We are at anchor off Funchal and become Portugal fans. At the beginning of our trip, we were already excited about Cascais and Lisbon. Now we really liked the Azores and Madeira is also a beautiful island. But above all, the people here are very friendly. The only downside is that there are hardly any anchorages close to islands of volcanic origin and that the marinas are usually too small to accommodate our boat. On the other hand, you can leave your dinghy at the marina jetty and dispose of your rubbish there without having to pay. The harbour master is always happy when we say we’re staying longer. Madeira depends heavily on tourism. Most of it takes place in Funchal. 70% of the population of the rest of the island go to Funchal to do their work.
The crossing from Terceira to Madeira went off without a hitch. It was tacking against the wind, correspondingly rolly and we had little desire to occupy oourselves with anything than sailing. On the other hand, we made good progress and arrived off Madeira after just under 5 days.
Funchal is a big city with countless restaurants, cafés and shops. There are lots of squares and pedestrian zones. After a day of shopping, we know that most shops sell women’s and children’s fashion; for men’s clothing, the choices are not impresive. The abundance of restaurants is a bit overwhelming. We discovered a small pedestrian street where there is a good selection of reataurants and where you can sit outside. We often eat there. Especially with Maika as a vegan, an Indian and a Japanese restaurant offered a bit more choice than usual. And both restaurants are very good with reasonable prices. (India Gate, Sakura Sushi)
The municipal market hall is decorated with tile motifs. Fruit and plant seeds and cuttings are sold here, but at very high prices. So it is more of a tourist market:
A public city garden:
A little later Lukas and Maika arrived and we enjoyed 10 days of tourist activities. Because the island is quite big, there were two day tours and a trip by cable car to the botanical garden. Here are the great pictures we took:
Western side of Madeira:
Cabo Girão:
Ribeira Brava:
Banana plantation:
Porto Moniz:
Bride’s Veil Viewpoint:
São Vicente:
Câmara de Lobos:
Drive with our dinghy, from the anchorage to the harbour.
Eastern side of Madeira:
Viewpoint Cristo Rei:
Machico:
Ponta de São Lourenço:
Rum Distillerie:
Santana:
The farmers used to sleep in these little houses. The kitchens were far away so that the thatched roofs could not catch fire.
Ribeiro Frio:
Pico do Areeiro:
Pico do Areeiro is 1818 m high and you can get almost to the top on a road. Here you are in the clouds most of the time.
Trip to the Botanical Garden:
Accessible by cable car or bus from Funchal.
The cable car also takes us back:
Once we reached the valley, we were in desperate need of refreshments:
There were a few minor difficulties on departure. When Lukas left, we hadn’t noticed that the bus to the airport doesn’t leave every half hour on Saturdays. We probably just missed one and then had to wait over an hour for the next one. The departure times are only given for the final stops. While waiting, we saw a small poster indicating replacement stops for the time of a road cycling race, but without a date. Hm, googling revealed that the race had probably already taken place. But wrong, Maika was supposed to leave the next morning. We had looked up a bus departure time this time. But when we arrived on land, the road was closed off and no cars were to be seen. Exactly on this day, the bicycle race was taking place! With enough time, we made our way to the bus stops that were still being served. There we waited for quite a while, then I saw the airport bus driving up the road a little further up. What did that mean? Did it not serve this stop after all? Could it just not turn into this street? We were about to flag down a taxi when the bus finally appeared and Maika could get on.
Mathias has been working on his anchor chain calculator app again. For several days he worked on making the calculations in the app even more robust (so that the app can also calculate more extreme user inputs). There was a problem with the simulator for Android Google. Mathias was swearing. Inexplicable problems occurred. Then, after 3 days, the breakthrough. The error was due to the fact that in very special cases the Android simulator calculated a value of 2 when calculating 1/A, where A has approximately the value 1. Which of course is wrong by a factor of 2… 🙂 Now Mathias has sent his first bug report to Google. It was classified by Google as P3/S3, which means they will try to fix this bug within a year. Without guarantee. Fortunately, the error only occurs in the simulator on the computer and not in the phone itself.
By the way, our shopping day was very successful, but it can also be simpler: Maika is happy about an old purple shirt from Mathias, which is already older than she is. 😉 (You notice, Mathias rarely wore suits 🙂 )
