WAGS 15.04.2020: Quarantine Diaries Week 5.

    The 5th week under Social Distancing rules, and running out of interesting local walks, not to say missing the company, banter and innuendo.

   Rod had his full report sent to me by 1208 today (Thursday) sans photos . It is clear that not only is Isolation Fatigue setting in, but without his walking companion, Antonio de Montanha, in tow, he is not only short of drone shots, but he clearly hasn't mastered the art of thrilling selfies.

Here is his minimalist effort for this week.

Herewith a brief and singularly boring note on my solitary walk.  No fotos either....selfies notwithstanding!

In the absence of my normal walking partner ..suffering from back spasms brought on by excessively heavy shopping bags...I was obliged to undertake my walk accompanied  only by one of our hounds, Ember.

Well in fact barely had I set off when I heard a chattering rabble behind me.

This, needless to say turned out to be the usual local arm of the WAGS Occasionals.  We exchanged greetings, well sort of, at a social distance well in excess of 2 metres, indeed about a rather unsocial 200 m... before diverging into different routes. We didn't cross paths again, indeed apart from a brief chat with a local farmer with a somewhat unfriendly dog I crossed paths with no one.

Yves captured the moment the determined Isolationist went on his way!!

From there the walk, left to my reveries,  was largely uneventful although mildly depressing to see so much of the erstwhile open countryside now covered by fenced-in avocados.

Distance covered was a fair 11k and had I not forgotten to turn off Viewranger before taking a while to read our EDP contador, it would have been achieved at 4 kph too.

I did get a ViewRanger track and stats. which is probably as much as we need to know.

Stats were:

and appear to have stayed within normal WAGS (acceptable) parameters this time.

the walk profile and speeds looked like this:-

Alas no anecdotes nor ruminations on the meaning of life, so we will pass on to Lindsey, who used flattery to make the cut, but was rather secretive about her activities, and has lost a day somewhere as she sent me this Wednesday evening:-

Hi Paul,
I know you are very clever with the computer and the Blog - perhaps you can include these photos in my Life in the Country!
Hope you have a good walk in the rain tomorrow!
Love Lindsey

Papaver Dubium ( Common poppy)

Cistus albidus

Lavandula stoechas (lavender) Aspodelus ramosus (white star-like flowers) iris xiphium, Thapsia villosa (yellow/green flowers).

The scientific identifications, (requested by me last night) just arrived as I was writing this section of the blog. I checked to make sure the camera atop my PC was switched off!

A late entry was this Thursday walk pic. Now how do we differentiate between Lindsey's Thursday Algarve Geriatrics, (TAGS) and John's outlaw Tuesday Algarve Geriatric Strollers (TAGS). Perhaps this is why we try to stick to Wednesdays!!

A nice muddy (Thursday) walk for Lindsey and her dogs

Peter Schroeder sent a brief illustrated resume of his Wednesday morning:-

This morning we did a 4 km exercise walk down the valley and found a group of cistus with 6 petals and later two bushes with no spots. The walk did us good but the speed was not up to wags standard. Peter and Sonja

A Not-so-rare six spot!

And so to our own outing:

First of all I risked my career by driving (non-essentially, almost) to our second home, Casa Linda Mariposa. Well perhaps it was not entirely non-essential as we had  a couple of workmen defacing our swimming pool in an attempt to discover where some of the water, not lost by evaporation, or exuberant tourists doing bombs from the high board, was going. It looks like it may be an expensive quest, but with the price and shortage of water these days I hope it is worth it!

   I started my devices for the walk at 1115, but we didn't get out of the garden until after 1130 as Myriam had some supplementary questions for the artisans!

    The intention was to do a shortish circuit ( at least to reach my 8000 steps for the day), and get home in time for the traditional Wednesday TM , with honour ( in these special circumstances) reasonably satisfied.

    I dispensed with the starter photograph as I am perpetually disappointed with my grimaces while trying to handle a selfie or a Delfie Art front and back camera view.

    The first photo was of some tile mosaic, as last week's early photo had been.

I have always wondered why the 'p' of Praia was not capitalised, but typo correctors and spell check are of no use in tile art.

    Myriam found some orchids before we left the area, and recorded them for posterity. 

Not to be outdone I recorded her Posterior!

It had rained rather heavily the night before so I determined to take only good paths and proper roads, so we set off towards Palmares Golf Course.

More fascinating flowers were imprisoned in Myriam's cameraphone.

     I am sure Lindsey can help out with the scientific and common names.

     We carried on past the Palmeiras Golf Club and courses and struck off on a track towards Vale de Lama. We hadn't been this way for several years, and in the interests of making the walk a little longer, I took a left fork rather than the right. This ended up making the difference between the 11 km we did and possibly less than 8km. 
    Going over the top we had some great views to the East.

   Towards Alvor

More wild flowers.......

   Suddenly, well off the roads, we came across this sign:-

In case you can't read the top one, it says Campo do Vale PND, Educational Campus 400 m.

Curious, we carried on and found a large Quinta with several designated parking lots. No  visible signs of life, but that would not be expected right now.

Further on there were some large cultivated fields, no doubt the Vegetable Garden and the Food Forest.

A wall painting, suggesting that this is a rather hippy veggie project.

and a strange construction at the entrance to the Garden.

Myriam's view

Couldn't really discern the purpose - anyone any ideas?

       As we exited the property on the main road there was a board against a tree which was evidently bought into play at the stated times to sell the produce.

 Will have to check this out, when things normalise.

The unimposing entrance - cultivation to the left........

.....and another professional sign.

A short hike along the road - orchid or not orchid?

Further on, we reached the coast and passed through the fish and oyster farms.

and some of the buildings near the causeway are now The Lagos Kite Club. Quite a few cars there including an expensive one from the Czech Republic.

Then past the 'new' holes at Palmares Golf Club.......

........ Hole 24

Decided on the off-road route back to Casa Linda - one we used daily 20 years ago with the dogs when we lived at Mariposa. 

Much overgrown now.

And then we were back, more tired than I had anticipated.

The Garmin said:

plus 188 meters of climb.

A possible future WAGS walk.

ViewRanger was started about 15 minutes before we left which distorted the averages.

Another chat with the workers at the swimming pool and we were home with the George Foreman fired up around 3 pm!!

A proper WAGS post walk TM

To finish, another Coronavirus parody, of 'Torn', which you may have heard before, but she is cute and I like the words!!

Stay safe and keep yourself moving. There is nothing worse than sitting still for long periods and bingeing on box sets - or so Myriam tells me!!

And now a bit from JohnH.

This week, my contribution is to be something other than a report on a walk that may or may not have taken place – I couldn´t possibly comment – because I realise that such a report, even if it could or could not have been made, could not possibly match up to the heady excitement generated by last week´s Guided Tour of the Supermarkets of Lagos.

So I revert to a subject first raised in late March. The attentive reader of these blogs will, I am sure, remember that I wrote then that I hoped others would join in with contributions to Paul´s Quarantine Diaries, thereby providing us with a chance to cook new things up, and then I added as a sort of throw-away:-

“ Last night I cooked a guinea fowl. Interesting. Hazel did not entirely disapprove. Has anyone else tried it?”

                            And so it is that The Esperança Press proudly presents

                    The Guinea Fowl Chronicles

                                                             or

                                      from Africa to Apolonia and back

The first contribution came from Myriam who asked:-

"Guinea fowl? The one with spotty feathers? Where did you get it? Went hunting? Is it considered a wild animal ???"

I replied to Myriam´s fusillade of questions with:-

"Well, I suppose that you could classify going to Apolonia as "hunting." Got the little creature first shot and it had already been plucked, thank goodness. Pintada in Portuguese - not too expensive."

Then Terry Ames came in with:-

"Hi all. In my other life used to keep 6 guinea fowl. Guinea fowl eggs are very good, very nutritious, but a hell of a job to pluck one till a gamekeeper friend showed me how to skin instead of plucking them, yeah very good eating."

which was encouraging. I haven´t ever had or even seen guinea fowl eggs myself, although I´m very partial to quail eggs and do them frequently.

Antje then chipped in with:-

"I would be very interested to hear how you prepared the guinea fowl, being a game bird it can get too dry very easily. I have cooked pheasants in the past and used Elizabeth David´s recipe for braised pheasant. I have started  a bit of a food conversation going on the WAGS whatsapp group. Ask Hazel to show if you are interested...a non-Covid subject."

Maybe some of that WAGS whatsap culinary stuff can spill over into the Quarantine Diaries blog. Anyway, I told Antje my way of dealing with the bird (which in the interests of brevity I shan´t repeat here) and she responded with:-

"Thank you very much for your detailed description of cooking the guinea fowl. It sounds very delicious and yes, quite "Masterchef-y. 
I prepare pheasant in a similar way but simpler, a receipt by Elizabeth David, from her book French Provincial Cooking, if I remember correctly. My pheasants originate from my son-in-law´s shoots and I skin them before taking them with me, frozen, in a suitcase to here."

So two ticks for Elizabeth David, an we now have this image in our mind´s eye of Antje strolling nonchalantly through the Customs at Faro Airport with her suitcase stuffed full with frozen pheasants.

Paul then did his best to disparage the whole guinea fowl idea by recommending Cantonese spicy chicken instead, but I´ve lost his text for the time being so cannot reproduce his put-down properly. Never mind. And it was at this stage that Mike Pease came in with what, to me, was a very intriguing comment:-

"I used to shoot wild guinea fowl on our farm on quite a regular basis. They tend to give themselves away with a loud and very distinctive cackle. Of course, our dogs used to love the sport of identifying them as they perched in the thorn trees and getting them to cackle in the sure knowledge that I would not be long in coming, armed with a .22 rifle to provide them witha mouthful  of guinea fowl feathers."

The bit about the “thorn trees “ caught my eye so I asked Mike:-

"Was that a farm in Aafrica at the foot of the Ngong Hills?"

– echoes of Karen Blixen /Meryl Streep doing her best Danish accent in “Out of Africa.”

To which I got this great response:-

“Our 903 acre, Kenana Farm, is situated only a few km west of Njoro*, famous for also being the home where Nellie Grant, mother of Elspeth Huxley**, lived. 
My father bought the land in 1943 when the war was on; he had to take early retirement as Commissioner of Police, and it was a case of where else to go. My brothers and I were either: in Stalag Luft III POW camp; the Coldstream Guards, or still at school. UK was out. In those days most of the land was thick bush covered with thorn trees, acacia spp. 
It was on top of these trees that the said guinea fowl used to perch and, much to the delight of our dogs, would then take off with much loud cackling when disturbed. 
To this day the farm remains one of the very best of such agricultural endeavours and is farmed by the Nightingale family to whom we sold the property. Not only is the land superbly managed but it has always, since my father’s day, been an example of social development with its own school, handicraft enterprise and thatched church. 
I just looked it up on-line and found: https://pt-br.facebook.com/pages/Kenana-Farm-Njoro/1196458410432696 and https://www.nation.co.ke/business/seedsofgold/Dairy-farmer-calls-it-a-day-after-52-years/2301238-4201526-h4yt9k/index.html
 Happy walking.
 Mike”

Editorial notes:

* Njoro is nowhere near the Ngong Hills – 90 odd miles NNW in fact.

** Elspeth Huxley, writer, journalist and much more: author inter alia of “The Flame Trees of Thika,” “The Mottled Lizard,” and “Out in The Midday Sun.” And this last named book has references to at least four of that Nightingale family, all before the Second World War. Well worth reading.

                                                             Thorn tree.

                                                                   Flame tree

And o the poor wee guinea fowl journeys from this

to this

And finally to this

And now some schmaltzy music to round things off.

                                                          Hats by Tilley