After spending a pleasant evening in Porto Moniz on the north-western tip of Madeira, our Feb 29th was to be spent going up into the mountains, crossing the central high ground’s so-called “Desert Plain” to wander along few more levadas and down towards the south coast again. Happily, the up component was courtesy of Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz in the forms of our two minibuses, leaving us with the 9mls/14.5kms of down on the other side.

We were tipped out right beside our first levada and began with the remnants of last night’s frost clinging on in the shady hollows. We were out in the open with views across swathes of gorse bushes to the distant and much lower south coast of the island. Other than the facts that we were still some way away from the coast and considerably higher, it felt reminiscent of the Cornish coastal path. This was much more my style than yesterday’s excursion into the cloud forest. Of course, the blue sky helped tremendously. Come to think of it, that bit may not resemble Cornwall much, either. 😯

As with yesterday, the levada fell very gradually such that the water ran gently and silently. I was back marker armed with a whistle so I had time to play around a little. Out of curiosity, I decided to use my Garmin GPS to try and estimate the gradient of the levada. I plotted a waypoint at the beginning of the walk (altitude: 4310 ft/1314 mtrs) and another when we hit the two mile mark (altitude: 4262 ft/1299 mtrs). In two miles the levada had dropped a mere 48 feet. Rounding to make life easy, that’s ~50 ft in ~10000 ft, a gradient of roughly 0.5%. Well, it keeps me amused.

Lunch was my highlight of the day, not because of the food which was a basic supermarket picnic of bread, chorizo and Babybell cheese-alike (light – I didn’t do the purchasing!), but because we were in the company of a small flock of chaffinches. The chaffinches, it transpired, were quite partial to small pieces of bread and were particularly keen on torn off pieces of Babybell light. I was over the moon when I held scraps out on my upturned palm and the chaffinches fluttered in to feed from my hand. A female settled for a couple of seconds before flying off with her prize. Great stuff! (I know, I can’t help it, I just love being in touch with wildlife.)

A theme developed concerning wildlife on Madeira. Many of its species exhibit minor differences compared to their mainland counterparts and are Madeiran subspecies. This is true of the Chaffinch. Our Chaffinch is Fringilla coelebs whereas the Madeiran Chaffinch is Fringilla coelebs maderensis. I think describing the differences would be a bit challenging but it certainly looked noticeably different. Just for fun, here’s a composite picture of both, including one from our lunch party, in similar poses to compare – the Madeiran Chaffinch is above.

We needed our pathetic torches again on this walk to get through the longest tunnel of ~1km. Our leader, Donal, noted that the weather at the opposite end of the tunnel (the south side of the mountain) could often be quite different. We plunged in to darkness dimly illuminated by our CSI-style Maglites. About 12 minutes later we emerged into blazing cloudlight. Shortly after wards it began spitting with rain. A little later we were walking through steady and persistent rain. Donal had been quite right. 🙁 Eventually, however, the rain subsided to reveal Messrs Ford, Mercedes and Benz waiting to complete our journey to the south coast and ferry us to our hotel at Ponta do Sol, where our 15 pairs of soiled walking boots managed to make short work of the hotel reception’s unserviceably white doormat. [Ed: Bloody tourists!]

Two things really impressed us about the Enotel at Ponta do Sol. Firstly, the architecture was noteworthy in that a relatively large hotel was designed outwardly to look like several smaller buildings. The multiple colours reminded me of Villajoyosa in Spain where they are similarly bold with colour, in a pleasing way. Check out the picture; that’s all one hotel – clever! Secondly, when we returned downstairs having showered and changed, the doormat had already been returned to its original virginal white state. Bravo Enotel!

The rooms were very spacious and comfortable, too. When we eventually retired, we propped open our Juliette balcony door and fell asleep to the sound of the Atlantic surf breaking on the stony shore literally just across the road. Very restful! 😉

OK, so we’re not actually on Madeira to dance the lambada. We are actually here with Explore! to walk, amongst other things, some of the famous levadas. Levadas are irrigation channels but more of these later. Madeira is essentially a large, formerly volcanic mountain and the main “other thing” that we are targeting is the high ground (~1800m/5500ft) in the centre. Explore! runs small group holidays, some cultural, some more active, and this is our sixth with them.

Our group on this trip is 14 strong, plus the leader, Donal, who unsurprisingly hails from the Emerald Isle. As well as trying to get our ears tuned in to Portuguese for our first time – it sounded to us a bit like Spanish with a Russian accent – we had to tune our ears in to Donal’s lilting brogue. Yesterday, we became convinced he was telling us that, at some time in its early history, Madeira had been invaded by parrots until we finally realized he was saying pirates. Duh! 😀

Today we were heading out to the eastern point of the island for what seemed like a modest limb loosening walk of 4½mls/7kms. Actually, I suspect that relatively gentle start is designed mostly for the tour leader, giving them a chance to assess the abilities of their new set of charges. To get to our start point at São Laurenço, we drove past Madeira’s other engineering highlight (other than its levadas): the airport runway extension which is a large flyover (no pun intended) supported on huge concrete pillars. They are clearly very proud of their runway, on Madeira.

This walk was a there-and-back affair, winding its way in an undulating fashion through an almost desert-type landscape with the Atlantic Ocean on both sides – more dramatic than picturesque. I personally find rocks a little on the dull side, preferring animate objects, but for those with the correct interest I’m sure the geology would prove fascinating. Courtesy of Donal’s instruction, I now know that things called intrusions exist in formerly volcanic regions. An example is shown in the picture on the right; just to the left of centre (Natalie Imbruglia?) are a couple of lighter strata stretching vertically from the shore to the top of the cliff.

We didn’t give Donal any concerns, everyone making it to the easternmost tip of Madeira without mishap where most of us chose to scale the 200m highpoint for the view (or just because it was there) before settling down to a packed lunch. There was also a wildlife highlight for those of us who prefer nature with a pulse. At our lunch spot a few LBJs (Little Brown Jobs) were hopping and flittering about. They looked a bit like Spotted Flycatchers but were more strongly flecked and behaving very differently. The birds turned out to be Berthelot’s Pipits (Anthus berthelotii), according to an information board (and Donal). They are resident to the Canary Islands and Madeira. Well done Carol for snagging a recognisable shot.

Chalk up a new one for our bird page – eventually. 🙂

We returned to our transport and noticed we had happily missed a rain shower as we were driven to Santana on the north side of the island for our second night followed by our first encounter with a levada the next day.

[Here’s a link to a Google Earth plot of this walk. You’ll need to save it to your computer before opening it up in Google Earth.]