Saturday 19 March 2005. We have gone up a mountain on a coach and come down halfway on a toboggan with gondoliers. As you do.
We are now on the way back to the ship on the coach, but wanting to stretch our legs we ask the courier to drop us off in town and from there we will walk back to the ship.
As we arrive at Funchal, it starts to rain... Just our luck! However, we are made of hardy stuff (and soggy stuff too...) so we get off anyway and trust that it's just a passing shower.
It is. But unfortunately it doesn't pass until we are back at the ship... Funchal is quite beautiful. Marble pavements, close-cobbled streets. Around this time in the UK town centres were also being repaved with coloured brick, but within months - weeks sometimes - they were sinking or standing proud, or were dug up entirely for utility firms to do something that should have been done beforehand and then left with unsightly tarmac patches.
Our walk brings us to the harbour. In front of our ship, the Carousel, is this Costa ship: Costa Fortuna. A name guaranteed to make any English speaker chuckle for a moment.
Our ship is the modest little ship behind. Carousel has just six decks, but it introduced us to the world of cruising opportunities and was in its last year of operation for Sun Cruises as it was being sold off or leased to a French cruise line the following year. We met up with staff we recognised in later years on both Thomson and Ocean Village ships.
We had some lunch and probably a bit of afternoon tea also and the weather brightened up a bit and this replica of Christopher Colombus's ship, the Santa Maria, chugged past once or twice with a crowd of happy passengers. I'm not sure how accurate a replica it was, as I'm fairly sure the original Santa Maria didn't "chug" all that much...
Every night we sat at the same table with the same group of people and it was always a happy gathering. Today was my birthday and the waiters added to the hilarity of the table by bringing a cream cake, and insisting on feeding me a spoonful, which somehow went more into my nose than my mouth...
