Wanderung 34

We steamed rather quickly past the western edges of Faial Island just after dawn, picked up a local pilot, and then anchored just outside the harbor breakwater at Horta, the main town on the island. As we were anchored offshore, the Zuiderdam lowered some of its twin-screw lifeboats to use as tenders to ferry the ship's passengers over to the small terminal area inside the breakwater. I think they use the twin-screw lifeboats for tendering because those are built as catamarans and with one propeller on each side, they are certainly more maneuverable than the mono-hull lifeboats.

From the terminal at the dock, we walked along the seafront promenade that extends to the small-boat marina on the other side of the harbor. Kimi, Monika's niece, was going to join us but had to set things up at the rescue center first. The port city of Horta is quite small, but it seemed very clean and pretty to us, with several churches situated on the higher ground surrounding the city center along the waterfront.

Kimi came and picked us up in her work truck, and then very generously spent the whole day playing tour guide for the four of us. First we had a short hop over to the old whaling harbor just across a narrow isthmus at one edge of Horta. There we stopped in for a snack at a small coffee shop, and had a Portuguese equivalent of the Spanish tapas where some small empanadas with different filings had been fried up for snacks.

Then we crammed ourselves into Kimi's work truck and chugged off on our around-the-island tour. But our first, quite unscheduled, stop was to try to rescue a goat that had pulled loose its stake and was wandering in the middle of the busy main highway. A typical animal husbandry technique on Faial is to tether a farm animal to a plot of ground with a stake and a line, but in this case the goat had pulled out its stake and was now wandering freely. I tried to stop oncoming traffic while Kim, Monika, and Jerry ran back to secure the goat. Kim later reported that they had succeeded in getting the goat to enter a fenced-in field, which was the best that they could do without knowing who was the legal owner of the goat.

We continued on up the eastern side of the island, stopping at scenic overlooks and discussing life on the island with Kimi. Having lived there 8 years, she had a good base for telling us about island life, including the interesting fact that three windmills had been constructed to provide power for the island's electrical grid.

Faial appeared very lush and green to us, with vegetation covering almost everything with a thick carpet of green. When I tried to walk on the grass, I had the same problem I had once had in Ireland, where the grass is almost 1 foot deep and so cushy that it is difficult to keep your balance on. I later learned that the average rainfall on Faial was medium for the Azores group of islands, as that island chain includes islands with more rainfall out to the West of Faial and drier islands out to the East of it.

The exception to the lush greenery on Faial was when we stopped at the other end of the island where a volcano had erupted just a few decades back. Vegetation was attempting to grow on that newly-formed land, but most of the expanse of lava, basalt and other volcanic rocks was still quite barren. I wanted to visit the adjacent museum about the eruption, but everyone else voted against that as I am known to take far too long in almost any museum!

Instead we curled back down the other side of Faial to a place where Kimi apparently regularly goes swimming in the Atlantic Ocean! Brrrr! But when we got there and walked down to the shore, I could see the sense of swimming in the mostly-enclosed tidal pool areas as the wave forces would be much reduced. One section had even been painted blue on the inside to roughly simulate what a typical outdoor pool would look like in other countries.

Our last major stop was Kimi's horse rescue farm, Ninovan. There I finally met my namesake, a rescued dog also called "Uncle Bob", even though he had FAR more hair than I do! Thank goodness he liked me (although I suspect he likes pretty much everybody)! But we also met the rescued horses that are cared for on the 3 acres or so that comprise the farm.

 

All of these horses have been mistreated or completely abandoned, and have been rescued by Kim and/or her friend Micheala. The horses basically live in retirement at Ninovan and they are now in good shape, but it was heat-rending to see the healed wounds from the mistreatment of the previous owners. Hard to believe humans would do things like that to dumb animals. Linda, who is an experienced horse owner, had thought ahead and snuck a couple apples from the breakfast buffet, and Mocca (the horse in the picture below) certeinly enjoyed his treat!

In any case, we spent a couple hours seeing the horses and chatting with Kim and Micheala before Kim drove us back to the maritime terminal, stopping off at the one big grocery store on the island so that we could stock up for the next days of the cruise. I picked up some real, old-fashioned Coca-Cola (real sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup as it is made in the USA), and Monika picked up some green local wine recommended by Kimi plus a cork puller.

Thus encumbered, we trundled back onto the lifeboat and were tendered out to the Zuiderdam. We were rather exhausted and had a short, simple meal on the Lido deck before retiring to our joint balconies to sit on deck for the evening. We were watching for whales, which we knew to be in the area, but had no luck seeing them--a lady later told us that a pod of whales had disported themselves on the starboard side of the Zuiderdam but our rooms were on the port side so we didn't see that.

We did, however, get some action shots of dolphins or porpoises that truly seemed to come rushing over to join the ship as we steamed slowly past the southern shore of the long island of Pico. I think with one picture I even caught one of the dolphins leaping in the air!

Pico is of itself an interesting island because it has the highest mountain in Portugal on it! That mountain is a huge volcano that just dominates one end of the island. According to our map of the Azores, a rough road even runs up the side of the mountain to the cone at the top, but we were far enough offshore so that we could not really see any sign of that road. But what we did see, was a perfect, Mount Fuji-like volcanic cone, although much smaller than Mount Fuji and not covered by snow on the top as is Mount Fuji.

The oddest thing was that there was a thin layer of cloud about 2/3 of the way up the slopes of Pico, and above that cloud layer the top of the mountain looked absolutely dry, black, and barren of any vegetation. Below that cloud, however, the lower slopes of Pico were remarkably lush and green. Coincidence? Or did that cloud layer mark a boundary where clouds typically rest against the slopes, raining on the slopes underneath but leaving the top of the peak dry as a bone? I don't know but I was puzzling about it when we turned in for the night.