The cruise ship passengers do a standard trip, up on a cable car to a mountain village called Monte, visit a tropical garden, take another cable car to a different garden and having done that catch the cable car back to Monte then a toboggan down the hill.
If that is what the tourists are supposed to do then we ought to follow their example so our last day was spent being a proper tourist. We took 365 photos and a video of our adventure, that is more than we took of the Terracotta Warriors in China!
I am not a gardening man, my idea of working in the garden is usually centred around a cement mixer so I am no judge of the Jardim Botanico or the Tropical Monte Palace Gardens. The Jardim Gardens served the worst cup of coffee I have had in the last 20 years whilst the Monte Palace had more walkways and concrete so better in my book.
The Tropical Gardens are owned by a chap called Joe Berardo who was born in Madeira but emigrated to South Africa and made his fortune. He returned and bought the gardens which he has spent a great deal of money restoring. They have their own terracotta warriors, Chinese and Japanese gardens and an awful lot of koi carp some of which are huge.
Joe is also a collector, he has 2500 stone sculptures made in Zimbabwe and a fantastic collection of minerals both of which are an ideal antidote to gardens when it starts raining!
So after visiting the gardens we hopped on a sledge and slid a mile and a half down hill in 7 minutes in the rain and I have the video to provive it. There is not a lot of heath and safety, no seat belts or crash hats yet we averaged 12mph downhill on public roads - there wasn't even a socket to charge the phone!
I, like all the other tourists, took a video on my phone and at several points along the way “Official” photographers took our pictures to sell us as mementos, one is shown opposite. But instead of getting back on the cruise ship we caught an ancient bus back to our hotel (the hire car went back this morning).
We have just had our last very nice dinner in the local, up market, steak house and will visit a Madeira wine emporium tomorrow before catching our flight back to the UK where we understand it has been warm and sunny.