Somewhere Over The Rainbow

I have been coming to Madeira for ten years now, and in all that time all I have pretty much seen is the insides of restaurants, the poolside of here at the Pestana Grand and the Pestana Promenade, the airport, Funchal town centre, and the top of The Mont via a truly terrifying cable car ride. We were determined to see a bit more the flora and fauna of the island this time. We booked a Jeep Safari so that we could go off road and get into the nitty gritty of the island ... and boy did we go off road!

We woke up this morning and it was teeming down with rain, which is about par for the course for us when we decide to go on a nature trek. Worse than that, the island was enshrouded in a thick fog! We got on the jeep, which was very cosy indeed, and we had to interlock knees with the people sharing with us. We got to know the couple very well in the eight hours we were out exploring! Our first point was a view point of Funchal ... you could hardly see the wall we had stopped by, let alone anything else. We could barely make out the football ground that Ronaldo first played at when he was but a stripling of a lad (we apparently passed his brother on the hill on the way there). Our hopes for the day were dipping, as the fog seemed set for the day. Now the thing with Madeira is, it is a little volcanic bit of rock in the Atlantic, and the weather can change in a matter of minutes. As we climbed into the foggy eucalyptus forest, the air was filled with the tremendous smell of the trees (and Marlborough Light's thanks to German couple in our jeep who seemed to need three cigarettes each every time we stopped to sight see) and the fog began to lift. As we reached the top of this particular climb the fog lifted and the most wonderful rainbow appeared in the valley below. The rest of the day didn't turn out half bad. Yes we got caught in the occasional downpour, and the roof of the jeep was put on and off half a dozen times, but we think it would have been far worse to have been cramped up in there for eight hours in the thirty degree heat.

We climbed and climbed, and drove on roads that could easily feature in the next series of Ice Road Truckers: Death Roads ... it was good sense not to look down a lot of the time! All in all it was a bumpy, exhausting, but thoroughly interesting and enjoyable day out.

More foggy and non foggy pictures of the day are up on the Madeira Flickr Set.