Cruise Day Eleven: Have Some Madeira, M'dear

The last stop on the cruise was Madeira. Frankly, I didn't know a whole bunch about Madeira before we left on the trip, other than the old Flanders & Swann song. I knew it was an island off the coast of Africa and that it was part of Portugal. When we were in DC the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we had stopped in a bookstore between seeing the Sagoffs and the Onkens, and I had found a guidebook to Madeira. As far as I know, the only one on the ship.

From it, we learned to tell good Madeira wine from bad Madeira (the label will be in Portuguese, not English), real local embroidery from fake (it won't say "Made in China", oddly enough) and that Funchal, the capital, is named for the local, native fennel plants.

When we arrived, we were on the wrong side of the ship to see the town. Instead, on the quay, we could see notices that various ships had painted when they first arrived at the port.



We had a very good guide named Maria, who spoke good English with a British accent, and I was later surprised to learn she had learned her English in school in Madeira and had apparently never lived in an English-speaking country abroad. She was everything a guide was supposed to be: informative, not too talkative, flexible, and most of all knowledgeable. She seemed to know every plant and every cove on the island.

Madeira, we learned, had been discovered in 1419, and was uninhabited at the time. This has contributed to its being still part of Portugal today, because the people who live there are all Portuguese (other than the odd foreigner), as opposed to subjugating or assimilating a native population. Madeira has been a popular vacation spot for centuries; Napoleon stopped on his way to St. Helena.

Madeirans, we noticed, are hard-working and serious. We never saw anyone just lying about, and only one panhandler. The island has minimal unemployment, and besides tourism and wine, there is fishing and a lot of intensive, high-value agriculture, including bananas and vegetables. The industriousness of the people is shown by the terraced farms that are characteristic of nearly all the island. All the terracing was done by hand, all the irrigation canals that channel the water down from the tops of the mountains were built by hand, and all the crops are harvested by hand.



Above is a shot from the bus of the terracing.



And this is a shot, also from the bus, of an irrigation canal. The guidebook told us that the canals all have paths next to them to allow for maintenance, which allows you to walk all over Madeira, unobstructed by traffic, by following the paths.



We stopped at two viewpoints, one of which, Capo Girao, is the second-highest seacliff in the world. Maria kept saying it was the highest in Europe (the higher one is in Taiwan), but of course Madeira is off Africa and not really in Europe. Above is the view down from Capo Girao.



There was a museum there, and I took a photo of this large photograph of George Bernard Shaw dancing on Madeira. Winston Churchill was also a frequent visitor; he painted there, and he wrote one of the volumes of his History of the Second World War there.



We drove down narrow roads to a fishing village, which wasn't interesting because it was actually a viewpoint over a fishing village, as opposed to the village itself, and from there by freeway including many tunnels, back to Funchal. There we were given a very nice tour of an embroidery factory, still using old machinery and older methods. The embroidery is done as piecework to the local women, who have been doing it for centuries. The woman in the back on the left is doing the patterns, the woman in the foreground is adding findings.

Here is video of the patterns being demonstrated. You can also hear Maria's English.

Here is the finished product. This is not my mother's embroidery.



Then we were given a wine-tasting. We had the extra dry, or sercial, and it was quite good. I bought a bottle of rum (if I'd read the book more carefully, I'd have realized I'd bought the wrong kind) and a gift for the Sagoffs.



And, yes, Marjorie is smiling as I tell her, "Have some Madeira, m'dear."

Our next stop was the extensive and beautiful market, featuring both fruit and vegetables and fish. There was a really aggressive fruit seller who wouldn't take no for an answer, kept trying to get Marjorie to buy mangos.



The fish market was much more low-key. The fish shown here is fished in only two places in the world: off Madeira and off Japan, oddly enough.



We walked through the town. There were a number of men like this, wearing Santa costumes and selling balloons. Most looked very unhappy (it was a warm day) and a number of them were unshaven and smoking cigarettes, which didn't exactly give off that jolly illusion.



This embroidery shop had the nicest cutwork and embroidery at reasonable prices. Unfortunately, the mat on the left, featuring jonquils, was well worth its price of about 400 euros. We could have had a smaller mat for about 100 euros, but decided to come back later. We saved our money for buying embroidery by going back to the ship for lunch, and then returning to the shop, while I went off and bought Phil and me t-shirts with the Madeira map on them. I'm actually wearing mine (it's nice and soft fabric) while I type this a few days later.

Marjorie found gifts and one small cutwork for herself, but the total price was too euros more than we had, so we used a credit card and still had all those euros.



We wandered around and looked at the Christmas decorations. Christmas is the biggest season for tourism in Madeira, and they do it up royally, with lights everywhere and decorations everywhere.



I had said earlier how nice it was we hadn't seen McDonald's, but there was one, along with the only Pizza Hut we'd seen on the trip. We walked past along the docks and there was a boat that said "Vagrant Ex Beatles Yacht" on it. When I mentioned this to Marjorie she said, "Yes, the guidebook said there was a yacht here that the Beatles used to own." The Pete Best of yachts, I would think.



There was a bunch of shops near the ship, and we stopped there to spend our last euros, and we're glad we did. I wanted a bottle of sparkling mineral water, which they had for a reasonable price, and we saw they also had Madeiran chocolate and Madeiran-made eucalyptus candy, which we also bought. Then we used up our last euros on a cup of capuccino for Marjorie and of hot chocolate (which turned out to be Nestles Quik, but was actually not bad, as they put a LOT of Quik in the glass) for me.



As you can see, Marjorie was pretty happy with her capuccino.

Then we got on the ship and the next time we'll touch dry land is back in the Home of the Brave.



But we weren't done with Funchal. The cruise ship in front of us had to leave before us, so we sat for a couple of hours waiting for its tours to finish, even though we could no longer go ashore. This did mean that we were still off Funchal when the lights came on, and we got some decent pictures of the city with its Christmas lights showing as we sailed away.