‘We shwim with the nature here.  If you would like to shwim with the nature too with no clothes on then that is all right by us’. Those rather worrying words were spoken by our host who had just picked us up in his car from the side of a deserted lane in the middle of nowhere. He had introduced himself as Willem and he was driving us to his farm and what was going to be our home for the next two weeks.  I didn’t dare look at my friend as I felt sure that I would have a fit of the giggles and I didn’t want to offend our host at this early stage of the game.

Earlier that morning we had set out from Lisbon on the intercity coach to Lagos and then caught a local bus to Bensafrim.  I was a little worried because we didn’t have an address for our destination.  Apparently rural addresses in Portugal can be problematic and our bus driver had no idea where our stop was either despite it appearing on the timetable.  We were left on a grass verge in the middle of nowhere and hoped that we could get a mobile signal so that we could contact our hosts or we would be stuffed!

Luck was on our side and Willem soon appeared in his car.  He was large, loud and Dutch and we joined him in the car to be bounced down dusty tracks to his farm where we were introduced to his wife Sol who was quiet, petite and Portuguese.

We were given one of the cottages on their farm which was spacious and cool and whilst it was sparsely furnished, it was perfectly adequate.  It had been empty for a while but my friend was a darling and swept out the majority of the cobwebs and their occupants before we unpacked.

Willem then gave us a tour of his land which consisted of several large fields, a dozen chickens, and a handful of holiday cottages which are rented out to tourists.  There was also a swimming pool but this was no ordinary swimming pool.  It was an eco-pool which meant that it had no chlorine or chemicals in it and it was cleaned by nature i.e. frogs, newts and water lilies.  Willem reiterated that guests often like to swim naked in the pool and if we chose to also ‘feel free’ at quiet times that would be fine with them.  It´s so funny how things change because now I regularly visit a nudist beach where I even stand at the bar with no clothes on or have a massage totally naked but back then I wasn´t quite so daring. You can go to this link if you would like to know how a series of personal challenges to myself led me to end up on a beach with no clothes on!

Their home in the main house was stunning; all high ceilings and beams and windows and light.  Sol is a designer and had worked wonders on their home as well as on the other cottages with innovative colour schemes and mosaic tile displays.

The eco-pool

We were here as volunteers on a work exchange scheme. The deal was that we should each work 25 hours across seven days in exchange for bed and board.  This is the standard as recommended for this sort of scheme with Workaway although they do vary from placement to placement.  In our case, Willem and Sol would provide the ingredients for meals which we would prepare ourselves although they would sometimes invite us to eat with them.  That first evening we joined them on their terrace to a lovely lamb casserole; the second evening we cooked for ourselves but I was given a plate of freshly grilled sardines hot off the coals.  My friend dipped out as he doesn’t eat fish and received nothing.

After oversleeping the next morning and hurriedly reporting for work at 11am our first jobs were to weed the large pebbled perimeter path of the pool and to cut down the waist high grasses from the bank.  We weeded and scythed and then we raked the cuttings down into the field.

Our next task was to clear the algae from the pond.  There was very little but it had to come out and Willem demonstrated his well established technique for dealing with it.  It floated hazily where it had been blown down one end of the pool but it was deceiving in its mass.  The trick was to insert a finger into the water and gently stir in a circular motion.  Like stirring a cloud the translucent substance would wind around your finger and gather there like candy floss and then it could be pulled out of the water.  Where it had caught around the stems of the water plants you could carefully comb it out through your fingers.  There was the continuous chirripping sound from the frogs that hopped and plopped into the water loudly every few minutes which sounded like birds, not like frogs at all, but very musical and which brought to mind the Paul McCartney song the Frog Chorus.

Swimming with frogs and lilies

Day two and we creaked out of bed following all the physical work the previous day.  We managed to wake earlier so that we could work in the cooler hours and were first asked to weed a large flower bed.  Sol loved her flowers and colours but the wild boar had recently got into the beds and ripped up some of her plants.  We weeded for several hours until we disturbed an ants nest and I got several nasty nips on my toes whilst my friend was happy to finally establish the difference between a plant and a weed and proudly announced that ‘if it came up easily it was a plant’.

Willem and Sol had three adorable dogs who appeared to have adopted us and spent all their time following us around or lazing under the enormous bougainvillea tree on our terrace.  There was a small simple bar just fifteen minutes down the hillside in the village although it took twenty five minutes to haul ourselves back up to our cottage after a couple of drinks; but when three pints of the local beer and three VERY large wines cost less than seven euros it would be rude not to wander down.  The second time that we went down to the bar the four locals who were sitting on the terrace and watching the world go by shared their bar snacks with us.  No idea what they were – sort of like giant salty sweet corn kernels but very nice too and it felt good to be accepted as a part of the gang despite the language barrier.

We spent the third day in the vegetable garden;, weeding between waist high rows of corn, pruning olive trees and preparing a raised bed to plant out lettuce seedlings.  I did intend to plant the seedlings out in the cool of the evening but we got home too squiffy to tackle that delicate task!

Over the next couple of days I planted out those eighty baby lettuce plants and we pruned the olive branches.  We also double-dug (is that word?) a raised bed in preparation for sweet potatoes and there was more sitting in the waist deep water at the edge of the pool in my bikini to clean the algae.

And then….we had achieved our twenty five hours so we could take the rest of the afternoon off. And the following day we set off early to catch the local bus to Lagos for a well deserved break.

This article was first published in August 2013 but has been updated as I re-tell my story of living a nomadic lifestyle