I feel tired this morning and don't move from my snug sleeping-bag when the first light of morning wakes me. I remain put and must've slept again. Next I wake up to the sun's bright hallo high in the sky through the tent material and its instantly too warm to remain inside. I am surprised to see it so late, having gone quarter to ten when I look at my watch. Though, being so close to the Portuguese border, Spanish, or Central European Time, is an hour ahead of Portugal, so I promptly put the watch back an hour to quarter to nine, which is marginally less lazy a time to be first emerging from the tent.

It is such a nice morning for cycling, that I wish I'd made the effort to get up that first time I awoke, which is always the way, regrets at having flittered away the better part of a day asleep. But my campsite to the side of a sandy track through a forest of widely spaced big round-top pine-trees common to coastal Southern Europe, is sublime, so much so, I remain sat in the shade of a tree and catch up with writing neglected the evening before.

There had been one dog-walker that passed nearby my tent the evening before, but it didn't matter too much about being seen, I don't think as there's is no boundary-fence by the roadside. Then as I finally load my panniers on the bike, I hear approaching chatter, three stout men wearing straw-hats on horseback have seen my bike leant against a tree and the gist of their jovial chatter is to do with my bike. I wave as the horseriders pass a little way through the trees and they wave back and one speaks a friendly greeting "bueno!"

Its a bit of a slog pushing the heavy loaded bike through loose sand of the track back to the road, which continues flanked by pine forest a few kilometres to a roundabout with a main exit for autopista A49, but I take the parallel left exit, N431 west; the final couple of kilometres is motorway service road before the motorway ends and both roads merge with a steady climb up and over a long suspension bridge looming ahead, across a river which is the border.

Then it is a kilometre more on Portuguese motorway until there's a big no-cycling, no-pedestrians et cetera pie-sign, luckily beyond the slip-road off for Vila Real San Antonia, a town near the coast, where I'll pick up N125 west through the Algarve.

The Spanish side looked more attractive with its pine forests. This side is a lot barer, parched and scorched brown by a hot Summer. Crazy Guy author Alison Addicks said something to the effect that it reminded her of outback Australia when she and her husband passed this way a few weeks earlier. But that is the hilly hinterland. Before long I'm in Vila Real, not a moment too soon as the day has warmed up and I'm in need of shade and refreshment.

The town centre is street upon street of cafes and restaurants and the cliental are mainly sunhat wearing north European. There are a few Portuguese holiday-makers, the two daughters, mother and granny family, going on likeness, sat at the next table to mine where I savour a cold beer. When their bill come, each counts out coins as payment. The other tables are occupied by a plump English couple, and another by a German family, a large sixty-something blond matron, chain-smoking between sucks on a banana smoothy straw. Husband a small man of similar age with a beer in front of him, daughter and boyfriend with their backs to me. It seems a world apart from Seville with history and cultural tourism. A complete different type of tourist, here only for the sun.

I make a stop at Lidl on the way out of town, also full of English and German holiday-makers. On the road ahead I've still got yesterday's tailwind pushing me along and I'm well on the way to Faro, when it comes to the time to look for a place to camp. There isn't much scope for free camping, there being so many houses and farms shattered here and there and a rough laneway I do check out, thinking it leads to a level patch of uncultivated ground, leads to another house. Eventually on reaching Otnao, I turn off for a campsite on the way into town, which cost six euros for a tent and the lady behind the desk hands me a plan of the site and tells me to camp where I like.