It was hard to drag ourselves down the stairs and out to the bus stop to leave Salema.
We got into Lagos after just a half hour bus ride, but it is a world away from Salema.
Not that anything is wrong.
While Salema is a sleepy, little, undiscovered beach town, Lagos is a full-on beach resort, visited by Germans and ill-behaved Brits.
That means that Lagos, while still small, has higher prices, more tourist shops, tons of restaurants and a mass of people.
On the upside, they have many beaches to choose from, an old walled city to explore, and a little fort down on the waterfront.
We walked the 2KM from the bus station, over to the train station to buy our tickets out on Friday, then on to our guesthouse.
We are staying at the Dona Ana Garden Apartments. They are residential apartments, some of which are used as guestrooms. So we have ourselves a little studio apartment for two days, at the cost of a regular room. Not bad.
We dropped our bags, and set out i the foggy, cool morning. Little did we anticipate that it would be a cool, grey day all the way until 18:00. So the beach was out.
We walked the streets of the old town area, really interested in the houses that are tiled. What I mean is, some of the older homes are covered with tile. The entire front of the home, both stories, sometimes three. The houses that aren't tiled are either painted nice pastel colors, or have color accents on them, so it is a pretty colorful, hodge-podge of a town.
There are a lot of restaurants and bars, and British tourists walking around drunk and loud at 11:00 with two or five beers in hand.
Seriously.
Girls hobbling in one high heel, crying on the shoulder of another drunk about last night, party boys stumbling down the street, loudly greeting and hugging everyone...
We looked for the German side of town.
The little fortress is nothing huge, built in the 1600s down by the harbor entrance. Very small, but pretty intact.
We found a great little place early in the afternoon for tapas and wine. It is called Meu Limão (My Lemon), set right next to the Church of São Antonio, and they take their wine seriously, with a choice of five or more red, white and rose wines to choose from, by the glass. They even had pairing notes. I ended up with a glass of red wine called Pato Frio, which was a blend of Alfrocheiro, Aragonês, Alicante, and Bouschet. It was fruity, dry, good tannins and left a great aftertaste that lingered into the food. It really held up to my tapas.
I had Camarões com Côco (shrimps with coconut) and Frango Piri-Piri (chicken Piri-Piri, like the Pil-Pil sauce in Spain). The chicken was a whole leg and back, and was really great but not as spicy as some. The shrimps were in a kind of coconut cream sauce and I wanted to lick the bowl clean.
It was kind of a shame we found this place right off the bat, because every other place we tried this day did not nearly measure up to the food and wine here.
The sun just stayed behind the clouds most of the day, we just walked the streets of Lagos watching the street acts, sitting in cafés people watching and eating small foods a few times. The streets are paved with cobblestones, and here they have taken the time to arrange them in patterns, so the streets are all unique and beautiful. I was thinking how hard it would be to repave them.
There is a lot of street art on the buildings as well, some of it was pretty good.
Before you know it, it started to get dark, so we walked out past our apartment to the road's end. There is a lighthouse, and in the cliffs below are natural sea arches, called the grotto. You can pay to take a boat there, or just walk a couple kilometers out to see them. As the sun set, the lighthouse did its thing and started beaming.
On the walk home we decided to eat breakfast, and dinner at Meu Limão tomorrow.