Visits abroad

April 18, Funchal. We spent the rest of this day watching the flower parade, the highlight of the Funchal Flower Festival. Vehicles with fantastic creations covered with flowers, dancing people in beautiful flower inspired dresses, booming music and a huge crowd of spectators along the parade road. Here are a few pictures with just a fraction of what passed in front of us.

Children are an important theme in the parade, although you can sometimes hardly see them behind the flowers. Note that the experienced mummy’s chained the dummy.

We were standing at the begining of the parade route where the children were still happy and laughing.

Here comes a humungous basket rolling with flowers and children.

Flowers, flowers, children, children.

An official in a high position.

One of the great tourist attractions in Funchal is to ride in one of these sleighs on the asphalt road all the way from Monte way up on the hillside and down to Funchal. Two men dressed in white are standing on the rear of the sleigh, manoeuvring it with their shoes. Here is a YouTube clip from such a ride.

Another magnificent creation. Huge flowers made of huge quantities of flowers.

April 18. Beautiful morning. Ocean and sky bleading into each other into a blue dream. A fishing boat struggled slowly as a white dot across the picture.

We went to Funchal to see the flower parade. There was time for a visit to the botanical garden first. Here is the view from the parking lot.

And here is a view in the garden itself. Symmetry and patterns are recurring flower themes.

Some hard kept bushes.

This is a replica of the houses that are to be found in every Madeiran tourist leaflet worth its name. In reality there aren’t many of the palheiros, as they are called. We have travelled around a lot in Madeira and we have yet to see one of them. If we wanted to see genuine palheiros we would have to go to the village Santana in the north of Madeira, there are a few house kept to provide tourists with photographing opportunities. We’ll just settle with this one for the time being.

As soon as I saw these… er… well, trees, I knew I’ve seen them somewhere before. Then it dawned on me! Beaker in The Muppet Show! See for yourself.

A viewpoint at one end of the botanical garden. A typical view of a Madeiran motorway with breath-taking bridges and long tunnels.

There was a whole department with birds in cages. They seemed to be rather bored, especially the parrots. The peacocks are loose, though. This one is magificent.

After our visit to the botanical garden we went down to the harbour to watch the start of the flower parade. On a bus on the way we saw a poster that seemed to urge you to contribute to the victims of the earlier floods. “Together we will rebuild Madeira” is what the first line of text says. However, with Google’s tranlation help, we now understand that it is an optician who wants to benefit from what has happened to sell some more glasses.

The flower parade was a treat. Here are two picture, there will be more in next post. Stay tuned.

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.