Portugal 2009 - Day 3

As it’s our last day in Lisbon we’ve decided to explore the country outside of the main city areas. We’ve bought our one-day-go-everywhere tickets and armed with a bus/train map we’re off. Thinking about it now, we should have gone home the minute we found our bus tickets weren’t working.

What should happen is this: Get on bus. Swipe ticket in machine. Machine goes beep and displays green light. Go and sit down.

What actually happened is this: Got on bus. Swiped ticket in machine. Machine went beep and displayed red light. Swiped ticket again. Machine went beep and still displayed red light. Swiped ticket again, more forcibly this time. Machine went beep and displayed red light. Swiped ticket again. Wobbled it about a bit. Machine went beep and displayed red light. Rubbed ticket on T shirt (no, I don’t know why I did it either). Examined ticket carefully. Why? I don’t know, I don’t know. Looking at it serves no more useful purpose than opening the bonnet and staring at the engine when the car’s broken down. Somehow you’re trying to give the impression you know what you’re doing when in fact you haven’t a bloody clue. Swiped ticket again. Machine went beep and displayed red light. Looked at the bus driver. Looked at the queue of people behind me stretching down the road. Looked at the red light. Went and sat down anyway.

On the next bus it was exactly the same. Bloody red light again. The bus driver took the ticket, examined it carefully, gave it back and indicated we were to sit down. On the third bus it happened again. By now it was obvious that our newly purchased tickets were completely useless so every time we boarded a bus we had to explain to the driver we really, really had bought the tickets and weren’t just a couple of English hooligans trying to get a free ride. With this going on every time we changed buses the tour of the countryside was soon beginning to lose its appeal.

We were hoping to make a round trip out from Lisbon, through what looked like a National Park area on the map and back home in time for tea but I think it was after our third bus change that we realised we weren’t actually sure where the next bus would take us. We knew from the map which bus took us in the general direction we wanted to go but the bus we thought we needed next wasn’t shown on the bus stop we’d arrived at. Quite often it didn’t help matters when the bus stop for the next bus was in a different road. Which side of the road do you wait at? We didn’t know. Now when this sort of thing starts to happen it signifies the beginning of the end. An air of puzzlement, confusion, frustration and blame starts to materialise. (All the blame, I might add, was directed at the bus company for not providing the right bus numbers on their bus stop signs so that made us feel slightly better).

We ended up getting off another bus which had stopped outside a college. Why we got off there I don’t really remember but as I have no sense of direction whatsoever it seemed like as good a place as any to me. It was now midday and the students were pouring out of the college towards our bus stop. Pauline was engrossed in the map and surrounded by chattering students when she suddenly decided to ask one of them which of the buses on the bus stop board might take us in the general direction we wanted. The student looked blank, shrugged and said something about asking the bus driver. Thanks student. We didn’t think of that. With a brain like that she must have been taking meedja studies.

The rest is all a blur. I do remember getting yet another bus and asking the driver to tell us when to get off. He nodded and then completely forgot about us causing us to end up somewhere I can only describe as the Portuguese equivalent of the end of the Northern Line – a strange, alien, worrying sort of place with just a bus and metro station and a shopping mall. Absolutely nothing else and in the middle of nowhere.

It was at this point I realised we hadn’t a bloody clue where we were, nothing new for me but more worryingly, neither had Pauline. No idea how far we’d travelled. No idea how far still to go and more importantly as it was now mid-afternoon, no idea how long it would take. We were in this Godforsaken place with tickets that didn’t work and no idea how to get home. When suddenly we saw the metro station. “That’s it,” I said, “Forget about buses, the tour of the countryside, the picturesque drive through the National Park (wherever the hell it was). Let’s get the metro back to Lisbon.”

There was however one big snag. Although our tickets were valid for bus, tram and metro, they didn’t bloody work so would be utterly useless at the unmanned automatic ticket barriers on the metro. “We’re never going to get out of here alive,” I said, “we’re going to die out here in no man’s land. Everything’s against us.”

Pauline suddenly said, “I’ve had enough of this.” And marched off to the one and only bus information kiosk to ask why our tickets weren’t working. The lady took them and for the next hour, in between serving a constant stream of people, she tried to get to the bottom of the problem. And do you know what? We never found out why the tickets didn’t work but the nice lady issued us with two new all day tickets valid for three days as a goodwill gesture. It seemed churlish to tell her this was our last day and we only had a few hours left of it but it was a nice thought on her part. So armed with our new super duper tickets we breezed through the metro ticket barrier and caught a train which took us back to the centre of Lisbon in fifteen minutes.

The day had been a total disaster from start to finish and a complete and utter waste of time. But, hey, we’re off to Estoril tomorrow.

It can’t get any worse…can it?