The bus shelter had one bench and a man eating a pastry with both hands. He didn’t look up when I sat down. It was seven in the morning and the air still carried the cool that comes off the river before the sun reaches the streets.
I took the inland route to Odemira, the town I’d seen on the municipality map at the tourist office but had no real reason to visit.
The river I swim in at the coast is wide there, flat, grey-green where it meets the sea. I hadn’t thought about what it looked like before that. Upstream it narrows. The water turns brown. Reeds line both banks in thick stands, and the bus window frames them for a while before the road climbs and they drop out of sight.
We passed a few houses, then a quarry, then nothing for a long stretch. Just dry grass and cork oaks with their trunks stripped pale. A woman on the bus slept with her head against the window. She woke when the driver braked for a dog in the road and went back to sleep right after.
The town sits on a hill above the river. I could see the bridge from the bus as we came in. Odemira is the administrative centre of the municipality, which means it has government buildings and a courthouse and people who go to work in shirts. Nobody was on holiday. The streets smelled of diesel and bread.
It was market day. I hadn’t known that when I got on the bus. I just wanted to see the river inland. But the main square had stalls set up and the smell of grilling chicken drifted across from one corner. An older woman in an apron was selling live rabbits from cages stacked on a flatbed trailer. She held one by the ears and showed its teeth to a man who was deciding. He touched the ears and nodded.
I bought nothing. I walked through the stalls twice and stood for a while watching a boy stack crates of peppers. He arranged them with great care, red on one side, green on the other. Then he stepped back, looked at the whole arrangement, and started over. A man selling shoes had covered his entire table in flip-flops, sorted by colour, and was reading a newspaper behind them with his feet up on a cardboard box.
I walked the back streets. There was a hardware shop with its door open and rakes and hosepipes hanging from hooks in the ceiling. A café had a television on with the sound off. Two men at the counter watched it while they ate. I stood in the doorway for a minute and nobody seemed to mind or notice.
After the market I followed the river path downstream until the reeds closed in. There was a concrete bench with a name painted in blue, already fading. I sat there. The water moved slowly. A dog came down the bank on the other side, drank, and left.
I had liked walking the coast from Vila Nova de Milfontes to Almograve for the wind and the open sky. This was different. This was just a town where people did things on a weekday.
I hadn’t meant to stay as long as I did. I missed the return bus I’d planned to catch and took the next one, two hours later. I sat on that bench for most of those two hours. I don’t have a good reason for this. The river was brown and slow and there was nothing remarkable about it. But I kept sitting there anyway, watching the reeds bend in a wind I couldn’t feel. On the way back the bus was nearly empty. The woman from the morning wasn’t on it. The light had changed and the cork oaks threw long shadows across the road.
If you’re thinking about it
- The bus from the coast to Odemira follows the Mira inland; check the current timetable at the stop in town before you go
- Market day is worth timing your visit around, though I arrived by accident
- The river path downstream from the bridge stays shaded in the morning before the sun crosses the hill
- Bring water; few places are open on the side streets away from the main square
- Odemira is a working town, not a destination
I’ll be here a while longer.
