“Hold out the back of your hand, like this” the portly produce man tells me, showing me his fist with his fingers curled under. He picks up a small passionfruit with its top cut off: a tiny natural bowl filled to the brim with gelatinous seeds. He takes an appropriately tiny spoon and fishes out a couple of the seeds, gently dropping them near my knuckles, where they look absurdly like a couple of black tadpoles sleeping in a pool of bright yellow juice. “This one is lemon,” he tells me and I drink it, surprised when my tongue is coated in a sour taste that’s absolutely nothing like the other passionfruit I’ve eaten. Almost before I have a chance to wash the citrussy taste out of my mouth he grabs the next tiny bowl in the lineup. “Here’s orange,” he says, and again it’s so different from the first – and so different from the passionfruit I’m used to – that I wonder if this man is some kind of fruit-breeding wizard. “The next one is tomato, but only because of how it looks,” he narrates, pointing to a cranberry-colored fruit, and just as he says it tastes nothing like tomato, but also nothing like the other three.
I pick a fragrant orange- and a peach-flavored fruit and nestle them safely in my backpack, as a snack for my hike later that morning. Following my ears and nose, I wander deeper into the market to a large noisy warehouse whose doors have been thrown open to let in the morning light and air. This gesture is entirely futile; before I even walk in the room I’m choking on the scent of fresh fish. A long line of older gentlemen stand belly-up against a balcony railing, looking down at a room full of fishermen preparing the day’s catch. The marble table directly below me is inhabited by three beautifully-patterned Moray eel, and a few tables over there’s an enormous chunk of tuna that’s nearly as big around as the fisherman who’s cleaving it with a knife. Somehow I find myself captivated by the world’s weirdest spectator sport, and lose minutes just standing there watching before my need for fresh air drives me back out onto the street.
Besides the fish market I’d just left, few things on this island smell like they should. My rambling feet carry me to the oceanfront promenade, where the breeze carries the mouthwatering scent of garlic frying in nearby restaurants instead of the expected salt and fish. The promenade ends at a seaside yellow castle and I turn left, heading into the heart of the city, where the air is perfumed by a thousand wild flowers rather than diesel fumes. The entire place is an unexpected and impossible surprise to the senses.
Madeira is a riot of color, even though it’s the dead of winter. Rainbow beaks of Birds of Paradise flowers poke out curiously from the greenery, and magenta bougainvillea blankets the concrete walls. Orange trumpets blare from Flame of the Forest trees, allegedly the descendants of seeds brought in by Captain Cook in 1772. Even the cultivated fields are brilliantly alive; banana and sweet potatoes already advertise their floral wares. This is all such a welcome change from Freiburg, which is dismal in January despite its reputation as the Sunniest Place in Germany. Like Midwestern USA where I grew up, Freiburg winters are grey, gloomy, and everything’s dead – but unlike the Midwest, it rarely gets blanketed in fresh alabaster snow that cleanses my eyeball palette and gives me something new to look at. I forgot how drained the pale light and muted colors of winter had made me feel until I was abruptly tossed into this island pool, filled with crashing waves in the brightest hues. My first afternoon is spent wandering the old town in a golden haze, floating untethered from one bright wonder to the next. I’m a hummingbird, so drunk on color and light that I can’t even fly a straight line from flower to flower as the warmth floods back into my veins.
Although Madeira may not be that far off the tourist track for Europeans, but to me it was a complete unknown. Unlike Rome and Paris and London, I hadn’t grown up seeing Madeira featured in Travel Channel specials or bad Disney Channel movies. I had no idea what this vacation would bring – and therefore I had no expectations. I find it an astounding relief to visit a place with no such preconceived notions. Everything is a surprise, and I can’t be disappointed if a place doesn’t live up to my expectations (kind of going along with the idea of never meet your heroes).
Even then, whatever basic expectations I did have time to form about this island got absolutely blown out of the proverbial water. Madeira (which is an autonomous region of Portugal) lies about 1000 km west of Morocco, so even in January the sun is strong against my pale skin. The island was born of fire millions of years ago, when a submarine volcano exploded and thrust razor-sharp black cliffs straight into the air. Although Madeira is only the size of New York City, it rises from sea level to over a mile high at its center – which is impressive, and yet still nothing compared to the 4km of subterranean volcano that separates the exposed tip of the archipelago from the seafloor.
All told, I spent five days on this glorious island. Five days being drenched in sunlight (and a little bit of “winter mists,” although the droplets were too fine to even count as rain). Five days scarfing tiny regional bananas and sampling poncha, a regional drink made from rum and freshly muddled lemon juice. Five days scaling mountains and staring out into the brilliance of the Atlantic’s abyss. And you know what? It still wasn’t enough time. I smashed as much as I could into those five days while still remembering to relax. But I could easily have spent weeks on this lost island, basking in the winter sun and filling myself with fresh ocean breezes.
Some of my favorite experiences in Funchal and its environs lie below, squeezed in between the best of the 1000+ pictures I took during my trip. Naturally I also engaged in the island’s unofficial favorite pasttime, hiking, which I enjoyed so much I had to make an entirely separate post here!
Seaside city exploring
A lot of tourist cities tend to feel like they’re an enormous movie set, where it’s like the locals come in every day to put on a rehearsed show, then vacate the stage once darkness falls. Funchal, on the other hand, feels lived in. While you can still find the chintzy tourist shops and gauntlets of restaurants just waiting to fight over you at dinnertime, finding authenticity is just a matter of walking down the street. One afternoon I got swept up into a sea of backpacked teenagers pouring out of their city-center high school, hanging out in groups or firing up their dirt bikes for the ride home. Locals queue at every bus stop at every hour of the day, just going about the normal errands of their lives. Older gentlemen flock to chess tables in the parks; twenty men gather just to watch two of their friends play, and if no one is playing they just find a nearby construction project to stare at.
While the social constructs feel familiar, the surroundings lend a surreal spice to the place. The men playing chess sit in a park – on the edge of the wild Atlantic. Locals waiting for the bus stand at the side of a road – which plunges into a tunnel in the mountainside just a few paces up. Cats slumber on street corners – lounging below brilliantly colored murals, just paces away banana plants drooping low with heavy fruits.
I feel remarkably safe here, whether I’m walking through old town or up exploring the urban jungle in the hills. I fill the gaps in my adventuring schedule with endless ramblings through the city, and it feels like I never run out of things to do or places to explore. And at night, after the sun is swallowed by the hungry ocean, the lamps and porchlights strung along the steep hillsides turn the city into a brilliant galaxy, hovering just at the end of my fingertips and eating up a third of the navy horizon.
Urban hiking to the Botanical Gardens
High in the hills high above old town, there perches a terraced botanical garden. Most sane visitors use the fancy new cable car to get up the mountain, and the base station is just one minute from my hostel. But one morning I felt fierce and adventurous and cheap, so I packed some snacks and set off into the urban jungle of Funchal. I followed a piecemeal maze of roads, alleys, and staircases up the mountain, but eventually all pedestrian paths ended and I was forced to walk on the steep, twisting roads. The roads here are full of blind corners, and the short blare of a car horn is a common sound here, but it’s usually just a friendly warning to other drivers that means “Heads up, I’m coming around the bend!” My endless plod upwards is punctuated with frequent rest stops, so I can look back and admire the city from my lofty viewpoint (to be clear, I’m stopping ONLY to admire the view, not to hyperventilate because of the 11% road grade). My one solace is that even the cars creak and groan as they power up the hills.
The Botanical garden is…well…a botanical garden. The most impressive part for me was just seeing firsthand all the diverse species, from so many worldly locations, packed together and thriving on this island. However, all of Funchal is a breathing botanical garden filled with the vibrant flowers and wacky plants, and honestly there are some good free alternatives elsewhere in the city. The Parque de Santa Catarina and the tiny Jardim Municipal (city garden) are fantastic places to just hang out in, and don’t require a cable car or a brutal hike to get to.
Taste
The most plentiful crops on Funchal are tiny bananas and fish, so I suppose it’s only natural that at some point the two were combined into a single regional dish (although I’m sure the original chef got some weird looks!). Scabbardfish with banana is strangely delicious, lightly sweet but also fried, and it’s best washed down with a little bit of regional poncha. While you can find poncha at any self-respecting restaurant, it’s well-loved enough to have entire bars dedicated to its craft; Madeira Rum House goes for the purist approach, where the bartender hand-muddles all the ingredients together in a mortar, and Venda Velha has a dozen mixed flavors to try.
While I enjoyed poncha, it was Madeira wine that truly captured my attention. It’s a fortified wine that is similar in theory to Port wine, but its aged in American oak casks so its flavor is more akin to whiskey. I headed straight for the source at Blandy’s Wine Lodge and got there too late to learn how it’s made, but luckily the doors of its tasting room were wide open. I thought I was enamored after the first sip of the five-year vintage, but I had a religious experience with my first sip of the ten-year. The tasting room had bottles from decades ago (I even found one from my birth year), and it’s good I’d only brought a limited amount of cash with me!
If you’re like me and want to take some Madeira wine back with you, there are a few options even if you aren’t checking any luggage. Duty-free shops in both Funchal and Lisbon airports (where most Air Portugal flights have layovers) carry Madeira wine. In Funchal, you can either buy it there or you can pay for the bottles at the Blandy’s Wine Lodge, take your receipt with you, and pick up the bottles in the airport. You can also ship the wine straight to your home, but it’s ridiculously expensive!
Island exploring
Although distances here are theoretically short, it takes ages to get around Madeira. I was too much of a chicken to try my hand at driving the narrow streets (for which I was extremely glad after I saw a tourist with his rental hanging halfway off a mountain road). Instead I took an organized tour to the west of the island.* Pictures speak louder than words here, since of course the point of a tour is generally to see as much as possible rather than necessarily experience.
*The company I used was awful and I do not recommend them (Lido Tours, Best of the West tour) Avoid if at all possible.
Madeira’s airport tarmac literally overhangs the ocean, standing on concrete pilons and jutting out like an absurd jetty from the shoreline. On three sides the elevated runway faces the ocean, and on the fourth side a cliff looms high overhead. When the winds kick up, no planes can land on or leave the island – which is exactly what happened the day I was supposed to fly out.
After waiting for my flight to be officially cancelled and picking up a new ticket for the following day, I headed for the Ponta Sao Lorenco to have a strong word with the wind that had stranded me on the island. I hopped aboard a local bus, a machine was a few years past its prime but absolutely spotless inside and out.** I was headed for the last stop, and watched the bus slowly empty until I was the only one left aboard. Abruptly, the bus driver parked at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere and caught my attention, telling me in broken English, “I be back in one minute, okay?” With the bus still running, he hopped out and ran out of sight, choosing a strange time indeed to run an errand.
The sun was hanging low on the horizon when we finally made it to the point, and sadly I didn’t have enough time to walk the entire 8km trail (not to mention the last bus back left in half an hour!). So I ran down the trail, trying not to trip as I took in the view. Sao Lorenco is a sharp and barren peninsula that juts into the ocean. Unforested and wild, the landscape might be quite ugly if not for the brilliant palette of colors buried in the earth. The richest reds, browns, and blacks peek out from the soils and cliffsides in precise layers.
The wind, when I find it, almost bowls me over with its fury. Every step is a fight, and I can’t hear anything over the roar. I demure to its unfathomable power, thanking the wisdom of the flight crews to not bother with trying to take off in this ridiculous weather. The furthest I can make it is to the opposite shore, snapping a few hurried photographs before turning tail and running back to the waiting bus.
**As a side note, if you do this hike when the trail is muddy and intend on riding the city bus, make sure your boots are clean at the end or you have a spare pair of shoes! Some friends of mine were almost not allowed back on the bus because their shoes were too muddy from the trail.
The lowdown
If I were to do the trip over, I would certainly have planned out my hiking trips a little better, since most days I rolled out of bed without any kind of plan. It doesn’t help that the local bus network is run by four different companies (FOUR!), depending on what section of the island you’re in. Timetables are tough to decipher (different times make different stops, or don’t run at all on certain days). If you do decide to go by bus, stop by a tourist information center to get exact line and time information. Also, some trailheads are impossible to reach by public bus, so for these you will either need to rent a car or a taxi (which can be rented by the day), or you can take an organized tour (Madeira Explorers is good).
By the end of my trip, two things were clear: A) I need to see the rest of Portugal as soon as possible, and B) Madeira is now firmly wedged somewhere among Croatia, Turkey, and Ireland in the running for my favorite place in Europe. I loved the enormous range of hiking trail types, and it was always easy to find something relaxing to do once I was back in Funchal. It was exactly the kind of trip I didn’t know I needed.
Window Seat Odyssey 