{"id":1880,"date":"2019-01-11T12:30:55","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T12:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1880"},"modified":"2020-08-08T17:40:24","modified_gmt":"2020-08-08T16:40:24","slug":"a-little-funchal-adventure-madeira","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/a-little-funchal-adventure-madeira\/","title":{"rendered":"A LITTLE FUNCHAL ADVENTURE, MADEIRA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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Today, we arrived at Funchal, on the Portugese island of Madeira.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Lisbon, we’ve been here many times before, so our objective for the day, in light of the fact that we hadn’t been given any tour escorting duties, was to do something different, discover somewhere new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funchal is surrounded by mountains on three sides (on the fourth side, it looks out to sea, of course). Getting beyond them is near impossible given the time we generally have on our visits here, but today was a relatively long day (7am – 4pm all-aboard time). In preparation of our visit the night before, Tracey consulted our favourite navigation app, which we’re constantly recommending to everyone we meet; MAPS.ME. It’s a totaly free Android app for which you can download maps anywhere you happen to be in the world. Not only does it show roads, but it also highlights places of interest, and more importantly for us, it shows footpaths. It’s got us around many unfamiliar locations and out of several navigational scrapes over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Madeira is well known for its ‘Lavaders’, which are ancient irrigation channels built into the hillsides. Many of them are unfortunately inaccessible, but after some serious ‘maps.me’ consultation, we decided we would take the cable car up to Monte, and then try to find our way down one or more of the footpaths that we could see on the map (backed-up, by the way, by a glance at Google Earth, on which the footpaths were clearly visible).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After taking the free shuttle bus from the terminal to the town centre, we decided to pop into the Tourist Information Centre to check that our proposed route was doable. I have to say, however, that the woman in there was not only unhelpful, but bordering on aggressive. We showed her where we were proposing to go and asked her about the footpaths, to which here constant, canned response was ‘No footpaths – no way through’. We tried to say that we’d seen the footpaths on our maps, but she grabbed the printed, tourist map in front of her and jabbed aggressively at the area we were talking about ‘no paths!’ she insisted. Blunt, then, and could do with some tips on manners, and as we exited the Information Centre, neither of us believed a word of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, we walked across town and bought two round-trip tickets for the cable-car anyway (we bought return ones because there was still a vague seed of doubt that had been planted by the rude Tourist Information woman), and flew up to the top of the hill, to Monte.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trip to the top of the hill in the cable car is always a relaxing, and enjoyable experience, and takes about twenty minutes. At the top, instead of following the general throng to look at the church and see the toboggans whisking tourists off down the hill, we turned right, towards the second cable-car that takes folks across the ravine to the Botanical Gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By that cable car terminal, we were pleased to discover a clearly-signposted, well-maintained footpath, confirming not only that the footpaths exist, but that visitors are actively encouraged to walk along them (we took photos of the signs, which I threatened to take to show to the rude Information Centre Operative).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Rude Tourist Information Centre Operative’s defence (although, as far as I’m concerned, there is no defence for out and out rudeness), the signs we saw looked very new. Some old paths were blocked off, and one of the paths we had hoped to take had striped tape across it, despite the fact that it looked new. Our concluson was that the upgrade of the paths would seem to be a work-in-progress. We’ll be coming back this way again in October, on the Columbus, so there’s a good chance the work may be finished by then. From what we’ve seen, it would make a great area for hikers, with lots of paths criss-crossing and taking in waterfalls and other points of interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So, we followed the only path that seemed open, and found ourselves winding our way down into the ravine and up the other side. It became steep in places, but the views across Funchal below, towards the sea, were spectacular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Eventually, we ran out of footpath, and found ourselves on a road on the opposite side of the ravine, and faced with a choice. From our online map, we could see that the road wound its way through a couple of small semi-rural connurbations, and eventually down, past the Botanical Gardens, back into Funchal. Our dilemma was; do we go back the way we had come and take the cable car back down, or do we march on, in the hope that it didn’t take us too long (we’d already been out a couple of hours at that point, and only had about 3 hours before all-aboard time).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Naturally, the adventurers in us drove us onwards, and despite the roads being steep on the way down, and our legs complaining in no uncertain terms, we made it back to Funchal in good time. With time to spare, in fact, for a beer and ice cream outside one of the small cafes on the main street, before taking the shuttle bus back to the ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We were tired and aching, but very satisfied with our little Funchal Adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, we arrived at Funchal, on the Portugese island of Madeira. Like Lisbon, we’ve been here many times before, so our objective for the day, in light of the fact that we hadn’t been given any tour escorting duties, was to do something different, discover somewhere new. Funchal is surrounded by mountains on three sides (on the fourth side, it...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1880"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1886,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880\/revisions\/1886"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}