The train to Pinhão

A cool, hazy morning sunlight illuminates the landscape as it plunges into valleys and rolls up into ridges. Red-tiled houses with tiny personal vineyards that have been carved into the slopes billow up white smoke here and there from burning piles of prunings. The leaves of the vines are starting to wear their funeral colours but November in the Douro is still verdant in the main. The vineyards soon turn more commercial in size though they too stand quiet, browning at the edges, the work done for the year. The train chugs through them and they ebb and flow on both sides broken by scatterings of buildings. Wispy groups of tall and elegant maritime pines look down benificiently on the shorter trees huddled around their base. The train stops at empty stations in quiet towns about which the tour guide sat behind offers superlatives to his curious guests. "This town has a large hospital" - thrilling stuff. We hurtle through a tunnel, the noise and reverberations of the old carriage make it feel like I'm on a rocket launch. The houses cling to ever more precipitous slopes as the rail line nears the river. You have to admire the tenacity of their placement though I do question the logic. Then again most of Portugal seems to be inconveniently located so what choice did they have? The plains of Spain? Who could cope with all the rain. And here it is, the Douro at Mosteiro, glinting in the sunshine. Smart phones come out for that iconic shot through dirty glass. The train drops down further to skirt the water's edge. We cut through great piles of rock blasted apart at the end of the 19th century, that first century of man's utter defiance of nature. The view is now constantly arresting and it frees my thoughts from the weighty implications of momentous decisions soon to come. The noisy engine scatters cormorants over the water's placid surface. The driver leans on his horn to ensure they get the message. We pass our first quinta, its vines divided into small pockets. Soon they're everywhere and I wonder what this landscape would look like without port's twist-of-fate history. A little known domestic product? A curious wine tried by holidaymakers who take back a bottle to live in the dusty recesses of their drinks cabinet? Instead it feel like a British wine that another country was kind enough to invent and produce for us. We arrive at Regua and the tour group and much of the rest of the carriage disembark and crowd the platform. This may validate our decision to go to Pinhão. From Regua the view is supposed to be really something. It is hard in these moments not to try to record in words or pictures everything I see. A missed shot grates. When did experiences experienced become debased currency? There's no likes for that I suppose. But that's an axe well ground and I'm certainly not free of the fault either. And so it is really something. The hills become blanketed in reds and greens. Trees explode with vibrant yellow foliage that is reflected in the glassy surface of the Douro as a mirror image. In fact whole slopes are reformed as watercolour opposites of themselves in the wide river. It becomes hard to see where the land ends and the water begins and my mind rolls through endless, mobian, autumn beauty. A sole boat motoring along breaks the scene and shatters the illusion in its wake. But this train journey is like being in a painting of stunning decay.