London in November is cold. Some days it is so cold that you can see your own breath. And that is too much for someone who spent the last 12 years in Texas. Days get short as well, no daylight before 7:30 and dark again shortly after four. It is a good time to get out of town. We took advantage of our new status of not being tied to a school year and consequently well positioned to participate in off season pricing. My natural instinct was to go south, the only question was how far. At first we considered the Canary Islands but when I realized that the water would not be warm enough for me to swim in, we decided on an island that had more than beaches to offer – Madeira.

We bought a one week package, airfare, 3 star hotel and breakfast, all told 300 quid. Not bad I thought until I got a call from the travel agent, informing me that the hotel we chose had overbooked and that they had to move us into a 5 star hotel, at the same price, of course. Well, I was not going to object to that!

(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.) Madeira appears to enjoy spring-to early summer weather all year round. Temperatures seldom fall below 20 degrees C and seldom rise above 25. In addition, the Portuguese brought back various plants from all of their voyages (and they did get around quite a bit) and due to the climate most plats did very well on Madeira. As a result, Madeira is basically one big botanical garden. November is not typically the time when plants bloom, but there was no shortage of flowers. The most impressive were tree-sized Poinsettias, African tulip trees and Birds of Paradise. The selection of exotic fruit is equally extensive. By now I thought I had sampled most tropical fruit, but I never realized there is more than one kind of passion fruit (found 6 in the fruit market).

Madeira proper does not have any sandy beaches to speak of, most beaches are small and consist of large black pebbles. Objectively speaking the water was not that cold (20 degrees C) which would have been fine to swim in if we came from Canada (in fact we saw a fair number of Germans going in for an invigorating swim every day). The lack of beaches has a valuable side benefit – absence of tourists with small children. The absence of undisciplined, screaming tadpoles greatly increased the ambience of the hotel and in particular the morning buffet.

Luckily, even if you do not feel like swimming, there are lot of other things to do. One popular pass time is to go hiking along levadas. Levadas are narrow canals carved into the side of the mountains and designed to bring in water from the wet north side of the island to the drier south. The whole system is very extensive and quite impressive and was originally built to irrigate sugar cane fields. Before the creating of large plantations in Brazil, Madeira was the main supplier of sugar to Europe and became very wealthy in the process. All that is left today is the intricate irrigation system. The canals have a narrow path along them to allow maintenance and these have now become popular with hikers. Since the path is very narrow and sometimes snakes around precipitous cliffs, it is not an activity recommended to people with poor sense of balance or problems with heights.

Another activity connected with heights is a cable car trip up the mountain which forms the backdrop of the capital Funchal.The main attraction is that you can return down the hill using a wooden sled driven by two Madeirans who look like Venetian gondoliers. Apparently Hemingway described the ride as the most thrilling experience of his life – which seems to be a bit of an exaggeration. However, it is possible that the ride was faster and thus more thrilling when all the streets were paved with basalt blocks rather than with tarmac, which has a higher friction coefficient and slows the sled down to the point when the drivers have to push and pull more often than break.

Funchal is a popular port of call for lot of cruise ships and we saw a different one (or two) in the harbor every day. The harbor also has a replica of Columbus’ Santa Maria ship, built by a local Dutch expat and exhibited in Lisbon. The ship now offers half day cruises along the south shore of the island. We were lucky to choose a day of very calm seas. Even so, one gets a good sense of the tiny size of the ship and the courage it took get on it and to head out into the unknown.

Not far from the hotel was a little fishing village Los Lobos, famous as a holiday retreat of Winston Churchill, who used to come here to paint. The coast of Madeira does not lack dramatic scenery, including very narrow roads carved into sheer cliffs.
Rather than rent a car and drive ourselves we opted for a minivan tour of the island.

These days, however, there is no shortage of modern, wide roads and tens of kilometers of new tunnels, which connect the south and north sides of the island. Signs of monetary infusion from the EU (Madeira is part of Portugal) are everywhere. Also, remarkably, we did not see any low income or marginal housing anywhere on the island. Everybody seems to be living in a nice, new house with white walls and red tiled roof surrounded by a garden filled with bananas and flowers. If it were not for 30 degree slopes and interminable steep staircases everywhere, it would be an ideal place for retired people.