Last day in Lisbon

 We already knew what we were going to do today: go up to Sintra to see the Palace of Pena and the Moorish Castle, plus whatever else we could find to do up there.

Once again we'd planned to catch the metro - and once again it was down and we had to catch a bus, this time to the Rossio station to get the train to Sintra. But we'd left quite early in the morning, so there was very little traffic. Got there in plenty of time to get on the 9.01 train - and this time our Lisboa cards worked as expected.

Forty minutes or so later we (and the dozens of other tourists) piled out of the train and onto the buses that would take us from the station up the hill to the palace. This, of course, was not on the Lisboa card, and cost us €12.50 each, and hadn't come across any information that that would be required - though it was a kind of hop-on/hop-off bus that we expected we'd use more of later in the day, so it didn't seem like quite as much of a transparent scam.

We had to hike a bit up the hill to get to the castle, and we had to move quickly; the palace claimed to have a policy where you needed to be at the palace for your allotted timeslot, and ours was 10.30. Problem was, it wasn't clear where you had to be at 10.30. We thought it was the first gate where they scanned your ticket, but that wasn't it. Then there was another gate where they checked your timestamp, but that also wasn't it. Finally we reached another stop where they scanned the tickets; that was actually it. It was about 10.45, but apparently that was within tolerance, so we were on the tour.

It was possibly the slowest moving tour I've ever been on; we just crawled along. But it was quite impressive.

A nice fireplace.

Us, walking through. Note our respective expressions...

We got some time outside on one of the balconies, which meant for some nice pictures of the palace.

Views were quite spectacular as well.

Back inside.

And then outside again.

Pay no attention to the finger in the corner.

There was also a small chapel.

We were done with the palace, but there was also the grounds. We found a sign that said there were lakes, so that's where we went.

I'm not sure how this tree got bent. It might have been deliberate, but I don't know why anyone would do it.

The lakes were...not terribly impressive. There were some pretty big fish in them, though.

We did find some kind of lizard. It might have been a newt, or a salamander. I have to admit I don't know much about the reptiles of the Iberian peninsula.

After quite a lot of bushwalking, we got to the Moorish Castle and spent a lot of time climbing stairs and taking pictures.

That was about it. We ran out of time to do much else, so we went back to the Sintra train station on the bus, caught the train back to the city, and then the metro (which was working again) back to our part of town. But we spotted a likely-looking restaurant on the walk, so we stopped there for dinner - potato skins and a bottle of green wine; a skewer of beef, chorizo, onion and capsicum (with a salad, rice and chips on the side); and a whole fried bream.

We'd once again ordered too much food, but it was good. And that was our last night in Lisbon.