Last day in Madeira

Even the rainy days must end. Alas, they don’t always end the way one might wish. We departed the guest house with smiles and hugs from Barry and Johannes. Despite the small room and the unheated pool, Summerplace was six nights of cozy. Daily breakfast was incredible, and the view (when it wasn’t obscured by clouds) was almost unsurpassable. The location, too, gave me something I didn’t realize I needed: peace from the noise of the city. My morning runs, three of them in the FiveFingers, were all stunning. I ran through fields of grass up to my knees (avoiding the deep pools of manure) and stared down cliffs that would normally have sent me reeling. I never ran far, ran everyday but one. My legs feel stronger, I feel more in tune with my self as a runner than I did before I arrived on the magical island of Madeira. The quite of those morning runs are what I shall remember most from this vacation.

We drove to Funchal through another cloud covered, rainy day. We saw immediately the devastation that had visited this city. Rocks covered the streets. Mud splattered closed and boarded up store fronts. The four lane street nearest the ocean had been reduced to two lanes. Boulders the size of automobiles were lodged in the channels that shuttled water from the mountains to the ocean. We pulled into an underground parking garage where workers were drying out electrical outlets and trying to get the lights working again. We walked up mud covered stairs to the street and realized that this garage, only two weeks before, had been filled with muddy water, pouring in through this very stairwell, most likely, because it opened to face the mountain.

The government had done much to get the city back to normal. Though some streets were partially closed, traffic flowed normally, and all the sidewalks were open to pedestrians, even if some of the shops were still shuttered. The walkways were crowded with people, like Wall Street at 8:45am. I didn’t know this many people existed here, could even fit here. On the western side of the island, we were lucky to see two people as we drove away from the guest house each morning after breakfast. Here, the streets were lousy with people. We had no urge to see them. After a stop for wine at Blandey’s, then a coffee, we drove to the Dom Pedro Hotel in Machico, the four star hotel where we would spend our final night.

Four stars is being generous. The bed, as hard as the tiled floor and just as cold, lay on a plank of wood. The wicker furniture was purchased sometime in the 1970s and the cathode tube television sitting on what they called a desk was not much younger. The drinks at the bar were outrageously expensive; this place caters to a British clientele that pay an extra fee for an all inclusive deal. We could have had the same thing for double the money. But it was just a bed for us, closer to the airport. From the lobby and from our room we watched the sea crash and break over the rocks, the clouds obliterate the mountainside and the houses perched there.

We chose wisely for dinner, a small place just down the road from the hotel that had the best espatada I had the entire trip. Espatada is beef spiced with bay (laurel) leaves, served on the skewer on which it is grilled. It’s a Madeiran speciality, apparently, in part because this island is covered in laurel trees. M had the espada (black scabbard) with banana, which was also especially good. I had my first taste of poncha, the sweet drink made from rum and honey and lemon. It was like a spiced version of limoncello. Afterwards, we stumbled back to our room and fell quickly to some semblance of sleep. The bed was so hard it was like sleeping on concrete. Eventually the alarm sounded and we were saved from the rack.

We left Madeira in the middle of the night, stealing away from our hotel, from the sleepy-eyed night clerk we roused from slumber on the lobby’s wicker furniture who watched us drive away through the glass lobby doors, from the sea finally quiet and the stars which we could see for only the second time in a week, with the yellow lights of the city guiding us, the air calm, the night quiet, the whistling wind at last abated–we left the island more full of peace than when we arrived.