Some imges of Madeira

Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Fri 4 Dec 2015 21:24
Rather late, but here are some pictures of Madeira: more to come soon.
 
QLAwelina superyacht
Quinto do Lorde marina; our home for 10 days. We are rather a modest craft by their standards.
 
The staff at Quinto do Lorde were extremely welcoming and helpful however, and did all sorts of things for us, including arranging car hire so we then spent a few days exploring.
 
First to Funchal:
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which is quite pleasant with wide tree-lined streets and some fine old buildings but pretty crowded, and with lots of parks and other public space. One can even take a cable car to the famous Botanic Gardens (of which more later).
 
It also has an enormous fruit and veg market with an equally large fish market attached.
 
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Just a tiny corner of the fruit section, and a stall selling only chillies (Note to Bob Longman: we need to up our game!)
 
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However, despite all these delicious things on display we managed to pick a restaurant where we were served quite the worst lunch either of us had ever eaten so we decided to drive up into the mountains.
 
Roads are generally excellent with hundreds of tunnels until one gets really quite out of the way. But the road goes up and up a very long way: this picture was when we had got above the clouds at around 1400m. The vegetation gradually changed from cacti and succulents to pine and eucalyptus forest to deciduous forest and finally to bracken and heathland and the odd pine, very like Ashdown Forest in Sussex.
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Above the cloud
 
As one descends into valleys – we chose to drive down into the valley of Riberio Frio (Cold River) – just how steep the valleys are becomes apparent.
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What it looks like below the cloud.
 
And then into farm land, which is almost all terraced as there really isn’t a flat piece of ground anywhere. All worked largely by hand.
 
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The terraces start just below the all-important levada which is the horizontal scar in the hillside running across the picture.
 
The lavadas are irrigation channels, and go for miles, 10km is not an unusual one. There are hundreds of them and we walked along one 11km long with a drop of only about 100m in all that length. Although still 100% functional, many have been adapted to have way-marked tracks along them and walking has become one of the chief tourist attractions of Madeira (it has no beaches!).
 
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They are not for those with vertigo.