The Faro Rally

The interactive map of the route

Wednesday should have been about lazing about enjoying the expansive hospitality of my ex-pat host Louis, and his good lady Eva. And indeed there was plenty of that. But first I had to get the bike fettled, and that meant visiting the local BMW main dealer and preparing my wallet for a serious reaming.


I was quite lucky that the bike got me to Louis's at all, and even luckier that the road down to Faro was mostly downhill. I rode into Baviara BMW, with Louis's warnings about the quality of Portuguese spannering ringing in my ears. It turned out that franchised BMW dealers are the same the world over, though...

Baviera BMW... All carpetted waiting areas and posh ambience...

Fortunately, I had just beaten the rally rush and got my bike in early, for a new clutch, a service and a valve clearance adjustment. It was all carpets and overpriced clothing, just as you might expect. The difference was that a labour rate the Portuguese thought to be insanely exhorbitant was actually astonishingly reasonable by UK standards, while the parts and clothing - at Pan European price points - were just stupidly priced by local standards. £180 for a pair of quite decent but fundamentally nothing-special riding gloves looks to be bonkers by UK standards, but by local standards - where nobody bothered with gloves anyway, but if they did they cost a fiver, 300 Euros was somewhere west of clinically insane.

Having dropped off the transport, I was at a loose end until my genial and slightly pickled host picked me up, so I waited in the air-conditioned splendour of the Jumbo hypermarket opposite Baviara. And instantly regretted toting a tent all the way down to Faro from the UK.

Why? Well, amazingly, I could have bought a fairly palatial rally tent for about £7. A cheap sleeping bag for less,foot pump for a couple of quid and a foam mat for bugger all. In hindsight I could have done the trip on a bike free of luggage (beyond maybe a rucksack bungeed to the pillion seat) and bought everything I needed to camp at the rally when I arrived for under £20!

As an aside (for the benefit of any watersports lovers who may be reading this - and no, not that kind of watersports) you could have a pucka closed-cell-foam body surfing board for another £7 (!) (well, the equivalent in Euros, obviously), and a proper inflatable kayak canoe, off the shelf, with paddles, for under £100! So in other words, it ain't worth dragging a truck down to Faro with a body board, a canoe and camping equipment in back, when you can buy the whole lot in Faro for less than the cost of the diesel to get the truck as far as the chunnel terminal!

In due course, Louis and Eva appeared at Jumbo, shopping ensued, and we headed back to chez Louis. From there, since I was temporarily bikeless, I resolved to spend the next two days full enjoying the local ambience. Meaning swimming in Louis's pool, punctuated by consuming lots of cooked dead thing and chips (that's 'fries' in American), all washed down with copious quantities of ice cold alchoholic beverage, at ridiculously cheap prices. This I proceeded to do, with occasional pauses to phone Baviara and check on progress.

During this two days of hedonistic excess, I did do Louis the favour of driving a knackerd old LHD Citroen back to his villa from the local back-street metal-basher.

Never again.

Portuguese roads fall into two classes. They are either brand new top quality gleaming highways, liberally seeded with 'Built by the EU' signs (Portugal being at the 'blow' end of the EU money pipe, rather than the 'suck' end that we are familiar with in the UK), or they are grip-free threadbare tarmac over ancient cobbles laid on even-condemned-by-the-goats tracks, insufficiently wide to safely accomodate two cars. Now, I've driven LHD cars before, and they can be a bit of a challenge for a confirmed RHD driver. It usually takes me a good few miles to stop trying to change gear with the window winder. However, never have I tried to keep pace with a maniac in a Subaru Imprezza Turbo on 'roads' where if I drive on my own side of the carriageway, my passenger door mirror is buried in the scenery. Yes, the approved Portuguese driving position is more or less up the middle of the road, with coreographed last-moment dives into the hedge to avoid a head on collision. To be fair to Louis, I think he was driving sedately by his standards, but the whole situation struck me as a very good way to write off the car and myself. As it was, I settled for my own side of the road and scoring the tip of his door mirror on the roadside.

No wonder Portugal has the highest road death rate in Europe. Although the drivers don't help, of course - driving tests are a comparitively recent innovation in Portugal. Some drive everywhere at 20mph, others treat the road network as a perpetual tarmac rally stage - there appears to be no middle ground.

However, never again! I'll stick to two wheels, on these roads, please! Still bloody dangerous, but at least you can get out the way when some loon in a Nissan Skyline comes flying round a blind corner on two wheels on your side of the road, as happened to me later on during my stay...

At the end of my brief interlude as a pedestrian pisshead, on Thursday evening, myself and Louis took a trip down to Faro Island in his Imprezza to drink beer and check out the mayhem.

Faro Island is a long, thin, sand bar just to the south of Faro airport, seperated from the mainland by a lagoon and a short causeway. The sandbar itself is only perhaps a hundred yards wide, most of which is beautiful golden beach, and it seemed to me that one good wave could return it to the sea fromn whence it came. However, that hasn't stopped the Portuguese from colonising it, and covering it in homes and bars. In previous years, the loop of single track access road around the island has become an impromptu race-track during the rally, with big-bore sportsbikes being thrashed through the cheering crowds flat out by pissed bikers wearing swimming trunks and flip flops. Predictable carnage resulted, ambulances doing a good trade, and this year there are vicious great homebrew concrete speed humps across the main drag. This year, therefore, was the year of the supermoto stunt god, rather than the racer of past years, with lots of wheelies, donuts and jumping over the humps. Probably marginally safer than the Deathrace 2000 experience of the past, but less spectacular to watch I'm sure.

	Louis on Faro Island... This was the evening we headed down to Faro Island to scope out the idiocy. Here's Louis sitting in a bar...
	Louis in typical pose... ...drinking beer.

All very silly, but great fun in a lethal kind of way. The GNR (local military plod) seemed quite content to watch the fun and occasionally do a bit of traffic control. As day turned to night, the loons got bolder (or drunker) and the crowd swelled, sitting on the tarmac and covering much of the road, as numeropus bikes were donutted, wheelied and stoppied inches away from them.

Eventually, we headed back to chez Louis, and the next morning I went and retrieved my now re-assembled bike from Baviara. I was a little disturbed to discover that they didn't take credit cards (a common issue in Portugal), meaning that I had to do some dramatic buggering about to get hold of €800 in cash in a hurry. Nevertheless, once sorted, it was time to meet up with Louis on his 900 Tiger and get down to the rally site to get our tents up and have a look around.

Obviously, I didn't ride well over 2,000 miles across europe in order to get pissed in a very hot, dusty field. But on the other hand, the rally did give me a great excuse for the trip :-).

Normally, the best plan, according to Louis who is both a local and an expert, is to register and get on site bright and early on the Thursday morning (i.e. as soon as the site opens), when the vast camping area is barely occupied and you can pick your camping spot, get a tent up and reserve a space for any later arrivals. You can then bugger off again, to the beach and/or back to your more civilised accomodation, safe in the knowledge that your sleeping arrangements for the Friday and/or Saturday night are secured, and that you aren't downwind from the bogs, but are in prime position under a shady tree (pretty important in forty degree heat!).

	Rally Registration... This was the signing in area...
	Rally Registration... This was the signing in area...
	Rally Registration... This was the signing in area...
	Road to nowhere... The access road to the rally site...

Turning up on Friday lunchtime meant that we did beat a lot of the international contingent to the punch, but the huge campsite was already heaving when we registered and headed on to the site to get set up. I was glad of our choice of bikes, as we circumnavigated the entire campsite, up hill and down dale, through deep sand, eventually ending up almost back where we started, immediately opposite the entrance to one of the campsite bars. This we took as a positive omen, so we erected our tents.

	The rally campsite... Bikes & tents as far as you could see...
	The rally campsite... Bikes & tents as far as you could see...
	The rally campsite... This is the bar we were camped next to...
	View from the campsite bar... Of my GS and Louis's Tiger parked by our tents, with Louis slurping water. Or perhaps it was vodka...
	View from the campsite bar... Tents and bikes as far as you could see...

At this point, I discovered that the cheapo Halfords special tent I had lugged all the way to Faro was slightly smaller than I was. My air mattress (also lugged from the UK, also available for beer money from
Jumbo) had to be jammed in, and I overhung that by 6 inches. Or rather I would have done, if the comedy tent had let me...

Anyway, we repaired to the bar for refreshment, and then took a tour of the rally, and the trade stalls.

If you didn't know better (fortunately Louis had tipped me off), you would be awfully disappointed walking out onto the rally site in the blazing afternoon sun. It was dead. An enormous empty field shimmering in the heat haze. The rally goers were all either out exploring the Algarve, sunbathing on the golden sands of Faro lsland, frequenting the bars & restaurants of Faro, hiding in the shade or in the bars of the campsite, or sitting on benches in the giant gazebo (complete with a water-mist spray cooling system) erected for the purpose of protecting rally goers from heatstroke while they drank gallons of ice cold Sagrez. The joint really only starts jumping late in the evening, with the Friday and Saturday night bands playing from late into the early hours.

	Local delicacy... This wagon was owned by the Portuguese Motorcycle Federation. Meat was baked inside dough in clay ovens to produce a sort of fully integrated burger...
	The stage... Impressive...
	The stage... Very impressive...

After grabbing some cooked meat in pitta from a food stand and some ice-cold water from the bar, I headed off to the trade stalls. They were mostly selling sub-car-boot grade tat - I bought a leather wide-brimmed hat to protect me from the sun and a couple of other trinkets - and then gave up on the rest, returning to the main arena to pick up an additional T-shirt (we got a nice pack containing T-shirt, patches and a bizarre metal shield at the gate when we signed on). The official merchandise was actually decent quality gear!

And with that, we made good our escape, returning to civilisation and a swimming pool at chez Louis.

The next evening we enjoyed a convivial evening barbeque at the home of one of Louis's portuguese friends, in the company of many local bikers, and we then headed en-masse for the rally site, pausing only at several bars and hostelrys en route. I felt quite lonely not drinking! We eventually made it to the rally site some time after 11pm, in time to enjoy Deep Purple, who played a storming set as usual, depite the absence of Mr Lord compared with the last time I saw them.

Deep Purple They still rock...

I took the end of their set as a sign that it was a good time to go to bed - the next band was on at 3am or something daft. Next morning I was awoken early by my phone requesting me to saddle up and nip out on a mission of mercy to help somebody out with my toolkit. Mercy delivered, I returned to chez Louis to prepare for the final act of the rally, the grand parade through the streets of Faro. And great fun it was, as we did two laps of the town centre, feted by cheering crowds, pausing briefly to collect free beer (or water in my case) half way round. The parade seemed almost entirely lawless - there was what looked like an 8 year old on a quad bike just ahead of me, looking like he was meant to be there as he trundled past assorted GNR types doing traffic control...

And then it was back to the campsite, where I retrieved my inflatable mattress (destined to only travel as far as Louis's swimming pool, though) and decided to leave my tent exactly where it was. Perhaps it will still be there next year...



A damned fine event, and a damned fine excuse to ride to Faro!

X-posted to khaylock, uk_bikers, motorcycles

Coming next: Homeward bound...