As we booked this holiday at the last minute I was unable to buy a paper copy of the walking guide so I bought a kindle version instead which I can read on my phone. At least I can when the sun is not shining, it is difficult to read on a small screen in bright sunlight and I look like a pillock walking along holding my mobile phone. (I know, I look like a pillock phone or not).
The book is published by the same company whose books we used in La Palma and La Gomera. Each walk is graded 1 (easy) to 5 (strenuous) but in both La Palma and La Gomera there were no 1 (easy) walks, we did mostly 3’s and 4’s and one 5.
On Madeira there are plenty of 1’s but very few 4’s and no 5’s. So Madeira is the island for walking wimps! Yesterday we did our first grade 1 walk, about 8 miles along the side of an irrigation channel called a Levada of which there are a great many. It was very easy and I am not sure we were entitled to the huge pizza’s we had in the evening after such an easy day and as I was embarrassed about our idleness I did not update the blog.
Today we took a grade 3 walk (average) but they ought to add a knee strain parameter which today’s walk would have been 5 (painful).
It started in some confusion, the book said park next to the cable car station, what they did not mention was that this village has two and of course we were parked outside the wrong one.
Once we had found the right path it was a lovely walk through a spectacular gorge and although we were very near the city and some big tourist attractions it was very peaceful although some the descents were knee crunchingly steep but on the plus side we caught the cable car back up to the car.
There were some interesting plants en route (Gill is admiring a large Agave) which is not a native species but is thought to have escaped from one of the many botanical gardens in the area.
Almost every town has cobbled pavements, these look good but in the wet they are awfully slippery, goodness knows how many Madeirans end up in hospital each year with broken bones having slipped on the cobbles. But one advantage of the hard road surface is that you can toboggan down the hills on sledges pushed/steered by two men wearing straw boaters. We might have a go later on the holiday but today we photographed some going past. The hill is about 1 in 5 (the same as Bishop’s Castle High Street) yet the sledges are doing about 20 mph. They don’t seem to have any brakes so seeing a sled in your rear view mirror is a little alarming, there were also a few tight bends.