Bakkies Botha does Portugal.

[Bakkies]

So, for our Christmas break we decided to pack up and head as far south as European roads will take us in search of sunnier climes. The rough plan was to bolt across France and NW Spain to reach Northern Portugal where we would pick up a trail courtesy of Wikiloc. The trail was recorded as North to South, mostly off-road
The trail started in Braganca and ended in Faro hugging the Spanish border for the most part. We had trouble finding the track at first as I must've done something wrong whilst converting the track for use with the Garmin. It kept wanting to stick to the tarmac so after a few miles we stopped at a viewpoint to see if we could spot the track which surely couldn't be far away from the road. We lucked out as I spotted what appeared to be a footpath just behind the barrier going down the hill. A closer look revealed that it was a wide enough track for a 4x4 and it led to all sorts of wonderful terrain down below! So without further ado we jumped on the track and that was the beginning of our off-road adventure across Portugal.
The going was mild for the most part but there were some tricky sections and really steep climbs. The Cruiser, being fully loaded with RTT and all performed flawlessly. On the tarmac we rarely dropped under 70mph and we saw 18-20mpg. We covered 3700 miles in total and the only issues we had was a headlight relay (green one) frying itself (which left us with main beam only but managed a workaround), a boost pipe rubber joint before the intercooler popped off twice under load and a bit more worryingly, a noisy front axle. I had the axle rebuilt only 2 weeks prior to our trip so I thought I wasn't going to let that stop me. All was well in the end but I am still somewhat baffled by this as it sounded like dry running CV's.

Portugal was wonderful and is a mecca for off-roading. There are loads of unpaved roads that can be driven without issue. Unless it is gated or access specifically prohibited I could find no reason not to drive it.. Wild camping is widely accepted although I would save that for summer; we only wild camped twice, not for lack of opportunity but it got rather nippy at night.

Here are the pictures, I hope you enjoy! http://s683.photobucket.com/user/Bra_Sam/media/DSC01559_zpsasbrtalq.jpg.html

P.s. I tried to upload photos here but seem to get a lot showing a broken image.

Cheers,
Sam & Sam

 

[Chris]

Nice pics Sam. And Sam of course. No reason why they shouldn't load. You can select the original image directly from your files on the hard drive. I use a Mac so taking screen shots is a 2 second job. I generally take a screen shot of the photo so that it's tiny in file size then upload that. If you have honking great files taking on an SLR for eg then maybe it's struggling. There is of course the SMUG filter that could be set too high in your settings.

 

[Bakkies]

Thanks Chris. They have mostly been taken with an SLR. Some pics are near on 5mb.. Most of them loaded just fine but then as I'm trying to arrange them some suddenly disappear and all I get is a small white icon that shows a broken picture.

Good tip on the screenshot though..

 

[Shayne]

Great pics gives me somewhere else to add to the someday maybe one day list .