Douro Valley Tour

It’s cheaper to do your own tours. You can customise them to your hearts desire. You can leave and return according to your mood. And public transport timetables. And that’s what I’ve been doing for decades. Why pay someone else money to do something you can do perfectly well yourself for next to nothing? There’s a simple answer to that question. It’s based on the time and cash ratio. I find as I’ve gotten older, I have less of the former and a bit more of the latter.

I did start planning our own DIY tour of the Douro Valley. The train journey from Porto to Pinhão is a delight, and we have rail passes that get us there for half the normal price. But then everything began to look like hard work. Which vineyards to see? Where to lunch? How to book? We don’t want to waste precious time…

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I booked a tour on Viator. Specifically, the Douro Valley Tour: Wine Tasting, Lunch and River Cruise by Portugal Excellence Tours. Two vineyards with tastings of port and wine, and a genuinely fabulous lunch. The guide had enthusiasm aplenty. And the two other deciding factors in any tour turned up aces too. The weather was perfect. And the other two people on our tour, a pair of Liverpudlian lasses, were good company.

I’ve long held a somewhat negative view of organised tours. Perhaps because they take away some of your freedom to explore. And it’s true, that on your own, you will make glorious mistakes which turn out to be the making of the trip. But I think tours are probably going to be a bigger part of our travelling future. It will be dependent on location and activity I suppose. It was a mistake to try and do everything ourselves in India. And our Vietnam trip was all the better for the tours we did there.

In short: I’m getting old. And this post is another documented step in my personal journey in getting older still. But here’s hoping that I dodge the coffin for many more years yet…