HAVE KAYAK, WILL TRAVEL
Paddle to Portugal's scenic Aveiro under sunny skies
In the grey, flat light of early-morning Portugal, I took the Aveiro line south from my home in Porto, passing fields of rice and hay. Sitting on the train among the commuters with their bicycles and briefcases, I felt satisfied knowing I was going toward pleasure, not away from it. I'd started the day in want of a beer, but an unearned beer is like winning the lottery: It's better to work for it. So I was taking my kayak to the Aveiro Lagoon, a tangle of protected waterways on the Atlantic coast, otherwise known for its beaches and the world's biggest waves. I'd leave the train in Salreu, and paddling through the lagoon, make my way to some café in Aveiro the long way.
Despite the beautiful sun and the open skies, it was still mid-winter. Had the weather been normal, I could have expected a February deluge. Instead, Portugal was drought-stricken: The rice fields were drained, the reservoirs at critical lows. The web of rivers, streams and tributaries that run from the Freita, Ladário and Chavelha mountains to the Aveiro Lagoon, some joining the great Vouga River and others creating their own passage, were also drying up. At the river dock at Salreu where I put in, the water had sunk low enough to reveal the black, gunked-up bottom of a depth gauge — somewhere around 50 units on a scale that was water-stained at 160.
The water was so torpid that a thick layer of dust had settled onto it, giving it a cheerless brown tinge. As I set off, the kayak cleared this away, cutting through and folding over the dust-skin, the water refreshed as I was. After paddling, I met the receding tide, exposing, as it flowed toward the lagoon, mud flats that shone like aluminum foil in the sun. I let it guide me, following it blindly down channels I hoped would not peter to a dribble in the middle of some muddy expanse. Low in my kayak, I was walled within the river, the banks rising as the tide fell. Only the occasional ripple of a fish nibbling at the surface reminded me I wasn't alone. A few rickety huts were plunked onto the mud, far from the runnels of the dropping tide. Later, a fisherman's son told me about these palheiros, often used for storage, but also for other uses, sometimes even as a church.
Eventually, I reached my goal. From its beginnings as a Roman settlement and into the 10th century, Aveiro was a tiny seaside village of fishing folk. The lagoon didn't come into existence until about the 16th century, when the rivers feeding into the Atlantic silted, and long sandbanks grew along the coastline. Eventually, more than 27,000 acres became ensnared behind those peninsulas, creating the jumble of waterways and mud. The village was no longer seaside, but the Portuguese are nothing if not industrious, and lucrative salt and fishing industries evolved around the ebb and flow of sea water within the lagoon.
The area is also a haven for birders. I drifted past hundreds of ducks, gulls, grebes and herons. Cormorants balancing on the calcified poles of long-abandoned jetties, looked, as they spread their wings to dry in the sun, like runners breasting a tape.
I met a confluence, several courses meeting and spreading into a wide, shallow river. Across that stretch of still water came the tolling bells of Murtosa. The town — white, blocky houses under uniform ochre roofs — was like a handful of gravel thrown onto the shore. I skirted the coast, intending to follow this river out into the greater lagoon. But the world had other plans. Standing up to his ankles in the mud, a man was mooring his narrow, high-prowed fishing boat to a thin wooden pole. Even in the rising heat, he had a thick wool sweater pulled snug over his drooping belly. His brow vanished in the shadow of his low cap. I hailed him with a wave.
“Where are you going?” he called out in Portuguese.
“Aveiro,” I said. Cutting the air with his hand, he motioned down a small tributary across the water. “That way.”
The Aveiro area is home to several kinds of purpose-built boats, most of them in the half-moon sloop style. Bateiras are used for fishing, and saleiros to haul salt from the pans. Mercantels carry everything else: Fish from Murtosa, sand from Esgueira, roof tiles from Válega, wine from Águeda. Moliceiros are used for collecting moliço, a broad term for water plants, including algae, eelgrass, pondweed and ditch grass. Their low-slung sides, only a few centimetres above the waterline, are designed for raking in the greens, which are then dried on land and spread on fields for fertilizer.
As Aveiro is to Venice, moliceiros are to gondolas. But whereas Venetian gondolas are black and sleek as crows, moliceiros are peacocks, grand and eye-catching. They bully through the narrow canals full of visitors on sightseeing trips.
Along the Canal Central, where the city's pillory and gallows once stood, was the grand Jardim do Rossio, its park torn up by construction. Here the moliceiros were docked, and I clutched one, waiting out the wake of a passing motorboat. On the shore, a gaggle of teenage girls giggling into their shoulders made me feel like the pillory still existed.
But the smell of cooked egg and the sound of jazz were in the air, and I held great hope for my perfect café. At the end of the Cojo Canal, I pulled my kayak ashore and folded it for storage.
Before long, I was settled at a café, the sun cooking the salt from my back, a chilled beer before me. As with many before it — and the one after — I'd never tasted a better.
Low in my kayak, I was walled within the river, the banks rising as the tide fell. Only the occasional ripple of a fish nibbling at the surface reminded me I wasn't alone. J.R. Patterson