

The online map that Walk The Camino had sent us as part of our preparation was of the opinion that the Caminho actually started at Santa Luzia, rather than at the Cathedral, which would on the face of it seem to be a more intuitive place to start on your 610km journey. We cast around for a bit to see if we could find any evidence of this; Jane had noted that there was a Rua de Santiago, so that seemed a promising avenue, sorry, Rua of investigation,

and Jane eventually spotted this, on a building nearby, which turned out to be – wait for it – the church of Santiago de Lisboa!

So our online map was accurate, but I’m buggered if I saw any other signposts for a Caminho in the area, or, indeed anywhere else we’d been in the city.

We’d made a fair uphill journey (sans elevador,if you’ll pardon me mixing my languages) to get to Santa Luzia. The castle was further uphill. Everything in Lisbon is further uphill. This is a typical profile of a wander round Lisbon.

We made our way to the castle, for which Jane had bought tickets in advance – which is just as well, as the ticket office and entry were small-to-medium sized bundles of chaos in an otherwise relatively ordered world. We’d hoped to get on a 1pm English language guided tour, but long story short there wasn’t one, so we just wandered round to see what we could see.  And what we could see mainly was some very fine views across the city.

Across the water is the Santuário de Cristo Rei, with its (slightly) junior version of the Rio de Janeiro Christ statue,

and we got a lovely panorama of the city

as well as a view of things we’d seen in passing yesterday with Carlos: the ruins of the Carmo Convent;

the “under maintenance” Elevador Santa Justa;

and the Graça church (if you look carefully, you can see the funicular carriage in transit).

We could also make out about half of the Star of David fountain in Praça Martim Moniz, the gateway to the Jewish quarter.

Lisbon was under Moorish rule for almost 450 years from 711. The fortress was built in the 10th century and was captured by King Afonso Henriques during the Siege of Lisbon in 1147, part of the great Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors. Because we didn’t manage to get on to a guided tour, we didn’t learn much more about the castle, but it was pleasant to wander around. Entry to the main part is over a moat

which Carlos had told us (with, I think, a certain ghoulish relish) was filled with human excrement as a way of discouraging invaders. This was in its day, you understand. Modern health and safety would have something to say about it these days.

The walls and parapets are extremely well-preserved and accessible.

There are several items of interest, such as this sundial

and arrow slits constructed so that bows could be shot in multiple directions.

All in all it was an enjoyable hour or so we spent wandering around. There are peacocks in the grounds and we saw two peahens, each with their chicks of differing ages, which were rather cute.

We had a very engaging encounter just outside the exit of the castle. A sign invited us to look inside the Castle’s church, the Church of Santa Cruz, labelled “Lisbon’s birthplace”*, and so, on a whim, we did.  It’s nothing particularly spectacular inside,

although the altar piece is lavishly decorated.

What marked it out was a chance conversation with a young lady who was busy doing detailed conservation work on some of the elaborate curlicues.

She explained to us what she was doing: applying a white base to smooth out the outlines of the feature; then she would apply some red colour (which you can see in places already set); and finally she would apply gold leaf

which would be burnished in once it was well and truly stuck down. She was delightful to talk to and very patient with our dumb questions.

The walk back to the hotel led past a few other sights of note: some street art;

a shop with a bizarre range of artefacts on display

including, delightfully, Christ on a bicycle,

an image which will stay with me whever I need to swear; some more lovely azulejas,

and the excavation site of a Roman theatre.

which once would have looked like this.

There was a wall with a lovely demonstration of anti-aliasing (Google that, if necessary)

a café which actually had flat white on the menu,

and the church of St.Anthony

with its vivid floral display,

which Jane managed to get a picture of between the hordes of people using it as the backdrop for fucking selfies.

For our dinner, we went to an area we’d first noted in our search for Earl Grey (we’d thought that an Auchan, even a little local one, might have some, but no….). It’s a cross road to the Rua Augusta, which has any number of touristy eateries along it, but one restaurant among all the others called to us

mainly because it was the only one not to have pictures of its food on display. It was called Em Alta Na Baixa,  and it was very good – a fitting note on which to (pretty much) end our stay in Lisbon.

We will meet Carlos tomorrow and he has, he tells us, plans for about an hour more of showing us around Lisbon before he takes us off to Sintra – where he will be our guide the day after. Sintra appears to have all manner of strange and wonderful Things To See, and we’ve never been there before, so we’re rather looking forward to it and hope that you now are, also, and will stay in touch with these pages to see how we got on.

 

 

*  The Igreja Paroquial do Castelo, also known as the Church of Santa Cruz, is an 18th century building within the castle walls, occupying the site of the old fortress mosque (which itself was on the site of a Roman temple). Since the mosque was purified and consecrated as a Christian church immediately upon the reconquest of Lisbon on 25 October 1147, and the church holds the city’s oldest administrative parish records, it merits the title “Lisbon’s birthplace”.

 

Learning more about Lisbon

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Sunday 23 August 2026 – We had a date with Carlos, who would be our guide for a walking tour of Lisbon, at 10am, so we didn’t have to leap out of bed with too much alacrity. The hotel has a small restaurant for providing breakfast, and I’d nominated 0830 as the likely time of our arrival. It was a buffet breakfast, with many good things on it, which I largely ignored for a chorizo sandwich. The major disappointment with it was a complete lack of any Earl Grey tea we could snaffle to supplement our supplies, but we thought we might be able to find some in the shops; otherwise it was a decent and ample breakfast.

Since we had time spare before our date with Carlos, I took the opportunity to walk along to Rua Augusta to see if I could capture some of its charm, and particularly the very typical  Lisbon use of mosaics on the pedestrian areas, before it got all full of people again. One thing I remember very clearly from previous visits to Lisbon is the very charming use of black-and-white tiles to make patterns in the pavements.

These are evidence simultaneously of the effort that must have gone into laying them in the first place, and the lack of maintenance in recent times. Rua Augusta, though, notable as it is, is mosaically in a good place.

Since that put me near the Praça do Comércio again, I took the further opportunity to get some photos there, too.

We met Carlos at the hotel and immediately headed back towards the Praça do Comércio, which gave him the chance to explain some of the history behind what we were seeing. Had we arrived in 1756, the scene would have been one of utter devastation, since there had been a major earthquake (estimated at 7.7 magnitude and only some 40km to the south) on November 1, 1755. November 1 is All Saints Day, and many people were at church, leaving candles lit for the occasion – in wooden houses. So buildings fell and fires raged. As well, a tsunami hit, which completely wiped out the square we were standing on and all the buildings around it – 85% of Lisbon’s buildings were destroyed.

The king, Joseph 1, and his prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal, survived the earthquake and set about rebuilding the city. The buildings we see around the square today are this Pombaline legacy – architecturally simple and with an elegance directly influenced by Parisian architecture.  All the ruins behind the square were flattened and the streets rebuilt on a grid pattern. The yellow colour of the buildings denotes their original purpose of being government buildings. Other colours were used for other functions or in other quarters of the city, like this one.

Apparently, Praça do Comércio spent much of the 1990s as a car park!

Carlos then took us generally northwards, past the Elevador de Santa Justa

a wonderful structure designed by a pupil of Gustav Eiffel to address the very hilly nature of Lisbon, now sadly closed ever since a tragic accident with one of the city’s distinctive funiculars, which meant that they, and the elevador, had to be closed for “maintenance”, although it would appear that neglect was a major contributor to the disaster.

We continued northwards to another major square, the Praça Dom Pedro IV.

You can see old Peter the Fourth above the trees there. He was a Good King, having managed to achieve great things (recapturing Lisbon from his hated brother Miguel, establishing the monarchy as constitutional) before dying young. His statue

dominates the square, but Carlos told us a story that the statue might not actually be of Peter, but of Maximilian 1 of Mexico. The story goes that Italian statue makers had created a statue of Max, but he died so they offered it to Lisbon at a bargain price; it was mounted very high so that the people couldn’t see that it wasn’t actually Peter. A close up of the face

does show a visage resembling Max rather than Peter, it must be said.

Maximilian 1 of Mexico
Peter IV of Portugal

We continued northwards towards the Jewish and Moorish quarters, in doing so passing remnants of the old walls of the city,

and the ruins of the Carmo Convent,

a 14th-century Carmelite convent which fell into ruin during the 1755 earthquake.

We were heading into the more working class areas of Lisbon, and it showed;

it’s even more dilapidated than the downtown areas. Among the general downbeat air, though, can be found some of the decorative architectural flourishes typical of the city.

as well as hints about its topology.

The decorative tiling seen elsewhere can be seen here, too, particularly on the buildings in the better-off areas;

tiles are an excellent architectural tool, since they don’t fade like paintwork does, and also can be replaced piecemeal should some break or fall.

The Moorish areas are Mouraria and Alfama and are distinguished by, among other things, the narrow and labyrinthine street layout.

This is the area where the distinctively mournful musical style of Fado is widely said to have originated. The street above features street art depicting many of the most influential figures in the early 20th-century development of Fado.

Fernando Mauricio
Amália Rodrigues, whose skill established a female presence in Fado

These two, and others, are celebrated in artworks along this street,

and there are other artworks dedicated to the tradition, too.

Fado singing is traditionally accompanied by two guitars, one of which is a special Fado-style instrument
Detail of the Fado guitar

We started to see increasing amounts of street art in this area.

and Carlos led us up streets and staircases featuring a bewildering varety of art works.

Much of it sprang from a project to address mental health and community spirit.

and some of the work was of immensely high quality,

and some artists had contributed multiple images, like Gnomo (who painted the other chameleon, above).

The area where this street art can be found is called Graça, and the steps we climbed led to its church.

We looked in, but a service was under way, so we didn’t stay long.

Just outside the church is a splendid miradouro (viewpoint), giving a great view of the castle

and an overview of the city.

At the bottom of the picture you can see the one remaining functional funicular, the Graça funicular, which is more modern than the ones that are currently “in maintenance”, albeit run by the same company.

Around this area can be seen some larger-scale street artworks, many of which have the theme of female empowerment (a relatively recent concept in Portugal, it has to be said).

At this point the rain, which had been sporadic up to that point, became really heavy.

so we stopped in at a charming little coffee shop, Condes da Praia,

where we treated ourselves to some traditional Portuguese pastel de nata – delicious custard tarts before calling it a day and catching a cab back to the hotel.

Carlos had done a splendid job of showing us some of the parts of Lisbon we wouldn’t otherwise have seen, and we’re delighted to learn that he will also be our guide in Sintra, where we travel in a couple of days’ time.

We relaxed for a while back at the hotel until housekeeping ushered us out so they could tidy the room. Since by that stage the sun was beginning to shine through, we decided to see if we could get up to the top of the triumphal arch at the base of Rua Augusta so we headed that way. It was clear, from the aroma in the air, that the amount of rain we’d had during the thunderstorm was more than Lisbon’s drains were prepared to deal with.

The entry fee for the arch is €5 per head, and for this you get a lift ride almost all the way up, which is great. There are still 74 steps to complete the journey, but that’s a lot fewer than it might have been. And the view you get from the top is wonderful, even if the aroma from the street was still perceptible.

I had particularly wanted to be able to show the patterns of the mosaics along Rua Augusta, and this was the perfect viewpoint. I was very taken with the reflections of sunlight from the windows in this picture.

We also took the opportunity to look into the church near the hotel which has the fantastic façade we’d seen yesterday, the church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição Velha.

This picture makes it look quite plain, but it isn’t. The altar is quite something,

the ceiling is beautiful

and there are many carved figures around, some with very lifelike features.

They’ve also taken some of the guesswork (and the reliance on donations) out of setting candles.

We finished our wanderings at Pata Negra, a Portuguese Tapas and Steakhouse, which served us a very fine meal (and G&Ts!), before heading back to the hotel.

So, thanks to Carlos we’ve learned a lot about Lisbon that we didn’t know and seen a lot we probably would have missed. The weather prospects tomorrow morning are conducive to taking a late breakfast, but we can wander about a bit more during the afternoon. Who knows what we may stumble across? Check back soon to find out!

 

Day 2 – Cistern Analysis Day

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Saturday 9 May 2026 – Warning! Long Post Alert!

The day kicked off with the usual holiday-starter activity: trying to make sense of the hotel breakfast buffet. This went off reasonably well, despite the lack of any form of Earl Grey tea; one can eat a decent breakfast here. So we were ready for the off at 0830 and our group convened and headed out to the bus, which was parked down near the restaurant where we had had dinner last night. Accordingly, we clambered on board and

immediately got stuck in traffic.  The traffic congestion on Istanbul’s main roads is quite something to behold. Our driver, Mostafa, stuck to his task, and eventually delivered us to Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum, which is in a central area on the city’s Golden Horn isthmus. All of the day’s attractions were in this area, so we bade Mostafa farewell until he would pick us up at the end of our peregrinations. 

 It’s immediately obvious that one is at the Archaeological Museum as soon as you walk through the gate.

Seçkin organised tickets and equipped us all with those earpiece receiver thingies that immediately mark one out as a tourist, and took us in to its inner compound,

where Jim and he gathered us round for a briefing.

I’m not greatly into either museum visits or archaeology, so I dare say that a lot of what he said shot over my head, but the basic idea would be that we would tour some of the galleries whilst Jim held forth about what we were looking at. The building, indeed the museum itself, came about because the Ottoman Sultan Abdülaziz, who ruled between 1861–1876 ordered one to be built after seeing and being impressed by archaeological museums across Europe which he visited in the summer of 1867.  The first curator and founder of the museum was Osman Hamdi Bey, a painter and archaeologist, and, building on his initial work in the late 19th century, the museum has a large collection of Turkish, Hellenistic and Roman artifacts, many gathered from the vast former territories of the Ottoman Empire.

We went in and both Jane and I took a lorra lorra pictures, many of which now puzzle me. We started off in the gallery which features several notable sarcophagi, including one which was prepared for Alexander the Great.

The carving on this huge sarcophagus is very detailed and ornate. One thing that interested me was the fact that it still had some of the original colouring on it.

There were several other notable sarcophagi there, also, as any fule kno, taken from the Ayaa necropolis of Sidon.

Sarcophagus of the mourning women

Lycian sarcophagus of Sidon

We went through galleries dedicated to Hellenic and Roman periods,

with Jim pointing out various arcane details that, I’m afraid, rather failed to excite me. A couple of things resonated, though. There was an exhibit of Emperor’s heads

among which was that of Diocletian, whose palace in Split, Croatia, we’d wandered around, courtesy of, as it happens, the other Peter Sommer trip we have taken part in, way back in 2018.

There was a statue of Hadrian, whose wall we hope to walk some time next year,

and a (probably fanciful) artist’s impression of what the Colosseum in Rome might have looked like before people started to use bits of it to build other buildings.

Another exhibit the museum is proud to possess is a snake’s head from the Serpentine Column erected in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, having been taken from its original location in Delphi.

By this stage I think we were all quite artefacted out and I certainly was glad for the opportunity to take a coffee break in the museum cafe. Hard by the cafe is a lapidarium, or a collection of old bits of stone, and Jane went to take some photos.

It includes, inter alia, a Medusa’s head.

She looks rather unimpressed, don’t you think?

Coffee stop over, we walked along the streets, trying not to get run over by the trams,

which apparently provide a great service, but which take up a lot of space on the roads. Unsurprisingly it’s a fairly tourist-heavy area.

We soon reached our next destination, which was the Basilica Cistern, the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath the city. Western usage associates the word cistern with toilets, but actually it’s a general term for any waterproof receptacle. This one was built by the Emperor Justinian in the early 6th century, to store water for the Topkapi Palace and other buildings in the city. Its name comes from the fact that above it was once a large public square where stood a huge basilica, and it was needed because Constantinople was not built on a river big enough to supply the city’s needs.  (The Romans, indeed, built a vast, 268km aqueduct to supply Constantinople with water from springs at Danımandere and Pınarca.)

It being subterranean, one descends into it, and it’s immediately apparent going down the steps that it’s going to be an impressive – though hopefully not an immersive – experience.

It is vast, and the noise of people milling about in it makes a significant impression.

The columns supporting the roof were apparently reused from other buildings. Whatever, they make for a very photogenic environment.

It’s very well curated, easy to get around, despite all the people taking fucking selfies,

and some modern artworks have been sprinkled around for variety.

It’s not just the columns that were reused, either; a couple of Medusa heads have found their way in to prop up some stonework, although they’re not in what you might call the normal orientation – apparently in an attempt to negate any turning-to-stony vibes they might still possess!

After our cistern visit, Jim led us past the cutely-named tourist bus service

towards Sultanahmet Square. We could see the looming presence of Hagia Sofia, sadly covered in scaffolding for a major refurb but still just about visitable (see later among these pages) 

and we passed the the Milion Stone (note: one “l”),

which is the post standing beside the tall construction. The tall thing was part of an Ottoman water tower, an important part of regulating water flow to various parts of the city. The post doesn’t look much, but it actually marked the start of the main street known as the Mese during the Byzantine era and, fundamentally, the point from which all distances from Constantinople were measured.

As he led us towards the square, Jim filled in some of the many, many gaps in my historical understanding of Rome and its empire. Constantinople is named for the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, who ruled from AD 306 to 337, founded the city of Constantinople in the location which had been the Greek city of Byzantium, and made it the capital of the Empire, which it remained for over a millennium. At the time, though, the Roman Empire was in decline, having somewhat split into two parts, the Western and Eastern Empires, ruled by, respectively Maximian in the west and our old mate Diocletian in the east. Long story short (as I understand these things) Constantine emerged victorious in the civil war between these two factions and became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire in 324 AD. He also converted to Christianity, which influenced much of the subsequent development of the Empire.

Anyhoo, Sultanahmet Square.

It’s a large open space where the Constantinople Hippodrome once stood (not a theatre, but an actual racecourse for chariot races, and quite a large one, too – the largest outside Rome, apparently). In the distance in the photo above, you can see an obelisk.  It’s the Obelisk of Theodosius, the ancient Egyptian obelisk of Pharaoh Thutmose III, first erected during the 18th dynasty of Egypt. It was re-erected here in 390 AD in the Hippodrome of Constantinople by the Roman emperor Theodosius I.

One might think “seen one obelisk, seen ’em all”, but Jim gave us some interesting context to its construction.  Firstly, it’s mounted not on a stone base, but on four bronze blocks

They were put there during the re-erection of the obelisk and it seems that they act as a stabilising mechanism to dampen oscillations; there have been quakes which have destroyed buildings but left the obelisk standing. 

The obelisk’s plinth has four faces, each of which tells a story

Submission of the barbarians
The Emperor and his court and cheerleaders
The Emperor offers laurels of victory in the games and brings on the dancing girls
Erecting the obelisk

Just a bit along the square is what remains of the Serpent Fountain, the sole remaining head of which we had seen in the archaeological museum.

This picture gives an idea of how much higher the present square ground level is than the original hippodrome surface.

After our walk around the square, it was lunchtime. Or, strictly speaking, nearly lunchtime, since we were ahead of schedule and the restaurant wasn’t quite ready for us yet. So we rested in the shade by the square. At one o’clock, we heard the Muslim call to prayer, from multiple sources. Hagia Sofia, once a church but now a mosque, was one; the Blue Mosque was another.

I found it amusing to think of the muezzin calls from these two sources as competing with each other in increasing franticness.

Nearby was a feature of Istanbul which I think is unique – a cat feeding machine.

People can put coins in and it dispense food intended for any passing cats, although a crow seemed to be seeking to muscle in on the action.  Istanbul is a very cat-friendly city, and there were cats wherever we went, this square being no exception.

We eventually made our way to lunch, which was in a street that featured a lot of eateries.

Ours was called Galeyan, and offered main course from the grill

as well as copious numbers of starters and a nice line in inflated bread (yes, I have a photo. No, you can’t see it).  

After lunch we visited a couple of mosques.  The first was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha Mosque, a 16th-century Ottoman mosque. Visiting it meant that the ladies in the group had to cover their hair. Not everyone had remembered to bring a scarf, so, well, who’d a thunk it, here’s a stall which will sell you a nice cheap scarf.

The walk to the mosque took us past a view of the Bosporus,

which was a remarkable sight – so many ships waiting for permission to proceed up the strait, which has a sophisticated traffic management system so that ships don’t crash into each other in the strong and rapid currents.

The Sokollu Mehmed mosque is a very decorative affair.  Seçkin took us through a lot of the detail about the tiling and ornamentation, but I’m afraid much of it passed me by. It’s an attractive space,

with some beautiful tiling work

After a short visit, we moved on to another mosque, called the “Little Hagia Sophia”

This was originally the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, built in the 6th century and converted to mosque in the 16th century during the Ottoman Empire.

John Julius Norwich, a modern historian of the East Roman Empire, has written that the church “by the originality of its architecture and the sumptuousness of its carved decoration, ranks in Constantinople second only to St Sophia itself”, so it may not have the huge size of Hagia Sophia, but it has a significant presence.

Our next stop was a carpet shop. Well, actually, it was to see the cistern below the carpet shop. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect; actually the cistern itself wasn’t that big a deal.

What made it interesting were the exhibits set up inside, which had once featured in an event called Byzantium 1200 AD, a project aimed at creating computer reconstructions of the Byzantine monuments located in Istanbul, as of the year, erm,1200 AD. There’s an intriguing map

and a lot of focus on the Hippodrome, with a diagram showing how it might have looked

and, indeed, a model.

A detail on one of the diagrams showed what the central isle of the Hippodrome course might have looked like.

You can see the Theodosius obelisk. And close beside it

is how the Serpent Fountain might have appeared. This was a nice way of adding flesh to the bare bones of what we’d actually seen in Sultanahmet Square.

Our final visit was to eat dinner. En route there we passed a couple of shop windows which underlined the ubiquity of cats in Istanbul life

and, indeed, a cat, luxuriating in its status of favoured animal,

before arriving at our attractively wisteria-festooned restaurant, Giritli.

The meal followed the well-established Istanbul dining pattern – multiple starters before main course and dessert.  There were separate cold starter and hot starter courses, too! Jane and I dealt with this excess of food in the only way we knew, which was to eat the cold starters only and refuse all further food. Well, honesty compels me to tell you that Jane did have a dessert, but fundamentally this tactic meant that we stopped eating reasonably early and didn’t have the prospect of going to bed on a full stomach. The food we did have was delicious and all the others (not the entire group, but just the English quotient, as the Americans had departed earlier for a meal of their own) said that their food was lovely, too.

Mostafa came to take us back to the hotel, which seemed good in theory, but in practice fell foul of Istanbul’s traffic, quite possibly made worse by the fact that there was a high-profile footie match on, and the police had closed some roads around the stadium. The practical upshot was that we decided to get out and walk the final five minutes to the hotel as it would have taken Mostafa and our coach about half an hour.

We also decided to address the urgent lack of Earl Grey tea in our possession. Just down the road from the hotel there was a mini-mart and it actually stocked Earl Grey – Lipton’s rather than Twinings finest, but any port in a storm, you understand. 

And so to bed, after spending not a few minutes trying to work out the hotel room’s lighting system, which, for some reason, switched off the USB charging points if you turned off the “Do Not Disturb” light. So we had an undisturbed, fully USB-charged night in preparation for another action-packed morrow. This will be more bus-based so we can range further in search of Things To See; what we got up to will be revealed in good time – stay tuned!