Sunday, November 4th - Funchal, Madeira
Bob: All too early we had to arise and get to our tour of the island of Madeira. It was the first tour to leave as it was an 8 hour tour and we were only in port for 9 hours, and in fact we returned only 10 minutes before the specified time for reboarding the ship. About half the total population of 260,000 of Madeira live in Funchal, which is a medium sized city. Madeira is a mountainous volcanic island like Hawaii and there are basically no flat spaces on it, so most of Funchal was built right up the sides of the mountains. Although Funchal looked interesting, we did not stop there but instead wound our way through town and then continued westward along the coast. |
Monika: The day was nice and sunny when we sailed into Funchal. Funchal is volcanic island and the mountains come down to the sea. The city is built on the slopes of the mountain and it was rather pretty seeing the white houses with red roofs crawling up the mountainside. We departed at 8:30 for our day long trip around the north west corner of the island. Getting people and their excursions sorted out in the Coral Theater went rather smoothly and they actually sent the longest tour (ours) off first. Our guide was an elderly lady who spoke excellent English. She was born on Madeira and knew every plant by its local, English, and Latin name. It was quite fascinating and I wish I could remember more of it. |
Bob: At the first scenic overlook we stopped at, we were accosted by Gypsy children who were trying to give us flowers and then charge us for them. Their parents were standing around nearby smoking cigarettes or drinking, so we knew exactly where any money donated to the urchins would go. Consequently we refused to play their little game although they were adorable little scamps. Our guide said that 8,000 immigrants from Eastern Europe had been allowed onto Madeira to do the jobs that the 8,000 unemployed Madeirans refused to do, but these immigrants were now causing problems, apparently begging and petty theft. Spain is trying to accommodate the Gypsies whereas Rome recently bulldozed a Gypsy encampment after a local women was brutally murdered and found (surprise, surprise!) a lot of stolen goods when they did so. So it will be interesting to see how Madeira tries to cope with their newly imported Gypsy problem. Our next stop was a pleasant little town crammed into a river valley right on the coast. People were attending church, but the tourist shops were also open for business! After stretching out legs a bit we coninuted on to some sheer cliffs that dropped over a thousand feet straight down into the Atlantic Ocean. There was a little outdoor market there and Monika bought a necklace, but I kept trying to take a picture of the cliff and found it surprisingly difficult to get a good one. Frustrating! |
Monika: We made several stops for picture taking and of course the natives knew all of these touristy stops. At the first stop, an overview, our guide warned us that this was the only place where there were kids begging and to be sure to ignore them. And indeed there they were. It looked like there were also adults supervising the begging children. But indeed this was the only place where we saw this. Our next stop was in a small village with a beautiful church. In the middle was a steep ravine going up the mountain. Very picturesque. The high point of the morning was a stop at the highest cliff in Europe. It is hard to get a picture that actually shows the steepness of the cliff going directly down into the see. At the bottom was a farm, and our guide told us that it used to be that the only way that people could get to the farm was by boat. Since this was the premier tourist stop, there were several locals that sold different things. At one stand I saw some jewelry and did pick up a nice little necklace to wear with my formal dress. |
Bob: Turning toward the central plateau, we passed terraced fields that were climbing up the mountainsides almost everywhere that the mountains had a relatively shallow slope. These terraces were supported by mile after mile of rock retaining walls built from carefully formed basaltic rock. The soil, our guide explained, was then carefully deposited in each terrace by the farmer, who had to carry the soil to the field using stone stairways set into the retaining walls. Those "stairways", by the way, were nothing more than oblong rocks jutting out from the retaining wall with no support or railing of any kind, so clearly farming those terraces was not only extremely laborious but also extremely dangerous. However, Madeira has a semitropical climate somewhat like Hawaii (see Wanderung 16), so the rewards of all this labor were the three crops per year that could be grown in the fertile volcanic soil. They only have to give the field a 2-3 week rest between crops, but the farmers are also careful to plant different crops in rotation, probably to prevent soil exhaustion or the build up of noxious crop pests or parasites. The nature of the crops also varied with elevation. Bananas were a major cash crop, so up to about 1,000 feet elevation bananas were grown wherever possible. Above that altitude vineyards with the special grape used to make Madeira wine, another big cash export, were the major players along with what I would call truck farms growing corn, beans, and other kinds of fruits and vegetables. The size of the farm fields was typically very small in part due to the way each farm was partitioned among the children when it passed to the next generation, resulting in a natural fragmentation over the centuries, so farmers often ended up holding widely separated and very small fields, which would make the whole enterprise both difficult and expensive in my opinion. |
Monika: From the cliff we kept going up through cultivation to the plateau in the middle of the island. We admired our driver negotiating the narrow streets and sharp turns. Bob was glad he was not driving and so could enjoy the view and even take pictures. On the southside of the island, up to 1000 feet the crop was mainly bananas, after that we saw vineyards and the top looked barren. The northside of the island was mainly wooded. We were told that of the 260,000 inhabitants, almost 120,00 lived in Funchal and 95% lived on the southside. The plateau was mainly used for cattle grazing. |
Bob: The central plateau of Madeira was mainly given over to grazing. I could not see any fences, so presumably the grazing is in communal areas of some kind. Each cow, however, typically was owned by a single farmer who was responsible for its feeding and upkeep. The high altitude and grazing keep down the trees, so the central plateau seems somewhat like a tropical tundra, if that makes any sense. As we drove down onto the north or rainy side of Madeira, the population dropped off and the vegetation changed dramatically. Now we started seeing forest-covered craggy mountains that reminded me very much of Hawaii. We had lunch at Cachalot, a restaurant right on the rocky shoreline of the north coast. The restaurant was beautifully situated because just off shore was a huge, diamond-shaped rock. When the sun struck the rock, it turned a golden brown that was a gorgeous contrast to the deep blue sea all around it. Lunch itself was a choice of "scabbard" fish or beef. I had the beef and that was low fat but also quite dry, so I was drinking a lot of water as I ate. Other folks had the fish and said it was quite good. Outside the restaurant we found walled-off pools where you could conceivably bathe if the weather were sufficiently warm. We had not, however, brought swimsuits so we had to be satisfied with just looking at the craggy, tortuous lava rocks that formed the sides of each of the pools. The bottoms also appeared to be raw lava rock, however, so I'm not at all sure you could actually stand up safely in any of those pools. |
Monika: The mountains on the northside were much steeper and ended directly in the ocean. There was even less level ground to build houses or to farm than on the southside, and even there the farmers had made terrace farming into an art. Nice to look at, but my God what hard work was involved in planting, tending, and harvesting. We had lunch in a seaside cafe overlooking the ocean so we could watch the surf crashing on the rocks. Outside the cafe, the town had put a few walls between the lava rocks and so creating natural swimming pools. We regretted not to have brought our swimsuits. But it was fun walking between these pools and taking pictures. |
Bob: We drove along the lush northern coast a while before cutting back across the island to Funchal to reboard the ship. We saw a couple of places where they had channeled or diverted the natural spring water from building the road tunnels into the ocean. The water gushed out of the those drainpipes and created some really pretty waterfalls right on the cliffs. The drive up the valley again reminded me of Hawaii and I could see why Heinke and Gustl took a walking tour here a few years back; that would tempt me also. We returned to the ship only 10 minutes before the final boarding call, so that was cutting it close but RCI will wait for you if you are delayed on one of their official tours, so we weren't too worried about that. We were sad to see someone being taken off the ship in an ambulance and we wished him or her well as we sailed out of Funchal on the long trek back across the Atlantic Ocean. We were, however, able to catch the 5:00 Walk-A-Mile and earn two more Shipshape dollars. The evening's entertainment was "From West End to Broadway". It featured a string of songs and dances lifted from a series of musicals such as Les Miserables, the Copacabana, and so forth. The 8 dances and 4 singers did a good job, we thought, although reviews from other passengers were mixed. We were surprisingly tired for not really having done any serious exercise during the day, so we turned in directly after the show. |
Monika: Back in the bus we drove up to the pass between the highest mountains on the island. It was fun looking at the ocean on either side. Then down the other side to a last stop where we could take pictures of a beautiful waterfall. There was of course the inevitable gift shop, but here they had a really beautifully tooled leather belt for Bob (3 Euro!) and some t-shirts with very nice embroidery. But we had to leave before being able to spend any more money. Back to Funchal we went on the new main road that was built by cutting tunnels. Our guide told us, that it really is cheaper to build and maintain the tunnels, then cutting the roads along the side of the mountain like those we had driven on in the morning. They may be more scenic, but much harder to maintain and impossible to widen. So the newer roads all were built utilizing tunnels whenever there was a mountain in the way. The new roads have decreased travel time between the outlying villages and Funchal by at least 50%. We got back to the ship only about 10 minutes before the "All Aboard" so we did not have time to try to see the town. Instead, we went back on deck for the afternoon Walk-A-Mile and then took pictures as Funchal and Madeira disappeared on the horizon. Tonight's show was the much anticipated first big cast show. We had heard them practicing all along. This was a new show with a new cast. They had started rehearsing 6 weeks ago in Florida after which they were flown out to join the ship and they had been rehearsing ever since. It was the typical cruise show with lots of vim, vigor, and vitality, not to mention costume changes. The four solo singers were all relatively good and the dancing was fun to watch. So a lot of fun was had by all. |
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