Belem Tower
We wake and find it is a much brighter morning. The breakfast room in the hotel looks out over Restauradores and it is also interesting to watch the other residents coming and going. A decent breakfast as well.
Having been displaced from yesterday this morning we head down to Praça do Comércio intending to take the tram 15 to Belem. There is a long queue and no tram 15 appears although it is supposed to be frequent. I eventually walk to the tram stop shelter (we are at the back of lengthy queue) and there is a notice which informs me that tram 15 is truncated at some point on the route and it seems it will not be serving this stop (as it is in Portuguese I am guessing at the content to a certain extent – but the names of the roads do not mean much to me and trying to find them on Google Maps does not help a lot either).
There is an adjacent taxi rank and so we take the obvious step. A very helpful and chatty taxi driver is happy to get us to our planned destination and explains how to walk between the Tower, the monument and the Jerónimos Monastery for which I am grateful.
At the Tower the wait to enter looks like it is about 30 minutes long – but it is getting warmer so we decline the opportunity to stand around in the sun and decide to walk along to the monument. We are both sure we visited this briefly on a coach trip when moored here on a cruise a few years ago but we have a little more time to take photographs today.
Jeronimos Monastery
The Jerónimos Monastery Is the other side of the main road and so we make use of the passenger underpass emerging the other side. We have a pleasant walk through some gardens and then have trouble finding the ticket booth, hidden away in a corner of the gardens behind trees. However I can see that there is a long queue into monastery which the we overhear a discussion and it is taking a couple of hours – which is even less attractive in the sun than the wait at the Tower.
We determine we will return someday perhaps – the area is struggling to cope with the number of visitors which have appeared in the sunshine and today is not the day for us to be standing around. Having closely watched the trams moving I work out where we need to be to catch a tram for most of the return journey which we then take back towards the town centre.
The station we need to use tomorrow is immediately behind the hotel and yet the entrance in an adjacent building lacks any branding or recognition that it is an entrance – it appears to be a Starbucks. When we go in we see signs directing us upstairs to the trains – but externally it is bereft. It is fair to say that we have not seen as much of Lisbon as I would have liked due to a combination of limited opening hours, non-existent trams and simply far too many people. Frustrating to be honest.