The Nomadic Adventurers: Madeira, Portugal

When we left Lisbon, Portugal, and headed out to sea two days ago. Yesterday, we were out at sea, with no land in sight. This morning we pulled up at the Madeira Islands (also a territory of Portugal). They are right in between the Azore Islands, which we saw last spring, and the Canary Islands, kind of off the coast of Morocco. As we pulled into the harbor, I was amazed at how large the town was. There were homes from the harbor going up into the hills. There are about 100,000 inhabitants in the capital city of Funchal, a far cry from our last stop in islands (the Faroe Islands).

We had arranged to meet our table companions at 9:30 this morning. When we got off the ship there were taxi’s lined up with all the drivers rushing up to us to suggest we take a tour with them. Since that was what Maridee wanted to do, we were receptive and hired one to take us all on a three-hour tour.

We drove through the town and headed up towards the high cliffs of Cabo Girao. They call them the second highest sea cliffs in the world. Well, I don’t know about that, but they are very high! They have lookout points that hang out over the cliffs and you are quite literally looking straight down. There are a few houses up there and even a country club with some very expensive homes overlooking an incredible view. But what is interesting, is that even way up there, there are terraces of farmland. The entire mountains are covered with terraces. Small rock walls filled in with dirt and cultivated. We saw a lot of that in Italy where they grew grapes on the terraces of mountains. Here, we saw mostly banana trees, with some grapes and tomatoes. Of course this is also where Madeira wine is made.

It is very warm here. We could tell yesterday when we were at sea that the air was warmer than back on the continent. When we went outside this morning after breakfast, we were surprised how warm it was. And by lunch time, it was quite warm with the sun bearing down. They have very moderate winters and I imagine the temperature stays about the same all year long. The island actually reminded us a lot of Hawaii.

Our friends wanted the taxi to drop them off in the old town of Funchal which it did. We got off too but we did our own things. They went exploring and we headed back to the ship. It took us over an hour to walk back to the ship from where we were dropped off. Though the island is beautiful, the cruise terminal is very outdated, far from the city center and very difficult to get to. But at the end of the very long walk were a couple of vendors selling things so Maridee spent our final 13 euros as a reward for walking.