The Rio Miño forms the international border between Portugal and Spain, not that such a concept in a modern Europe has a great relevance to the average cycle traveller.  Its interest lies in the fact that it offers us up an interesting decision.  We have a choice for crossing this river… bridge or ferry?

Experience in Portugal over the last four weeks has left us with the conviction that any and every bridge of any consequence has come with some form of problem.  Anyone who has negotiated the old US Army Corps of Engineers’ double-humpbacked girder bridge over the Charleston River will sympathise with The Navigator’s near phobic fear of bridges.  An experience that still taints and permeates the thought of bridge crossings.  But today armed with app-maps and street-views you would have expected we would be able to plot a route over a bridge that might mitigate some of that angst.  However what all this clever tech can’t do is account for the ogres and bogles and trolls that live under that bridge.  

All’s going well; The Navigator has carried out her due diligence, plotted the route, we’ve rounded the corner ridden up the slip onto the ascending ramp to find the nice, safe pavement coned off, then to notice that the anticipated two lanes will soon become just one.  One narrow one.  They’re repairing the piers.  Then there was the long single lane bridge on a quiet Sunday morning when suddenly a plug of traffic and an ambulance’s wailing siren comes rushing ominously from behind.   Now we’re pedalling like the furies.  

So when the city of Porto arises on our horizon it seems like a sensible option to source an hotel room on the southern side of the Rio Douro. We can then have the leisure of walking and inspecting the multiple options for crossings and for negotiation with the denizens that live under the six different bridges.  As it transpires there really is only one obvious choice.  A cast-iron structure from the Eiffel school of ironwork that carries the Metro and pedestrians on the upper deck and a lower deck for cycles and other ambulantes.  Still, it’s a bridge in Portugal, ergo it’s under major refurbishment.  Hundreds of people are crossing in any one hour, wandering between the painters, around the tarring squad, tripping over cones as they take selfies, whilst the inevitable, oblivious, instagramming influencer clogs the narrow pavement.  

We leave town by riding the lower deck, leaving dusty tyre tracks on the pristine tar, in glorious isolation, early on a Sunday morning.  I suspect the gremlins will be sending an invoice to the next river bridge crossing.

If you ride a coastal route it’s going to be inevitable that there will be wide rivers or even estuaries to cross.  This coast has plenty of them.  So as we approach the border that’s delineated by the Rio Miño we have a suggestion of a ferry that may or may not exist.  One on-line report says the car ferry ceased at the turn of the century when the bridge opened, but that there was still a passenger service somewhere nearby.  So it came as bit of surprise, as we pedalled away from an overnight campsite to be accosted by a man offering “going to Spain… boat taxi?”  It’s nowhere near where our map suggests it to be.  Now it has to be understood, I’m very sensitive to people offering services in the vicinity of an international border; be they taxi transfers, money changers or assistance enablers.  My default setting is to ride past pretending ignorance even if they have official looking laminated documents strung around their necks.  In my defence I couldn’t see any boats, let alone taxi-boats from where I was; The Navigator however was behind and a bit more curious, stops to engage and looks over the riverbank.  At the bottom of a seaweed encrusted stone jetty is a ridged inflatable boat that has already loaded on two cyclists.  The craft’s master seems very keen to add our two steeds and their panniers to the manifest.  I was rather hoping that no more bikes turned up as I’m convinced they would have been wedged on board too.

Seven exhilarating minutes later he has rammed his craft onto the deserted Spanish shore and we are leaping from the bow onto soft sand, and I’m dodging waves to offload four cycles. He’s in a hurry to get back across as a taxi has pulled up, presumably with some more potential pilgrim passengers.  Maybe they were creaming off potential fares from the supposed ferry further up the estuary, the ferry they claimed no longer operated. What I do know is that their rates were half of those advertised by that supposed defunct service.  

It feels somewhat subversive, but It’s nice to be positively conned at an international border.  That, and we’ve avoided another part Portugués bridge and its itinerant attendants.