DAY 9 Another symptom of road fatigue is not working out the distances on the map correctly. I have to put my hands up and say I discovered this morning we had an extra 50k to go.

Add that to the extra 25 courtesy of the boys from Zamora and that's almost 3 day's cycling to do in 2 days! The Goat is now quietly gloating over his beer and calling me Vasco, after the famous Portuguese discoverer, The answer to this new problem was to put in a massive 175k from Miranda to Regua which meant leaving early and the Goat not dithering with his panniers as he usually does.

He failed there straight away by putting them on the bike the wrong way round and catching his feet on the as we set off so that he almost crashed in the first 5 metres.

We also had to cut down on the stops by taking most of them on the roadside and carrying extra water bottles in the panniers.

We still managed lunch in a café in downtown Mogadougo where the waiter, who appeared to be a retired shepherd, made whistling noises and growling sounds at all the village down and outs who made up most of the clientele.

And in Carvivais we stumbled on the home of the Sporting Lisboa Benfica fan club where Martin made the mistake of mentioning that he was an Arsenal fan which immediately prompted a guided inspection of all of the barman's Benfica memorabilia.

We made a break for it only to be held up behind rolling roadworks until we were allowed to jump our bikes onto the newly laid but empty carriageway and race past all of the cars and trucks that were in the ever growing queue.

Alas we came to a complete stop at Pocinho due to major works to repair the road and the only diversion, short of a 150k detour, was to jump onto a train to the next town along the Douro.

We had an hour to kill before the train arrived and chose to spend it in the company of Dirty Boy at the Café of Death by the railroad yard.

I would say this was a 3 Fleas Eatery with Dirty Boy taking the biscuit with a T-shirt which indicated he had recently been lying flat on his face in an unclean pigsty for some considerable length of time.

THE ROAD The road is more dangerous here in Portugal.

Drivers drive as they do in Britain and we have been cut up already by a couple of truck drivers on blind bends.

The only good thing about the traffic here is that there is not much of it.