Portugal’s political and social structures have undergone seismic changes within less than half an average life span. The long dictatorship of General Salazar was followed by a military coup in the 1970s, but even this allowed only limited and gradual democratic reforms. In essence the country has had little more than a decade in which to adapt to the political dictates of the European Union and the market forces of mass tourism. It is therefore not surprising that, faced with officialdom, you can sometimes see a flicker behind the eyes as the traditional response to an inconvenient request – a dismissive wave of a uniformed arm – reluctantly gives way to a present where it is no longer an option to simply say, ‘No!’ With a final long look at us, the woman with the cough applies herself to her computer.
Even her computer programme which produces the permits appears to consider our intrusion unwarranted, however. It is, she explains, refusing to allow her access. Nevertheless, she gives every indication of trying to key required data from our passports and ship’s papers into its apparently resistant boxes. While we wait it occurs to me that of all the offices in all the world that I’ve ever been in, this one, in a botanical wonderland, is the only one that doesn’t have a single pot plant in it.
Finally, after what seems a very long time, a printer across the room rumbles into life and, with much smiling and thanks, we take possession of our permit. It is not until we get back to the boat and actually read it that we discover it is valid for one week only.
In the meantime, still light-headed with success, we lunch al fresco at a shady table overlooking the gardens’ sunny terraces. Two peacocks, one the more familiar variety of luminous blues and greens, the other pure white, wander gracefully among the tables. I have never been so close to a peacock before and to have two of them – especially the rare and almost-mythical white – undulating past one’s elbow in such glorious surroundings is truly magical.
A middle-aged man settles at the table opposite, putting down a cup of coffee with one hand and a plate with a large slice of Madeira cake on it with the other. As he reaches for his slice of cake, however, the white peacock, with a swiftness obviously honed by much practice, darts a long elegant neck forward and snatches it from the plate.
The man, with an equally surprising turn of speed, slaps the bird hard across the side of its head. The cake falls to the ground. I gasp in shock. The crest of delicate white feathers crowning the peacock’s regal little head has been bent sideways by the blow. Other people look up from their plates and stare. Man and bird are frozen, eyeing each other.
The spell is broken when the man turns away and reaches sullenly for his coffee cup. The peacock continues to glare at him a moment longer. Then it raises its head, turns and stalks slowly out of the restaurant with all the dignity of a dowager duchess, albeit slightly the worse for wear and with her tiara askew.
3
Funchal
We spend the following day discovering the island’s capital, Funchal. After tying up the dinghy in the harbour our first stop is at the small public garden whose pink blossoms we can see from the anchorage. To my great delight there is also frangipani.
I met my first frangipani tree in Australia when I was twenty. It was love at first sight. Related to the magnolia, its branches form a huge umbrella of long, oval leaves. Among them nestle clusters of small, waxy flowers, ivory in colour shading to yellow and finally to apricot at the very centre. They have five petals and unlike most blossoms fall from the tree long before they wither, so the grass under a frangipani looks as if it is littered with tiny stars. But it is when you pick one up that you discover the ultimate joy of the frangipani tree – its perfume. For each little star smells of marzipan, that soft paste made from ground almonds, sugar and egg yolk that Christmas cooks use to cover a rich fruit cake before coating it with white icing.
The longer I spend adrift in the natural world, the more I wonder if culture is a blessing or a curse. How much of our history, myths, art, religion and education is really a means of instilling fear and loathing? It is always easier to control frightened people, after all. Why else do we terrify children with tales of cannibalistic old women living in gingerbread houses, or invent a place called Hell?
Frangipani is a good example of this. Look it up and you will learn that in one culture the tree is linked to ghosts and demons. In another, its flowers are associated with death and funerals. Another connects the shedding of the tree’s flowers with the woes of the world. How depressing. When without knowing any of this beforehand, you can stand under a tree that looks like heaven, smells like Christmas and sends you on your way feeling even happier than when you arrived.
On the main boulevard, the Avenida Arriaga, another old favourite from Australia awaits. Jacaranda. With their dancing, fern-like leaves, and blossoms like oversized bluebells, jacaranda trees make a wonderful contrast with the stately palms lining the avenue. We have coffee in the sunshine of this blissful mid-October day, on a pavement of the kind beloved by the Portuguese. These black-and-white mosaics can be hard on the feet when their tiny, square tiles become uneven, but they are always a pleasure to the eye.
The newspaper stand opposite has a thatched roof. Beside it, a low, shady fountain has been commandeered by a duck for the ablutions of her minute offspring. They wave their stubby wings in delight as jets of water rise above their heads and cascade over them, rolling off their waterproof feathers in glistening droplets. Water off a duck’s back, my father used to say of people impervious to criticism or shame. And you never truly appreciate the metaphor until you watch it happen.
Step off the main road, and you are in gardens of more palm trees, frangipani and jacaranda, flowering shrubs and a tree festooned with the most extraordinary blossoms. Each flower is several feet long, narrow where it joins the tree, fluted at its open end, and resembling those long graceful trumpets favoured by musical angels in Renaissance altar paintings. And later, when I look the tree up in a book, angel trumpet tree is in fact its common name.
Meanwhile, at ground level, are spider plant and tradescantia, the kind of plants I nurtured at home in a northern climate, in small pots, indoors. Only here they are many times the size and flourishing out of doors as exuberant borders.
We walk on, past a circular bandstand and stone seating, out of the gardens altogether and into streets with buildings reminiscent of a 1950s Hollywood version of the artists’ quarter in Paris. Daddy Longlegs. Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. A bit seedy but deeply picturesque. We wander through it eating ice cream, step around workmen re-cobbling a stretch of road using only water and wooden mallets, and visit a church with a blue and white tiled interior.
Funchal is said to have been named after the abundance of funcho – fennel – found growing here, and nestles in a natural amphitheatre with a southern exposure. It was founded five centuries ago, with its cathedral dating from 1493. It is also an absolute delight. Its squares are lovely and its architecture varied, old and beautiful. Especially pleasing is the traditional Portuguese use of black basalt to frame white buildings, which somehow manages to make them look elegant and solid at the same time.
There are fountains, too. Fountains add sparkle to a city because they catch the light, and water splashing on stone is cooling on warm afternoons. A couple of rivers run through the capital as well. Only small ones, it must be said, and they end their journey at the anchorage in a state of exhaustion, although doubtless they are more robust when the rains come. Even now, though, in their off-season, they still add lustre.
And everywhere there are trees. I have never seen a city with so many trees. Or so many bearing so much blossom in so many varieties, or so many flowers or simply so much green. Visit anywhere else and it is natural to assume that the founding fathers stripped the land, built their city, and then added trees and shrubs to beautify it. Here it is as if the flora never gave up its tenure of the land in the first place and that the people, when they came, simply arranged themselves around it. So when you p
ass a small bungalow in a side street with a huge banyan tree filling its front garden and beginning to overwhelm the dwelling, you get the feeling that when space really becomes an issue the final decision will be for the tree. Or perhaps I am simply unfamiliar with the effect of a Mediterranean climate on fertile, volcanic soil.
We visit the two-storey flower and vegetable market. It is a colourful place, not only from the variety and exotic nature of the flowers, but because the women selling them wear very pretty national costumes and head-dresses.
There is also a large fish market which, at this time in the afternoon is empty apart from us and two men behind one of the tables. Unlike Porto Santo, however, they have cool boxes. And they are offering swordfish, a particular favourite of ours. We indicate two slices, please, and the size we want. One of the men cuts and weighs them, eyes us thoughtfully, and then keeps cutting further pieces off the fish with a lethal-looking knife and adding them to our slices, observing us between times. The two men look so much like pirates that we say nothing, pay what they ask and wander off clutching the little black plastic bag they hand us. It will turn out to be not only the cheapest, but also the freshest and most delicious swordfish we have ever eaten.
In the vegetable market upstairs, the man serving us drops part of our change and creaks picking it up off the floor.
‘Forty-five years,’ he says mournfully as he hands the coins to David.
‘Fifty-six,’ says David.
‘Ah,’ says the man, eyeing him. ‘You’ve had an easy life.’
‘No,’ says David, nodding meaningfully at me.
I may kill him.
But slowly.
Like an orca.
We wake next morning to a golden sunrise and a calm sea. After breakfast we make an early start for Monte Palace Tropical Garden and a bus-ride even more hair-raising than the previous one. The journey is roughly twice as long as the one to the Botanical Gardens. The bus driver seems to be even more maniacal than last time and the twisting road seems to get even more precipitous as it winds ever upward and seemingly closer to the edge.
At one stage a pedestrian skitters across in front of our windshield and lands against a wall. He’s attempted to cross what only moments before had been a deserted corner. Unfortunately, he is only halfway across when our bus accelerates to get around it, and he nearly ends up under its wheels.
At a bus stop, a woman gets off and teeters on a curved ledge only inches wide, beyond which is a deep, sloping storm drain and then a low concrete wall. Her choices are: to balance where she is until the bus has gone; stand on the road and risk being dragged under its rear wheels; or take her chances in a storm drain whose angle could easily send her over the low wall and headlong down the cliffside. It is teeter, get dragged by the bus or go swimming with orcas. She teeters, and my last sight of her is crossing the road behind our departing bus. They’re nimble, these Madeirans. Like mountain goats.
After the hot road, concrete walls and vertiginous glimpses of the sparkling bay hundreds of feet below, you suddenly find yourself in cool, sweet air surrounded by stillness, lush greenness and towering trees. The enormously tall tree trunks are like the pillars of a living cathedral and encircle a space so shady and tranquil that it is almost a religious experience. Indeed, there is actually a shrine among the trees. I buy a candle for 100 escudos, light it and put it with all the others burning inside. I’m not sure why, exactly.
Monte Palace Tropical Garden boasts 100,000 flower species from all over the world. It is also a testament to love and/or duty, to self-sacrificing volunteers, a surplus in the labour market or the Portuguese equivalent of workfare, because the weeding needed for the flower beds alone must be astronomical. While the miles of dirt paths must take thousands of man-hours a year to maintain, with their shallow steps, each one edged with slivers of stone. Or the sloping paths paved in semi-circles of round pebbles so you don’t slip going downhill. Or the ones done in sliced stones…
And yet, notwithstanding the welcoming shrine, and the spectacular number and variety of plants, this is a place to drift and dream; to ignore words like species and genus, and simply surrender the senses to the smell of freshly tilled soil, warm foliage and the colour and perfume of flowers; to the play of light through giant branches; limpid pools of koi carp; and shady paths between cascading foliage, especially after the green-free zone of an ocean passage. It is more a pleasure garden than a jardim botânico and nowhere more so than over by the baroque church of Nossa Senhora do Monte where the wicker sledges of the carrinho do Monte are lined up and waiting for customers.
This might best be described as a 19th century version of the Winter Olympics’ luge event only without snow. Two people sit side-by-side on a high-backed wicker settee on runners, and hurtle down a winding, cobbled street. The sledge is controlled by two carreiros, or drivers, wearing white shirts and trousers, short leather boots and straw hats who initially pull the sledge from the front by ropes, to gain momentum, and then leap onto the back to steer it during its precipitous mile-and-a-half-long descent at speeds approaching 30mph.
We consider it briefly, then decide the bus is marginally preferable. Once embarked on its white-knuckle descent, though, we are not so sure. It is also very crowded and we miss our stop by the market, ending up on the waterfront of the Old Town, near the ancient fort we can see a bit of from Voyager. A man is laying a mosaic pavement, placing each half-inch-square tessera individually in a grey powder.
We amble down a narrow alley behind shops and restaurants, their back doors wide open to let in air. Anyone could walk in and take whatever they wanted but it seems nobody does. Stray dogs lie sleeping in secluded corners. Somebody has left food in shady places for them. We wander narrow, cobbled streets of little restaurants and ancient houses with flaking shutters in the process of renovation. A ladies’ college is selling delicate embroidery. A shop is offering exquisite wicker work. On the quay, small fishing boats lie beside the walls of the old fort with its characteristic little towers.
In a small square near the quay two short, stocky men wearing curly cowhide chaps and leather waistcoats play haunting music on long, Andean pipes. We dinghy back to Voyager, to thick slices of tiger bread and blackberry jam and large mugs of hot black tea. The musicians play late into the evening. Around bedtime the pipes are joined by a muted guitar. It would be easy to linger here, but if we are to visit Selvagem Grande before our permit expires we must make a move.
SELVAGEM GRANDE
4
Salvage on My Mind
We rise early to be at the marina’s fuel dock when it opens. We are joined shortly afterwards by a lot of anxious tour boat owners, loading trays of sandwiches over our heads off the quay and eager to be off. One of them has that glazed, rumpled look of someone who has seriously overslept. We let the anxious ones have the fuel gun first. We have a large, slow-filling tank. They have small boats with small tanks and a living to earn.
In the meantime, I begin filling our water tanks. Both of them are slow fillers, too. If hurried they will gush out water and appear full, even though they are still half-empty. The starboard tank has a gauge in the bathroom cupboard so you can easily check if it is full. The port tank’s gauge is under the forward cabin’s bunk and inaccessible under the great pile of heavy stuff we store on top of it.
I am over-zealous filling this tank – sending in a bit more and a bit more after each small gusher in the firm belief that it can’t be full yet – and will pay for it later. For now, though, we bid Madeira a reluctant farewell and sail off into a gentle, blue day. The wind is light but we put up all three sails anyway, to get the most advantage from what there is, and motor-sail using just one engine, turn and turn about.
A three-quarter moon is well risen before sunset, and by 8pm the wind has all but died away. A warm, gentle day turns into a warm, starry, moonlit night. I do the 8pm and the 3.30am watches. About half an hour after beginning my first one, there is one of those inexplicable eve
nts you sometimes get at sea. In the distance something brilliant crosses the sky very fast, slows, and then tumbles into the sea. It is a radiant green, a long curve like a scimitar that circles as it falls. But as with many things seen in the night sky at sea I will never know what it was.
Later in the morning, when the starboard engine warning light comes on, David goes below to find out why and discovers a loose fan belt. He traces the problem to the pulley wheel that drives the water pump for cooling the engine. The bearing has disintegrated and it is not the sort of thing for which you would carry a spare. One of the advantages of having two engines, however, is that we can still make progress on just one. Manoeuvring in tight areas might be a problem but having cleared away the debris we could still use the starboard engine in short bursts if necessary.
Going barefoot into the workshop for tools, David notices that the carpet in there is wet. The port water tank that I filled at Madeira without due care has overflowed into five lockers containing a wide range of items including spare parts, electrical equipment, board games and a briefcase full of personal records and documents including our birth and marriage certificates.
They say bad things come in threes. Our next stop will be a cramped, rocky bay in an area the cruising guide describes as ‘inadequately surveyed’. It has reefs lying just below the water and, as a reminder that they are not called the Salvage Islands for nothing, the photograph accompanying the navigational data in the cruising guide shows a broken-backed French cargo ship draped across one of them. I am not filled with optimism. In the meantime I set about some salvage work of my own.
I spread the damp paperwork from the forward port cabin around the saloon where it cannot blow overboard, and carry everything else that is wet and portable up to the cockpit to dry in the sun. Then, while mopping up the cabin, I prepare my nervous system for arriving at Selvagem Grande, and my Portuguese for meeting its wardens.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 3
