Funchal, Madeira

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...

Return to Atlantic Islands Cruise, 2005 Index

Up and Down in Madeira

Saturday 19 March 2005. Another day, another place. We are up in time to see as we sail into Funchal Harbour on Madeira.

When we were here a year ago it was a very foggy day, caused by sand and dust blown from the Sahara Desert. Today looks like being a bit better weather.

We have booked a morning's excursion and are taken high up into the island's mountains. This is Curral das Freiras - the Nun's Refuge, named after the nuns of the capital Funchal's Santa Clara convent, who fled here during a pirate attack in 1566. The view from above is stunning. Madeira had been attacked by pirates several times. No wonder the nuns wanted to make it as hard as possible for pirates to reach them.

We arrive at a village called Monte. We have come for a toboggan ride down the mountain back towards Funchal. Toboggan? But where's the snow...?

There is no need for snow. The toboggans are made of wickerwork and are pulled, pushed and/or scooted by two gondoliers down the [GULP] public roads of the locality, dodging cars, shoppers and sleeping dogs as they go. The more religious are praying at the roadside shrine and lighting candles to appeal for a safe descent...

"Should we buy some tea towels as a souvenir?" wonders Miss Franny. But there's no point - let's get the toboggan down and if we survive then we can think about souvenirs!

We got near the front of the queue and watched as our fellow passengers eagerly or otherwise disappear down the steep road and around a corner. Despite keeping our ears open we don't hear any car horns blaring or squeals of brakes. So far, so good!

OMG as we zoom down the hill at one point a road crosses our path and the road we are careering down levels off with time for just a swift glance (pick your side, there isn't time to look both ways and certainly no time to stop should anything be coming...) At one point a chap came out of a shop doorway and took our photo. I played up to the occasion and hear the photographer say "Doh..." in Portuguese. Then we got to the bottom some time later to find the guides from all the excursion coaches killing themselves laughing at this - the photographer had been an official souvenir photographer! "I've never seen a photo so funny!" says our coach's courier.

Before we set off down into Funchal, there's time for a photo stop at this viewpoint. Our ship, Sun Cruises, Carousel is the middle of the three cruise ships. The plants in the foreground are banana trees. They grow a smaller strain of banana on Madeira and locally there is much consternation at a rumoured European ruling that bananas are going to be banned under a certain size. The sort of idiotic and baseless decision that ignorant morons in power make at every level of government.

We get down to Funchal and decide not to go straight back to the ship. Having been onboard for two days - a day at sea and then in Morocco - we are wanting to stretch our legs a bit. Typically it starts to rain just as we get off the coach...

Return to Atlantic Islands Cruise 2005 Index

Ornate Street Lighting

I know I live in - well near these days - Blackpool but I'm ignoring illuminations and to be honest, the UK altogether for this entry. Having travelled around Europe quite a bit we have come across many examples of older or just simply decorative street lighting and it's become a habit to look out for them.

As most of our travels have been on cruise ships, we don't tend to see a lot of places at night, so most of these shots will be daytime. But that does make it easier to see detail on the lamp standards and finials. We'll start gently with this view of St Tropez.

Villefranche nestles between Nice on the French Riviera and Monaco. This street is named the Hidden Street and it runs parallel with the seafront and is totally enclosed. It is lit with what seem to be ancient housings containing more modern electric lights.

Housings that look as though they should be holding flaming pitch-covered lengths of wood or bundles of twigs always get my attention. This one is above a gateway into the ancient city of Rhodes.

Another year and back on the French Riviera; this is Sanary-sur-Mer. Wouldn't it be wonderful to sit on the Promenade and listen to a concert in this band stand with it's old-fashioned lighting?

We had just got off our ship in the harbour at Ajaccio, Corsica and this street lamp stood out against the deep of the blue sky.

Koper in Slovenia. I particularly enjoy looking around those medieval cities where many of the street lights are attached to buildings rather than lamp posts, because the streets are so narrow.

These lights are a touch more modern, but at least a bit of imagination has been applied to the design. They sit on the end of a pier at Limone on Lake Garda, Italy.

Lamp posts this time. This is Funchal on the island of Madeira out in the Canaries.

And another one in Valetta in Malta.

We went a long way to see this one. It's in Walt Disney's Magic Kingdom in Orlando. The flag was a clue wasn't it...?

The lamp standards in Venice have pink glass in their casings. Perhaps to make the most of the colours of the Doges' Palace?

Also in Venice, we found a dragon holding up a bunch of umbrellas! Well just the one wouldn't keep it dry...

The medieval city of Kotor in Montenegro has such narrow streets and nestles so close under the mountain that the light finds it hard to penetrate and the street lights were still glowing when we arrived one morning.

A lovely bit of decorative ironwork in Palermo, Sicily.

Piombino in Italy and a street that I just happened to glance down as we passed it.

For most things architectural it's hard to beat Spain's wonderful city of Barcelona. It's a city where your neck should be constantly stretching upwards to make sure you don't miss anything and for this article I'm going to finish with a second look at Barcelona's magnificent street lights below.

Curiosities - Buildings and Infrastructure Index

Colourful Coasts (Canary Isles) on Thomson Celebration, 4-11 April 2014

This is a series of articles covering our trip around the Canary Islands on the Thomson Celebration cruise ship. Once more meeting up with our friends, Tomas and Maris who sing as 2 Intense onboard the ship, we will be taking it easy on this trip, with far more independent trips ashore than excursions.

Click each of the photos below to view the associated articles and photographs.

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Thomson Celebration in Funchal, Madeira

Monday 7 April 2014 and by the time we surface out of our bed the Thomson Celebration has arrived at Funchal and is moored in the harbour close by other cruise liners, Aida Stella and the Braemar. The crews of these had arranged a 3-way football tournament.

We have been to Madeira twice before, on the tiny ship Carousel of Sun Cruises. The first time Sahara dust turned it into a foggy place of only a few hundred yards visibility and the second time we got soaked by rain which came on as we started to walk back to the harbour from town. Today is much kinder!

Opposite the ship a large fortress, Fortaleza do Pico, occupies the hillside. In 1566 Bertrand de Montluc led a force of French corsairs in eleven ships to attack Funchal. They moored outside Funchal and attacked overland which meant that the defences of the town were unable to bring any large guns to bear as they were all sited to fire out to sea. Small pockets of resistance were dealt with easily and the city was subjected to a violent sacking for a fortnight. A community of nuns fled the town and took refuge high up in the mountains of Madeira. Their sanctuary, Curral das Freiras, is spectacular and a feature of excursions to this day. The fortress in Funchal was constructed between 50-100 years after the pirate raid.

We hadn't booked a tour for today and instead got off the ship and walked into the town. I was going a little gingerly due to still having the blister from a couple of days ago, but it behaved itself and I stopped worrying about it after today!

We found Funchal filled with street musicians, some of them quite large bands and this one featured this curious instrument with bright red plastic tubes. They looked like and probably were drainage tubes. The ends were open and the musician whacked them with a sort of paddle and startlingly it sounded just like a bass guitar!

This is the doorway of City Hall. It has some nice ironwork and leads through to a courtyard with a statue. It was just one of several pleasing buildings in the centre of the town.

Being on the side of such a steep hillside, Funchal has a few rivers flowing down from the interior to the sea. This was taken from Ponte Do Bettencourt, "ponte" meaning "bridge". The river did not look as if it warranted such a deep ravine, but in 2010 a deep depression over the Atlantic and a few other factors led to Funchal experiencing several months' worth of rain over a short period. The rivers flooded, causing damage except where they were contained as here. They washed so much material down that there is extensive building work going on now to rebuild the Promenade which was badly damaged. Much of it is being rebuilt with the material washed down by the swollen rivers!

We dropped into seats at a table and ordered a drink opposite another similar cafe that seemed to be occupying a building originally a cinema or theatre. A beggar was moving from table to table, telling some sob story. I just thrust out a hand, palm out as he approached our table and motioned him away. It worked so well I must try it again...

After a couple of hours we were ready to start moving back to the ship and instead of going back down to the Promenade we walked along the back streets for a while. This was a wide pleasant street with cafes, bars, hotels and a few shops on one side and a park on the other.

Looking down a side street I saw the panels on the side of a hotel, filled with blue ceramic tiles which showed scenes of Madeira. One was of the wicker toboggans that can be taken down the mountain, being pushed and guided by two "gondoliers" who scoot the toboggan and just hope no motorised traffic will cross their path from a side street! We did it once and it was great fun.

We were back on the Promenade walk and nearing the harbour and I was just putting one foot in front of the other, happy in my own little world when I heard a voice say "We think we know you!" I came out of my daydream to find Tomas and Maris smiling at us. We laughed and chatted and Tomas took this selfie of the four of us. I put my camera on the wall and used the self-timer and managed to chop off the top of our heads... I'm sure Tomas won't mind me using his photo!

Back on the ship, later that afternoon we watched the replica of Christopher Columbus's ship Santa Maria return with her cargo of tourists who had gone out for a spot of dolphin watching, swimming and deck swabbing. They must have been friendly as the fortress guns remained silent. Next time, we'll have a look at a few dolphins ourselves!

Oh and our crew lost the football tournament...

Colourful Coasts Cruise Index