Madeira, Day 2: Paralyzing heights and churning seas

The morning broke with sunshine, a glorious blue sky peppered with drifting gray clouds and only a light breeze. After a spot of tea (I know, wrong country; I brought my own) I headed out for a morning run. Rather than go down first, I went up into the mountain. The guest house lies on a small road that ends at a little dirt road. Follow the dirt road for about 2km, past old farm houses and a new well and a small plot of farmland that has been recently tilled, into wide lanes that have been cut out of the earth. Mud walls on either side, five meters high. I found a sign that indicated this was a bike path and so I followed it. Around sharp bends as though this were once a road that led over this mountain, over rivers and skimming cliff ledges. For the most part, there were no steep dropoffs. Just trees and a cool wind and the sun peeking out from behind those gray clouds occasionally. I ran over the top of the mountain without realizing it, to a town on the other side. I hadn’t even realized how close we were to the top, really, nor how far from the sea below. More on that in a bit. When I got back, I removed my shoes and stuck my legs in the cold pool, temperature 12C (~54F). You’d think it would be cold to basically plunge your legs into water that cold, but it felt quite good. I wasn’t even shivering.

M wanted to ride a cable car, so we drove back to Achadas da Cruz, which we passed yesterday, and followed the signs to the telefèrico. The road was steep and only a little windy and seemed to be taking us straight to the edge of a cliff. Which it was. We got to the top of the telefèrico to find three men standing together at the top of the cable car arguing. I asked M to translate, but she said they were speaking too fast for her to understand completely. “I think they’re talking about sports,” she said. One of them kept gesturing wildly to the cliff edge. I approached the miraduoro, which I roughly translate to mean ‘view point’ and immediately turned to sit down. I had to hand the camera to M because I couldn’t even stand up. The upper station for the car was basically metal supports and a cable that went almost literally straight down, a 1000 foot vertical drop to a small village nestled at the bottom next to the sea. I felt my legs giveway as I stood up to watch M take the photos. I couldn’t even look up at the top of the supporting pillars because doing so would have meant having my back to the cliff and that meant the fear that something could carry me over the side and I’d go tumbling down to the small village below. I found this photo online which should give you something of an idea of how far down the drop was.

Lucky for me, there was no cable car. I don’t mean to say that it was sitting at the top and not in service, or that it was sitting at the bottom and not in service. I mean that there appeared to be no cable car anywhere in site. Not dangling in the middle, not waiting to be called. Just gone. Which is too bad because that village down there has no other way of being in touch with the rest of the world. Not without a boat, that is, and the seas today were not as calm as you see in this picture above. They were choppy and foamy and I’m pretty sure if I lived down there I wouldn’t have put a boat into the ocean today. In any case, my colon received a reprieve today and didn’t disappear into my lower intestine. (Dad, you know what I’m talking about here.)

We drove on to the lovely little town of Porto Moniz, which sits by the sea. The road was windy, but the destination was worth it. Porto Muniz, a popular tourist spot, is famous for its natural swimming pools. The seas cascade over small rock walls and the water pools in natural crevices, protected from the surf. I don’t think these little pools are as natural as the government would like you to believe. The walls on the outer edge of the pool has been constructed to make the pool as big and as safe as possible. There are other, smaller pools, too, near a heliport which is where the helicopter tour of the island lands. (There’s another heliport in Seixal just down the road, where we ate dinner.) Today, the sea was alive and angry. Huge waves, some as high as 20 meters, crashed against the rocks, sending sea foam high into the air. The sea itself was white with the foam. It looked like egg whites being beaten, like the white sands of New Mexico swirling in a breeze, like a huge soapy bath. Only this soapy bath could kill. We watched the waves crash into each other and into the rocks for at least an hour, mesmerized by the power of the ocean.

We ate dinner in a little town called Seixal, at a small restaurant with so-so food but an incredible view of almost the entire northern coast of the island. The town is nestled against the hills leading right down to the sea, and while there is one paved road that runs through town, there are many smaller named foot paths that run throughout the village, and it is off these paths where people live. M worried about walking along them because she thought we were basically walking along these people’s front yards. Which we were. But that’s the way to get around on foot. There was actually a roundabout for pedestrians. As our meal was ending, we saw the new moon, big and orange, rise over the eastern end of the island, illuminating the sea which, for the moment, had calmly subsided. The lights of Ribeira da Janela and São Vicente blinked on, yellow stars dotting the coastline. We drove back to the guest house in the dark, an exciting and nerve wracking experience over twisting, turning roads. Now we sip a little Madeira before turning in, excited to find something new to tickle our senses tomorrow on this beautiful island.