Hiking Miradouro da Ponta do Rosto (Sao Vicente) on Madeira

According to this list, Madeira is the third most dangerous airport in the world.  Many times, the pilot just gives up and flies back into the sky. This video conveys a little of the excitement.  It seems some people on Madeira watch planes attempting to land for entertainment.  So, it was a relief to land in not-so-high winds this time.  

Previous post - our time at the Palace of Queluz in Lisbon.

Once we settled in, we chose Ponta de Rosto as our first hike.  To get there,  I had to drive up an incredibly steep road from our sea-level hotel to the highway.  It was a tiny, narrow road that just kept going and going straight up.  Jennifer said it felt to her like the car was going to flip over backwards.

The Sao Vicente hike is at one end of the island. (Sao means "saint" in Portuguese).  It's a wind-blasted, treeless, serpentine strip of land, with cliffs a few hundred feet high alternating on one side or the other.

The hike is doable by almost anyone who can walk for three hours.  There's a bit of steep uphill at the end, and some brief ups and downs along the way, but it's not a long climb like hiking up the side of a mountain.  If you go, be prepared for gusts of wind trying knock you off balance every once in a while, and for spots where there's nothing between you and a cliff but a broken handrail, rusted away by all the salty air.

This view is looking back toward the main part of the island.  I'm standing on the edge of a tall cliff here, but it drops off out of sight, so you can't really tell.  That's the problem with photographing cliffs from the top; they just look like the ground. :)

The rocks have so much iron ore in them that they look red rust, which is sort of what they are.  Madeira was formed by undersea volcanoes pushing up lava over millions of years, the same way that the Caribbean and Hawaiian islands were formed. 

Madeira is hundreds of miles from Europe and Africa, just a dot of land in the vast Atlantic ocean.  Madeira is a part of the country of Portugal.  I read it was one of Portugal's first naval discoveries, in 1419.   

Nearly to the far point of the hike, we can see the tip of Madeira.  It was a cloudy, windy day.  

This is the view from the "official" end of the trail.  It's hard to see through the haze, but there's a lighthouse there.  The tip of the island in this photo is another one or two miles from us.

On the way back, the sun finally broke through the clouds every once in a while.  Again, I'm standing at the top of a very tall cliff.  This one was off-trail, so no handrail.

In the photo below, I believe the horizontal orange lines in the rock are layers of rock with iron ore.  But what I really find fascinating are the vertical lines of stone, which I interpret as pathways made by magma as it pushed to the surface millions of years ago.  I would estimate this cliff to be about two hundred feet high.

It was really lovely to see this type of plant blossoming everywhere on the hike.  It's known as "The Pride of Madeira", and though these ones are very pale pink, they also have pastel blue and violet ones.  They were thriving all up and down the trail.    

I couldn't help thinking of the new King Kong movie, Skull Island, everywhere we hiked on Madeira.  Fortunately, we never encountered the giant gorilla or the hungry dinosaurs on any of our hikes.

One last photo, with actual people in it, for scale, and for the fear factor.  When you hike this part of the trail, you see hundreds of feet straight down on both sides.  They had a single-strand handrail of think metal cable on both sides, but the cable had rusted and snapped in many places along the way, leaving nothing between you and the void.  A little thrilling, but really not too bad.

It was a really nice hike, we only wish we'd had more sun.  Though there was a good flow of people on the trail, you could be alone with nature if you just stepped off the trail a hundred feet.  When we left the trail to go look over some cliffs, all we heard was the surf washing back and forth against the rocks and the wind and an occasional seagull's cry.  It was so peaceful, after all the stress of getting there.  A beautiful place to decompress.

Trapped in Lisbon, Visiting the Palace of Queluz

For two and a half days of our one-week vacation to Madeira, we were instead stuck in Lisbon.  For more on how this happened, see my last post about the hellish flight that stranded us in Lisbon.  As long as we were stranded, we had to make the most of it.  The airline had put the whole planeload of people in a decent no-name hotel next to a train station, so we took the train to the Palace of Queluz.

The Palace of Queluz (pronounced kuh-loose) is on the outskirts of Lisbon.   We'd already been to Sintra, which is where everyone has to go on their first visit to Lisbon and environs, but we'd never even heard of Queluz.  Getting there only took twenty minutes by train, from our hotel that was on the same side of Lisbon.  We walked through an urban neighborhood of multi-story buildings with shops in the first floor to reach the palace.  When we arrived, there were no people in the parking lot, and only one person buying tickets at the reception.

March is definitely the off-season, though the weather was beautiful.  As we started our walk through the palace, it was just us and the guards.  Like our own private palace!  This was the most impressive room inside the palace, with two huge chandeliers in perfect condition.

The other room that really made an impression on me was a room with walls covered in custom-made tiles depicting idyllic scenes.  I like the way the fountain water is depicted.  The hands of the guy holding the rifle look like they were drawn by a child though.

After the indoors tour, it was time to explore the palace grounds.  There were nice flower beds in bloom already.  It was a beautiful early spring day, and we enjoyed having these huge gardens to ourselves, We only saw a total of three other groups of visitors during the hour and a half we were there.

The grounds covered many acres, with paths between manicured bushes, leading to circles with fountains and sculptures.  A perfect place for the idle nobility to kill time plotting their next affairs, coups, and assassinations.  At least if you believe what you see on The Tutors and other such historo-dramas.

Here's an interesting statue of cherubim and a fish with a giant forehead and wings for ears.  I like it for it's oddness, but also how well sculpted it is.  This was made by a master sculptor.  I always wonder about pieces of such high quality left exposed to the elements.  Maybe it's a cast, and the original is safe and sound elsewhere.

I have no idea who this one is supposed to be, but I love how the lichen testify to the age and weather it's seen.  Gives it amazing color and texture, like the person is transforming into a plant.

The canal walls were covered in a long series of huge blue tile murals.  They call this tile azulejos, and it's one of the characteristic looks all over Lisbon and much of Portugal.  These scenes made for royalty are some of the best existing examples of the art form.  I say that based in part on comparing them to many other examples we've seen all around Lisbon.  This piece is about 8 feet by 12 feet.  You need to see this on a decent-sized monitor to appreciate it (talking to you - you mobile browsers!).  I love  variety of tree and leaf types, and how the leaves of the plants behind the wall are a paler blue to imply they're further away.

This is one of about twenty similar panels, each with a different scene, lining the canal walls.  This shows groups of people watching the sailing ships crossing the harbor and arriving in a town in the background.  After having read so much history involving shipping, whether in Venice or Amsterdam or London, this scene really evokes a daily reality that seems irrelevant and quaint to us, but was like watching the biggest blockbuster to them, because ships returning meant everyone on board had not died in storm or war or pirate attack, and the investors in this particular ship's voyage had not lost all their money, but instead were about to make a lot of money.  I feel the excitement of the spectators.

That's all for the Lisbon part of our trip.  My next posts are about our adventures after we finally made it to Madeira.  The next is about our hike along the sea cliffs at Sao Vicente.

The Three Hour Flight that Turned into Three Days

It normally takes about three hours to fly from Paris to Madeira, a Portuguese island hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic.  It took us a bit longer.  

After we boarded our plane on time in Paris, the captain announced that there was a problem and we could not leave for three hours.  There was a hubbub through the plane, and then we sat, and sat some more.  Crew were coming and going from the cockpit for a couple of hours.  Finally, they announced we could leave.  Yea!

So we took off and flew for three hours.  When we started to descend, there was powerful turbulence and thick cloud cover.  The plane bucked and swerved like crazy as we approached the runway.  Suddenly, the pilot goosed the engine and we started ascending again.   The pilot announced the winds were too strong and had to go around and try again - before we ran out of fuel 

So, we flew in a big circle for ten bumpy minutes, and then we started our approach again.  Again, the plane bucked and swerved alarmingly.  Jennifer's fingernails dug into my quads.  Again, the pilot pulled up and we passed the island.  

So, he announced we had to go land on the only other tiny island nearby, get more fuel, and hope for the wind to die down.  Madeira is a tiny island hundreds of miles out in the Pacific.  There's nothing to slow down the wind in all that vastness. 

When we landed on Porto Santo, we were thinking we could stay in a hotel, or take a boat if things didn't go well. Instead, the first thing the pilot says is "there are no hotels in this island."  And it occurs to us that with wind this strong, boats aren't going anywhere. It's a two and a half hour ride between the islands by boat, so definitely out in the open ocean. 

The little refueling truck loaded us up with a little fuel so we could try again. The pilot announced we'll try again, but if we can't land, we'll have to fly back to this little island and get more fuel so we can fly to Lisbon.  

While we sat on the runway frustrated and tired, the French woman next to us had a phone that worked in all Europe.  She said a British guy was supposed to fly down from London the same day on another airline, but they cancelled his flight before it ever took off.

Then we sat on that runway for another two hours.  During this time, there is an animated discussion between the pilot and two elderly passengers.  Next thing we hear is the pilot announcing we have to fly to Lisbon and try again another day.  The passengers had convinced him that it was too risky to try to land again.

So, we had an hour and fifteen minute flight back to the mainland, and landed in Lisbon.  When we arrived, we parked the plane way out on the tarmac, not at a gate.  That's not unusual, but it does mean that we need buses to take passengers safely across the runways, etc, into the terminal.  So, they said the buses were coming.  When?  No one knows because they weren't expecting us.  I could see out the window a normal car pulled up next to the plane with someone inside wearing a safety vest and talking on a mobile phone.  They came and looked at us more than once while we waited.  An hour and a half later, our buses finally arrived.  The passengers were amazingly calm after all this.  

So, we finally arrived into the terminal at 11:45 PM, but the story doesn't end there.  We had to wait for our bags.  No problem.  You would think they could have offloaded the bags during that one and a half hours we were stuck in the plane. Nope.  We'd had nothing to eat or drink,, and all the airport restaurants were closed.  

We sat. We waited. Other passengers filed out of the airport while our baggage belt sat motionless.  Another hour later, at 1:00 am, our bags started coming out. By 1:30 AM, we all had our bags.  We got on the buses and made it to the hotel by 2 AM.  Check-in was mercifully quick and we feel into bed exhausted with no idea what was coming next 

After all this, we still had no information about when our flight to Madeira would be.  They had told us they reserved the hotel in Lisbon for two nights.  Why are they saying two nights, if we're leaving tomorrow morning?  Or are we?  We eventually heard there would be no flights to Madeira the next day.  All day the next day, we kept asking the hotel desk if they had any info about when we would be flying out.  Nope, no info.  By noon, all they could tell us was, you'll be staying in the hotel another night.  No flight.  Argh!  The next day, it was the same thing.  We could barely believe our ears.  It was two days later before Aigle Azure was able to arrange a flight for us.  When we got to the airport, we had to wait an hour in line before the gate agents even set up the desks.

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I talk about a day in Lisbon and a sea cliff hike on Madeira in other posts, but here I have to bring up the return end of our trip.  On the morning we were supposed to fly home, a lunatic bent on murder ran into the Orly airport terminal and fought with a soldier over her machine gun.  They shot him dead on the spot.  Can you guess which airport we were flying to?  Orly, of course.  We were busily packing our bags in our hotel room, getting ready to have breakfast, then go to the airport, when I got a news alert from my French news app about the attack.  It didn't take a genius to figure out that our flight would be delayed.

Later that morning, we got a text from the airline that, due to the Orly airport closure, our flight would leave at 1:45.  But not 1:45 PM, they meant 1:45 AM that "night."  Ugh.  We killed time around town all day, then went to the airport about 11:30 PM.  The airport was basically closed when we arrived.  The only people at the airport were a few employees preparing to leave, and most of the same long-suffering 200 passengers we'd spent so many hours with at the start of our trip.  To top it all off, even that 1:45 AM flight was delayed until 3:00 AM.  We finally made it back to Paris at 7:30 AM.  

We won't be flying Aigle Azure again, even though not all of the delays were their fault.  This certainly qualifies as the most ill-fated travel experience we've ever had, and it will forever dim the memories of what could have been a much better trip.  As much as we travel, it could be said we were overdue for a travel disaster, but this seems pretty excessive!