Category: Madeira 2010

Madeira 2010, day 7, the Funchal Flower Festival and more

April 16. Today we went to Funchal again. There was a flower festival going on, one of the big annual events on Madeira. Wherever you go there are artful flower arrangements on the streets and pavements. We also saw the big flower parade that took place on the 18th. Pictures later.

Here is this year’s somewhat bizarre poster.

 There were arrangements en masse of this kind. Countless flowers have been used to decorate the town.

A close-up on geometrical figures made of small flowers.

The flamingo flowers are always rewarding photo objects.

Mud covered mime artist entertained the crowd. Here is a male one…

…and here is a female one. The tourists were delighted.

A rest in the Santa Catarina park above the harbour.

If you want a cheap and tasty lunch you should look for one of the small restaurants for the locals in some narrow alley. Here we are consuming a simple but nourishing soup.

We went to the great bustling market, Mercado dos Lavradores. Here the farmers come to sell their fruits and vegetables…

…and the fishermen come to sell their fish.

The fish department is exciting for a guy like me who has only been fishing for perch and roach at home in Sweden.

And here is the famous espada, the deep sea fish that is a standard dish in every restaurant on the whole of Madeira. It is monstrous but very tasty, mostly served with grilled banana, potatoes and a mountain of vegetables. It lives at 2000 meters depth in the ocean. The big eyes are useful for animals who live in such a dark place. Here they lie on their bed of ice with broken eyes.

Funchal had had terrible floods earlier, where heavy rain gathered in the two river beds until they couldn’t hold any more water. Street were destroyed, housed washed away and people died. There were still water in the river on our visit, but only in a moderate quantity. A great deal of damage was already repaired.

Here you can se how the mud from the river has made the harbour water brown.

We drove up to Monte in the afternoon. Monte is a popular tourist place since this is from where the famous sleigh rides start (traditional wooden sleighs going down the steep hills all the way to the center of Funchal). Some nice levada walks starts here too. On this picture you can see that the whole mountain side had slid down into the valley. The house owners had a narrow escape. To the bottom left you can see the cable cabin that will take you all the way from the harbour in Funchal up to Monte. A truly spectacular ride.

I have a peculiar relationship to doors. I always feel compelled to take photos of interesting doors. A psychologist probably would have interesting things to say about it. Here is a door I found in the Santa Catarina park.

And here are some Madeiran souvenires. What makes them so specifically Madeiran we still haven’t found out.

Madeira 2010, day 6

April 15. Weather was fickle this day. We decided to take a car ride around the west part of Madeira. The long and winding road along the west coast is a treat.

It had been raining during the night and the air was really damp. The moist on the balcony doors is not rain on the outside, it is condensation on the inside.

Here is a close-up. The tree symbol is to show that this is a green hotel. They have received several environmental certificates.

This is Jack, the kind dog whose owner has a café on the westmost cliff of Madeira, west of the town Ponta do Pargo. It’s well worth a visit. When you have gone as far west as you possibly can there is a nice lighthouse. The picture is not much for the world, but since it’s the only one I took during the car trip I decided to post it anyway.

Madeira 2010, day 5b, a few pictures

April 14 II. A few pictures from the fish department in the supermarket in Calheta. Fish is a common dish on Madeira. Don’t leave the island without having tried some form of the espada fish.

Am I mistaken or do I spot a slight smile here?

The espada is a really ugly fish. But tasty. I’ll write more about it in a future blog.

A few pictures from our nice apartment at the Jardim Atlantico hotel. Bedroom, livingroom, kitchen section and a bathroom. A wide view of the Atlantic Ocean and at the moment a dramatically cloudy sky.

Madeira 2010, day 5, a visit in the sugar cane factory in Calheta

April 14 I. No walk today. We drove to Calheta instead, a small town on the south coast, not far from our hotel. The main goal was to visit the sugar cane factory. The sugar cane industry is a small but still rather important part of Madeira’s economy. The most important products from sugar canes are sugar (surprised?), sugar cane honey, molasses and rum. The process uses machinery that is all but antique, but it is still as efficient as when it was new (although the steam engines were replaced with electrical ones not too long ago). The factory is open for tourists, you can simply walk right in and stroll about. A tip we would have liked to have had before we got there: Bring ear plugs! The cane crushing machines produce a hellish noise and tinnitus must be common among the workers. None of the men in the factory were wearing hearing protection as far as we could see.

Outside the factory there are lines of trucks with huge loads of sugar canes.

The sugar cane factory in Calheta.

View from inside the factory with stacks of sugar canes. You can see the crushing machines in the back. I switched to black and white, it seems to work much better on this kind of images.

Only one of the machines were running, but the noise was far beyond what any human ear could stand. The machines are mostly open and occupational safety doesn’t seem to be a buzzword around here.

A couple of pictures of the workers.

The crushed sugare canes are transported to another machine that squeezes out even more juice. After that they end up on a lorry outside the doors (maybe to be used like this?).

Boilers for evaporation.

Here the juice is boiled for production of sugar.

In the factory there is a small museum and a shop where you can buy sugar cane juice, rum and bolo de mel, the sweet tasting soft cake in which sugar cane honey is an important ingredience. Gunilla invested in a bottle of really nice rum (which of course caused problem at the airport, it’s easy to forget the liquid rule). We tasted some juice along with a fresh piece of bolo de mel. I thought the juice would taste like liquid sugar, but it was a fresh and fruity drink, cool in the heat.

Madeira 2010, day 4, Levada da Serra

April 13. This would prove to be the only day with bad weather during a levada walk. Certainly, the bad weather stayed in the mountains, but alas, so did we.

The beginning of the day was beautiful, here the sun is shining above our hotel. Our terass is the one on the second floor. We really find no reason to complain about the view. Hotel Jardim Atlântico is situated quite a distance from Funchal, out on the countryside of which most of Madeira consists. A few meters out of the hotel area you find yourself in an ordinary Madeiran village. This was the second time we chose this hotel, and if and when we get here again we will choose the same one. Last time we stayed in Funchal, but a city is a city whereever you go. If you want trecking and nature, we strongly recommend a rental car and hotel Jardim Atlântico. Here is a link to the hotel website.

The hotel is situated almost 500 meters above the ocean, and if you are up for it you can make the first walk from the hotel down to Paúl do Mar, the little port village at the bottom of the cliff. It’s a beautiful albeit laborious trip, especially if you walk up again (instead of taking a taxi).

The levada we chose for today is called Levada da Serra. It runs on the northern side of Paul da Serra, the large plateau in the middle of west Madeira. Here you can see the actual birth of a levada. In this picture we have descended from where we parked our car and there is a little bit left to walk before entering the levada. We came from the path to the left, by which you can reach Bica da Cana, a peak whith one the most spectacular view on Madeira.

Gunilla is studying our levada bible, Vandra på Madeira (Walking in Madeira) by Anita och Birger Løvland, unfortunately not available in English (as far as we know). Clouds have gathered some hundred meters above us, but as you can see, down by the coast the sun is shining.

The heather trees are typical for the area, and this type of vegetation is to be found only here and on the Canary Islands. It changes the path in places to dark green tunnels.

Here are the two very first meters of Levada da Serra, at first just fed by a few tiny trickles of water.

With perfect accuracy a small waterfall is falling onto the levada. It hasn’t yet started to rain, but the umbrella came in handy nevertheless.

And here am I.

Some plants I seem to recognise from home. This looks like common wood crane’s-bill, but then again, it doesn’t. Some kind of crane’s-bill at any rate.

We had our packed lunch at a beautiful place where the levada runs down in a steep drop to a lower level. When we had finished it started to rain. We had planned to go back a little bit and then take a shortcut on a path that was supposed to lead up over the mountain. We didn’t find it and we think that it had been swept away buy one of many landslides, so we had to go all the way back in pouring rain. We came back to the hotel soaking wet, but there the sun was shining, and altogether, it had been a nice day’s walk.