I missed the bus to Santa Apolonia the way I have missed half the transport on this trip, comfortably, and booked a Bolt instead, cheaper and more reliable than Uber anywhere in Portugal. One good thing about booking the train ahead of time: first class turned out cheaper than second, which felt like a system error nobody had caught yet.
The ride to Porto took two and a half hours. Porto itself was never the plan, not originally; the actual destination was an island off the coast, and flying there from Porto turned out cheaper than flying direct from Lisbon, so Porto got added to the itinerary purely on a budget technicality. I landed there, so to speak, at half past nine.
First decision of the day: what to do with a backpack for the next fifteen hours, given that tonight involved watching Portugal play Colombia at half past midnight in a fan zone full of people who cared a great deal more about the result than I did. Leaving bags in the city meant either trusting a locker at the main station I might not be able to reach late at night, or gambling on how safe Porto actually felt at three in the morning, a different question than how safe it is in general. I solved it by going straight to the airport from the train station, dropping everything there, and coming back into the city with nothing but a phone and a charger.
At the station I watched another backpacker fighting with a ticket validator and losing, and recognized the exact mistake because I had made the same one myself an hour earlier: black validators are for tap to pay, yellow ones for travel cards, and none of that is obvious until someone tells you. So I told her.
She was a German exchange student, currently backpacking, freshly landed from Iceland. We kept talking past the point either of us needed to, which is how two strangers end up deciding to spend a day walking a city together. Worst case, I told her, we would at least get some good photos out of it. We dropped her bag at her own hostel and went looking for Porto.
It is a small city with everything worth seeing packed close together, and we covered most of it on foot over four or five hours: the colorful stack of Ribeira along the river, the iron double deck of the Dom Luis bridge, Livraria Lello's carved staircase glimpsed through the crowd at its door, Clerigos Tower standing over everything, Sao Bento station's blue tiled walls telling centuries of history to anyone just waiting for a train. We saw all of it from outside, never once queuing for an interior, which suited both of us fine.
By afternoon the heat and our dying phones sent us back to her hostel to recharge both. Back out again, we planned to cross Ponte Luis for the view, only to find police had closed it for a fireworks display neither of us had heard about. The workaround was Calcada das Carquejeiras instead, a brutally steep cobbled stair named for the women who once hauled heather up it from the river docks to the city's bakeries, a climb the guidebooks do not oversell. It put us at Ponte do Infante, a quieter, less photographed bridge than its famous neighbor, and the viewpoint above it at Miradouro das Fontainhas, which turned out to have Ponte Luis in full view anyway, lit gold at sunset, better than the crossing we had actually planned.
