Hola Madeira! 🪇
Discussion
if ya want to see Sao Vicente i can show you around :D
bit of a pain to get here though
partly why i'm here :D
Would be cool, really looking forward to explore the island! You only can arrive by car to sao vicente?
there is a bus two or 3 times during weekdays but basically yes
costs about 40 euros in a taxi
i needed to get away from the crowds and i just have to swallow that cost... low time preference if you don't have the money to burn on a car, and there is no powered transport option in portugal that can take you more than about 10km on this island without having a driver's license and the roads are intense on the cars too, downhills will wreck your brakes and uphills will wreck your pistons and tyres in both directions
a lot of the things you see in this place you will start to understand once you realise that even though it's 50km east to west, it's like it's 200km on flat land, at least
Lets see 🤙
well, to be honest, there's not really much i can do other than show you all the ways and things that i have learned about as i lived here
there is some nice restaurants down at the beachside and the roads up around the edges of Ginjas and Lanco you can see a lot of beautiful things
there is the caves down in the valley just before you come to the town center and i believe there is numerous levadas around here, i haven't got to seeing much of that yet
to the west of the Sao Vicente town is one of the old volcanic crater cones, i think there's tracks up there,
up behind Ginjas to the west is a very windy road up a very steep slope to the top where there is windmills and a small town behind it on a plateau
the steepness of the sides of the valley is quite something, everyone has an epic view except the ones down in the valley next to the river, and the slope of most of the roads is intense, the contours of the land make it very difficult to take a straight path anywhere without an almost impossible grade
there's lots of cool little footpaths back behind the blocks of houses that are fun to walk around, sometimes you get right in people's back yards, sometimes the paths follow levadas (basically drains that carry water around) - you can find this stuff everywhere on the island though - and they are cool, often there is old 100+ year old stone houses you find, half falling down in the backs of the blocks, old water storage ponds, and lots of crazy steep staircases winding around the place
Wow thats and amazing information! Thanks so much, ill try to watch some of them 🤙
Disfruta mucho de Madeira y date un rulo por los caminos y acequias de sus montañas, son brutales.
Wow si tengo muchas ganas de explorar todo esto, tienes alguna recomendación?
lol, just walking around is brutal
this is from someone who did 50km days in serbia in mid 2021 on the road to sofia
whatever km the map shows in madeira, it's at least 4x that for the real cost in energy and joint strain
i did 40km one day between santa cruz and about 5km shy of funchal and i could hardly walk for 3 days, and this is the flat paths along the coastline