Portugal Sidebar: Fishing in Salema

The first evening we were in Salema, I sat watching the peaceful and nearly empty beach trying to come to grips with the beauty of the place. The first day after such a long trip (we had taken a two and a half hour bus to Boston, flown overnight to Amsterdam and taken an early morning flight of over three more hours to Faro then driven to Salema) is always very strange. You're trying to put the jet engines out of your head. You're trying to stay awake and you're trying to understand just where you really are.

An elderly gentleman walked out on the beach to collect his fishing gear. He calmly gathered it up and drew in the line as I suspect he had done many, many times before. It was extraordinarily calming.