Dalama Adventures Tale of two corporate types ditching their jobs and traveling the world for 14 months... check out all photos, blogs & interesting tid bits at http://www.dalama.net

The weather here has been unbearably hot the past few days, literally it's about 35 degrees just after sunrise, and by mid-day our skin is cooking and the rubber sealant on our backpack zippers are bubbling and melting. The water is too cold to hang out in without a wetsuit for any long period of time, so we're reduced to just the occasional cold plunges, about every 30 minutes or so, to keep the body temp in line. The heat is also intensifying some of the more unique lifestyle characteristics of southern Portugal. People siesta for very long times during the days. In fact, by 11:00 a.m., stores have shut their doors and owners are in their cool homes taking long mid-day siestas. Some come to the beach to cool down, but others retreat to their casas, drawing the white metal roll-down window covers against every window in the house to keep out the scorching sun. Things start to open back up around 3:00 p.m. or so, and and it's happy hour time by 5:00 p.m. People come back out to the streets as the sun sinks lower over the horizon and pitchers of cerveja and sangria are now flowing freely. By 8 or 9:00 p.m., the dining begins, a bit earlier than in neighboring Spain. And while we're ready for be by 10:00 p.m., life here is just getting started. The cars and people stream down the streets until early hours of the morning, so strange for such a tiny, sleepy beach town. Or perhaps we're just really getting old. But it's not just the wild partiers or stifling, windless heat that's keeping us up all night. The heat has also brought out those nasty, blood sucking mosquitos that buss continuously around our heads at night. It's quite a scene. We've shut all the windows to our killer ocean view room so the mozzies don't come in, and there's no fan or A/C - similar climate to San Diego coast - who really needs them? The room is a sweat box, and we pull the sheets over our heads to avoid being bitten, and the darn things still take chunks out of us. Every 10 minutes or so we're flipping the lights on and using a towel to kill the mosquitos on the ceilings and walls. It looks like a war zone, bits of mozzie and blood spots on the walls, which we'll scrape off tomorrow after we're finally able to let fresh air in. It's a good thing this isn't a Buddhist country and therefore we are not feeling guilty for killing all the mosquitoes. So no that we've had no sleep for the night, we slip into the local town culture, and siesta most the day, getting ourselves out and about when the heat cools down, and after we've caught up on a bit of sleep.