(Portugal)…I decided to get off the main E-4 motorway in northern Portugal at the town of Mirandela. There was no rhyme or reason for this, just that I had become bored, even though as far as motorways go, Portugal has to have some of the world’s emptiest. I was heading into the lonely region of Tras-os-Montes, all those esses pronounced with drawn-out esh sounds. I took a lonely road, and then I took a lonelier one and found myself in a space of a short time in two villages not even on my map. The first was named Soeima, the second Gebelim. There is little information to be found on them, other than the first has a population of 180, the second, 259, and that the name of Gebelim derives from an Arab word jabalain, which means “between two mountains.” The village’s crest was wonderful, two intercutting mountains and a black boar beneath two olive sprigs. A Roman bridge is in the area, and its church is dedicated to St. Martin.
It did feel that this region hugging the inside of the Spanish border was twice removed. Firstly, it is in Portugal, not Spain; secondly, it is difficult to get to if you do decided to make it to Portugal, as inevitably one first goes to either Porto or Lisbon. This is a realm where bear and wolves still exist and the locals play a form of bagpipe, together with their cousins in the Spanish province of Galicia to the north, called a gaita, played by a bagpiper called a gateiro and made from the wood of fruit trees: apple, cherry and olives.
The mountains I was passing through had the name of the Serra de Bornes, which added to the sense of the imposing country I was in. I strolled around both Soeima (the subject of the photograph above) and Gebelim. This is the land that tourists want to see—stubble-chinned ancients trying to pull stubborn mules off hay carts parked beside stuttering fountains and widows dressed in black shawls and headscarves tapping across cobblestone lanes with canes. 
A considerably larger town was Mogadouro, which has both a castle and a church and a name suggesting I was nearing the area’s famous wine-producing valley. When Mogadouro first got its start, the Douro River was a narrow river with occasional rapids. Today, it has changed dramatically, with heavily terraced vineyards and a series of dams that flooded the valley and allow pleasure craft on wine-tasting adventures access all the way into Spain and its Duero River (same river, different spelling). After a very comfortable night at the new Aquapura Douro Valley hotel (www.aquapurahotels.com/douro), I went back to my idea of remoteness and visited two monasteries a little farther west, in the villages of São João do Tarouca and Salzedas.
To reach the first I went through another little village called Mondim, where nearly every house is undergoing renovation. This is because the wife of the most successful Portuguese banker is from there, and together they practically brought the village. São João lacks the money but is blessed in other ways. Its cathedral with ruined Cistercian monastery (although some priests do live adjacent) dating to 1113 boasts a nationally famous painting of St. Peter by Gaspar Vaz, a student of Grão Vasco, also known as Vasco Fernandes. A very similar painting hangs in a museum in nearby Viseu. It is noteworthy for its depiction of Portugal’s then king dressed in pontifical purple, his face made to resemble a peasant, with rough features and a bold statement that where the regal power lays so does the religious.
I almost tripped over the tomb of Pedro Afonso, who as well as being the Count of Barcelos (where the country’s famous painted roosters are carved in tribute to the legend of an accused murderer being spared at the eleventh hour) was also the illegitimate son of the country’s King Dinis and the author of a work on the old enemy Spain entitled Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344. I like the idea of history books dedicated to just one year and written by someone not from the country chronicled. I think this should be encouraged. Have the history of, say, Canada chronicled by someone from Swaziland or Papua New Guinea, who may or may not have been there. Portugal’s noble laureate in literature, José Saramago, came here and wrote in his travel book on the country, “In spite of which, the traveler knows he has never been here before, knows he has never visited São João de Tarouca, has never crossed this tiny bridge, never seen these hollowed-out grassy riverbanks or the ruined building in front of him, or the arches of the aqueduct (and now, as he writes, he is not sure he has seen them this time either), this short incline leading firstly up to the church door, then down again to the town.” On the way to the second monastery, I stopped in Ucanha, which has a relatively steeply arched bridge dating to the 12th century that crosses the River Barosa.
Part of the bridge has a stone roof under which is a long line of stone seating where monks from the monastery in Salzedas used to sit and collect tolls from travellers. In the church in Salzedas the wooden pews where the priests lined up also had seating, ingenious wooden protuberances that would allow the priests to spread out their cassocks over so it still appeared as though they stood throughout the long masses. The monastery at Salzedas is more fascinating and crumbling than the one in São João and like so many times experienced by Saramago, I, too, had to search for the villager who had the responsibility of holding the key.
When he arrived, it solved one of my long-standing questions as I have travelled around Iberia—where do all the old men who stand around outside cafés and churches comes from? Well, here was living proof that there is a steady stream of up-and-comers biding their time to take the place of the nonagenarians. He was pleasant, and as the heavy wooden door creaked open, we stepped into a musty quadrant of chipped stone, invading plants and broken paving slabs. It dates to 1168. Supposedly, there is a renovation project under way, has been since 10 years ago, it’s just that no one has got around to doing anything yet. An English couple owned one room off the quadrant, I was told. There was nothing special about the room, any more so than the calm, decayed wonder of all of it, so I asked why they—anyone—would want to own this particular spot. The guide had no answers, and then it turned out that the owners’ family came to Portugal in 1752.
It is true that many of the grand port- and wine-producing families of the area (if the room is owned by one of these) originated in England, and the Netherlands, and tend to marry to members of other vintners, but it seemed odd yet magnificent that they would be described as English when there would be in most probability little difference between them and anyone else in the area. Salzedas also has a crumbling Jewish quarter. It is small, three or four minuscule alleys and a heap of rooms piled on top of one another. The sewage system smelt as it would have done—or worse—than when the monastery was built. Only one small flat looked as if though it had had some attention. When you stepped out of the quarter back into the square in front of the church, the light was blinding.

(Maine, New York, etc)…I recently took two trips north of New York City, so as to see parts of my “backyard” I’d never seen before. It has always fascinated me that Americans at the drop of a hat can decide to move from Los Angeles to new York City, or vice-versa, while in England—at least when I was a kid—eyebrows were raised if you decided to move from South London to North. “You’re moving where…? Well, good luck, it was nice having know you.” It was considered far less odd if you moved from Bexleyheath to the United States, than if you moved from Bexleyheath to Belsize Park, which my friends Shaun and Scott did.
It is President Dwight Eisenhower who Americans have to thank for their healthier attitude, as it was he who signed the Interstate Bill that upgraded and built the country’s web of fast roads. England, meanwhile, has a few major motorways that support thousands of kilometres of Roman lane. One of my recent trips was to Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State, a state that measures 141,299 square kilometres, as opposed to England’s 130,423—which might explain why New Yorkers and all Americans need to drive farther and cannot be constrained by internal notions of what is and is not “home.”
The Adirondacks is the last true wilderness in the Northeast and in effect stretches all the way from the northeast of Pennsylvania, along the Appalachian Trail, across New York (where its bulk lies), across the Green and White mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, respectively, and out into the deep woods and endless lakes of Maine. Lake Placid itself is famous for hosting several Winter Olympics, the last being in 1980. It is wonderful to see how small and unimposing its Olympics facilities are in this age of hype, explosions, floating architecture and corps of 1,000 drummers. The town—one street really—is trendy in an escape-from-New-York-City way, while the lake surprisingly is off the beaten path. A smaller lake, Mirror, in the town often is mistaken for Placid, and vacationers paddle around it with smiles on their faces, maybe ignorant of the mistake.
We took a kayak and paddled around Placid, watching the Great Northern divers (known here as Common loons) surface, beads of water dripping off their striped necks. There are three islands in the lake, two large ones—Buck and Moose—and one small one—Hawk. We tied up at a tip of Moose and swam in the cool water. One female Mallard took a liking to us and followed our kayaks.
 Next to where we stayed was a Howard Johnson hotel, which maintains one of the very few HoJo restaurants still in existence. The ski jump is formidable, and why anyone would want to go down one is beyond me. Being English, I have embarrassed and fond memories of our own ski-jumping star, Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards, who angered and delighted spectators with his antics at the Calgary Olympics, at which one Italian commentator termed him not a ski-jumper but a “ski-dropper.” But the fact is he could go down the ski jump, where I certainly could not. I believe a film on his life is coming out next year, starring Steve Coogan. The thing that impressed me about the ski jump is the very small space that exists as you get off the steps and onto the launching pad.
We took a beautiful hike along Indian Pass from the original Adirondacks hiking base, the Adirondack Loj, the last word spelt not as “lodge” but in a phonetic manner pleasing to its creator, Melvil Dewey, one of the original wilderness supporters and the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Library Classification System. (Was his name spelt Melvil, rather than Melville, because of his parents’ shared belief that trickled down to the son?) It is by Heart Lake, which also is cold and has more than a hint of vegetal matter when its bed is stepped on.
My second trip was to visit as many of the Shaker communities of the Northeast United States as I could—this was in a week of $4.50-per-gallon gasoline prices. I have always been interested in the Shakers (full name: The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) since reading an article on them in the September 1989 issue of National Geographic. Our first stop was Sabbathday Lake in Maine, which is the only remaining community. The only male Shaker left—there are five left today, although there are strong hopes of one more joining up soon—is Brother Arnold, and when we arrived, he was sweeping leaves in preparation for the upcoming tourism season, which runs there from May to October (www.shaker.lib.me.us). He chatted with us. A team of volunteers helps them maintain some 730 hectares.
This is a small amount compared to the Shakers’ heyday, in which there were more than 30 communities in more than 15 states, including a short-lived, all-black community. Sabbathday Lake has a calm that I will not even try to describe here. It is a place to sit and think and feel. Farther down the road is Alfred, Maine (www.ficbrothers.org), which until 1931 was a Shaker community but is today owned by the Canadian-based Brothers of Christian Instruction. We were accompanied by one of the brothers as we walked to the small Shaker graveyard there, and he asked if we wanted to hear him sing the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts, which was written there. It was a touching and beautiful moment and again screamed out simplicity.
From there, we headed to Canterbury, New Hampshire (www.shakers.org), and luckily we approached it along New Road from the east, which gives a wonderful view of this large community—the last one to give up operating—from the bottom of a hill. It, too, is a joy to walk around, but a nearby motorbike-scrambling course with accompanying engine sound rather destroyed the ambiance. More peaceful and far less known were the former Shaker communities of New Lebanon in New York and the nearby Inn at the Shaker Mill Farm (www.shakermillfarminn.com), which was a Shaker mill and now is an inn (that should be obvious from its name, no?) and sits by an idyllic waterfall. We stayed in a B&B, Hitchcock House (www.hitchcockhousebb.com) that was built by the Shakers as a private home. It was very pleasant (minus the statue of the comic Bald eagle in the front yard), and one of the owners, Ted Delano, told us that he remembered the Shakers when he was a very young lad.
Our last stop was in Hancock, just across the border in Massachusetts, which is a tourist attraction but adequately shows the live of the Shakers and explains how they cared for their every need, a concept that the director said amazed certain elements of today’s youth.
Two hikes lead from this living museum, one to the top of a hill called Mount Sinai, where the Shakers went during a brief stint when it was their fashion to receive visions, the other to a wood where they collected wood for their famous boxes and furniture. As we walked along this second path, a bear was spotted. When I finally saw it, I was convinced in my urban manner that it was a statue placed there to inform other urbanites what the country looked like. When it growled, we realised that it was indeed a Black bear and made a hasty retreat, ignoring most of the rules that are supposed to be adhered to when a bear is seen.