It’s St. Patrick’s Day, time to wear green, play Irish music and offer toasts of good cheer.
In Madeira, you won’t be drinking Guinness but poncha, which is made from sugar cane rum and either orange or lemon juice. It’s sweet and sour and a couple of them will make you forget your troubles.
Since we’ve been drinking it with folks from Scandinavia, we’ve been saying “cheers!” or skål!” rather than the Portuguese “saúde!”
But today we really should say, “sláinte!”
Funchal, Madeira’s capital city, is tucked between the mountains and the sea. Houses cling to hillsides. Roads rise at 45-degree angles, and highways glide through tunnels (there are 156 of them on the island).
But even here, there are limits — rocky gorges, mountains cleft by streams and waterfalls. For those less navigable places there are cable cars, gondolas that glide above it all.
You can take one from the harbor to Monte, and a shorter and less traveled one from Monte to the Botanical Gardens. That’s the one we chose on Thursday.
Similar to a ski lift, the car never stops moving. You step in, the door closes, and you are floating hundreds of feet above the ground. I mostly focused on the horizon, but every so often I glanced down or to the side, which gave me a chance to snap this shot. I have a feeling the occupants of the other car were doing the same thing.
Let’s just say there are so many noteworthy gardens in Madeira that I completely confused two of the more famous ones. I thought we were going to the Botanical Gardens when instead the friends we were meeting were visiting the Monte Palace Tropical Gardens — which we had just seen two days earlier.
No problem, they said. You can take a cable car to the Botanical Gardens from here and meet us later. And that’s what we did: had a quiet glide across a rocky ravine from one garden spot to another.
And then… we were wandering beneath arbors groaning with wisteria, past pink and white camellias, strolling past cactus and bromeliads and ferns and a patchwork garden of reds and greens.
In a way, the whole city is a garden, with bougainvillea pouring over walls, and potted plants on most terraces. And always in the background, the Atlantic Ocean.
Before yesterday’s excursion, a fellow hiker said, “You will love this walk. Everything is green and blue.” She had taken the trail before, so she knew.
But nothing could have prepared me for the particular shades of green and blue, for the commingling of ocean, sky and grass, for the pastoral setting, the lone cows grazing.
There was so much green and so much blue, and when you walked out to the Pico Vermelho viewpoint, it was as if you were walking into the ocean on a gigantic earthen gangplank. Only you didn’t enter the sea; you marveled at it.
One of Funchal’s major tourist attractions is riding the cable car (a gondola-style lift known locally as the teleferico) up to Monte, elevation 3,300 feet, where there is a church, a palace garden and a rip-roaring way to come back down — by toboggan.
Two strong, straw-hatted men (called carreiros) give each toboggan a running start, then jump on and use their thick-soled boots to brake the contraption as it descends the steep street. Sometimes they slide the toboggan sideways so it doesn’t gain too much speed.
The tradition began in the 19th century, when the toboggans — which are woven of wicker in the nearby town of Camacha — were a major means of transporting people and goods down the steep mountainside.
Now tourists pay 30 euros for a 10-minute ride, and the carreiros are bused back up to the starting point every few minutes. But the tradition, as they say, lives on.
(Photos: Carreiros mid-ride and walking back from the bus to the starting point.)
Into every traveler’s life some errands must fall. And by yesterday it was more than time to do laundry.
We’re lucky to be staying in a little apartment with drop-dead gorgeous views, a tiny balcony, and a small washing machine under the cabinet, where a dishwasher might be in the U.S.
The machine’s buttons were mysterious and there was no information in the apartment that might explain how to turn the thing on, so Tom looked up the owner’s manual online. Even that didn’t tell us what we needed to know. But he tinkered with the appliance until it came on … and it stayed on for the next couple of hours.
I wasn’t sure if our clothes would ever be dry again, but I was pretty sure they would be clean. And in fact, they are now both. The drying rack fits over the balcony railing, and, with a little ingenuity, over two kitchen chairs, as well. So by this morning, we had clean, dry clothes.
It was an adventurous laundry day, Madeira style.
(Clothespins: a laundry day essential)
We had been in Funchal for a full week before I darkened the door of its main attraction, the cathedral, or Sé. I attended mass there, which featured one only brief reading in English, the rest in Portuguese. But that didn’t matter. I sat (or knelt or stood) and let the experience wash over me: the setting, the music, the piety.
The cathedral was built in the 16th century, and features a carved wooden ceiling made of Madeirian cedar and a gleaming gold altar. The service was beautifully accompanied by a small choir and orchestra in the loft. The worshippers beside me seemed as awed by the place as I was.
At one time, this cathedral oversaw the largest diocese in the world, because it encompassed all of Portugal’s territories in Africa, Asia, North America, South America. A mighty Sé, indeed.
Travel is not just those top-of-the-mountain moments; it’s also all the moments in between. Checking a train schedule. Staring at a map. Waiting for the bus.
I did a bit of bus-waiting yesterday, and while I waited, I looked around. It was a bright, busy morning. A group fitness class was huffing and puffing down by the shore. A taxi-driver was trying to poach bus customers. There was a flea market bustling behind us.
It was a scene, so I just tried to take it in, let it seep into my consciousness so that on some gray and rainy morning I can pull it out and enjoy it all over again.
There are scenes happening everywhere — but I’m often busy to notice them.
(Enjoying the scene with a cup of chai latte.)
Madeira is a mountainous island. This makes for vistas aplenty, some of them vertiginous. A walk we took the other day was along a cliff edge.
It wasn’t right on the edge, and the path was generous, but it took most of my concentration to focus on the path ahead and not look too far out or down. The few times I did, though, I was rewarded with glimpses of blue sky, white waves and lush greenery.
Soon the trail turned inland, and we followed a steep old road down to the shore. The knees were a bit wobbly at the end, both from the height and the effort. But they made it.
It’s the end of our first week in Madeira. We arrived here late morning last Friday. Since then we have hiked levada paths, toured northern villages, sampled local food and drink, and best of all, made new friends.
This trip is a different kind of adventure, staying put rather than moving around, micro not macro. I’ll admit, it’s an adjustment for me. But it’s a delightful adjustment.
As we walk the paths, we pass so close to homes that we can practically smell the coffee being brewed. And we can certainly glimpse the lush gardens being tended and hear the roosters crowing.
What would it be like to live on a levada? To have a house so much a part of its surroundings? I would have to be a different kind of person to find out.
