Day 9- Aveiro to Porto

After all Aveiro turned up to be quite a small city with a couple of canals and some pretty churches and a fish market and a few tourist. The bit that most tourist don't get to see is the massive industrial state just outside Aveiro.

We left the city toward the beached in direction to the ferry boat towards Torreiro and the sea. We cycled at least 3 or 4 miles along a big industrial state and some salt pans.

We have been told we could get a ferry boat across to San Jacinto, so after a few stops to ask we managed to find the ferry stop, after waiting for a while a boat "lancha" turned up and the capitan told us that no bikes allowed if we wanted to cross we needed to get a taxi boat.

On our way back we stopped at the port police station and they gave us instructions on how to get a boat taxi, it took a little while but we eventually found our Capitan who took us across in his private taxi.

The other side of Aveiro, the natural park with the estuary in one side and the ocean to the other is really empty and flat, we cycled along the estuary on one side pines and eucalyptus and the other Atlantic coast and wind.

There were more local cyclists waving at us on route. We found quite fair amount of traffic, lost of industrial areas both sides of the road. Lucky for us, we found a local who gave us directions to a cycle route that took us to a beautiful coastal road towards Porto, it turned out to be a 15 miles cycling route along the coast entering in Porto from the south.

It its to date one of the most spectacular entries into a city, with the sun setting on the Atlantic sea and the  twinkling city lights in the distance, we cycled underneath one of the Porto bridges and arrived to the Ribera area, where the night live concentrates. We rested a day in Porto and took the opportunity to meet up Hugo and his family, wonderful encounter. After a day of resting and enjoying Porto we left towards Guimarães.