Levada Walk

Today was the day of our first levada walk.  We are trying easy ones out first!  

We took a minibus with the guide over to the East side of the island to be greeted by rain which quickly became a torrential downpour for the first 20 - 30 minutes of the walk.  As SHH has just said - it was nice when it stopped.  He is the master of the obvious.  It was an interesting walk because of the mud and the bright orange water in the puddles and the fact that I have bashed my leg on a levada wall - not too much sympathy required thank you - and Lorenz our guide was very interesting in explaining how more of the younger people are now having to reclaim the land from the mimosa like acacia which is rampant because so many of the construction projects they have been working on are coming to an end.  In this shot you can see some of the terraces.  Further on along the levada it became much more obvious where people were having to work very hard reclaiming every bit of land to support themselves with the produce - you can see some of this in the extras, along with a man and his son carrying feed up to their land in the only way possible along the small levada paths - that is, on their heads.  A hard life.

We had a more restful afternoon lazing by the pool.  Tomorrow is catamaran day!  We will be up early to catch the service bus down into Funchal!  Hopefully we might have a dolphin blip tomorrow evening.  This is going to be our Big Blipmeet day!  We are going for the record in the smallest Big Celebration Blipmeet.  I hope you all appreciate the effort we are going to put in to publicising Blip to anyone who will listen.  I will be 21 again tomorrow!  Life is good.