A tour round the Paradise garden

The Santa Maria. Apart from a few trivial details like an engine, a bar and flush toilets, this vessel is supposedly an exact replica of the original. Indeed, she does take to the seas under full sail when the occasion warrants.
Right now, however, she'll doubtless be somewhere off the southern coast of Madeira, packed with tourists, after sailing this morning from the capital Funchal.
A year ago, it wasn't my insides misbehaving, but I took a spine-jarring shock when one of my plunges into clear but deep Atlantic waters from the boat was less elegant than I like to believe the others were! Still, it was almost as hard to persuade me back on board as it was Marianne.

A dolphin in some parallel life, inseparable from water since she was a baby, the lass was in a swimming pool when her Mum 'phoned this morning to swap news from their holiday house in the Drôme valley.
I felt just the teeniest twinge of jealousy. It's so hot today, the air so still, that for once I do mind being Paris-bound, rather than playing the fool aboard ship. The skull was in one of the Santa Maria's heads ('Maritime Terms' -- yes, you knew what that means, but maybe this 50-year-old glossary will be of interest to fellow landlubbers).

My own head was long filled with wintertime thoughts of going back to Madeira and that's unusual. Normally, even if I'm greatly struck by a place, there are always so many unknown ones still to see that I dismiss such notions.
Funchal, like every town on that largely unspoiled Portuguese island, didn't seem to have one level street in it. It was the walk back down steep, narrow streets the second day we went there that was the hard bit. Getting up into the hills by this lift was the best way to get to one of Europe's most remarkable gardens, in a place full of parks. Locals lay claim some kinship with that other sea-faring people, the Brits, and relish pointing out where Churchill stayed and painted in the district.

Last year, Marianne had had enough of our African trips and Madeira, the alternative, came as a wonderful surprise as we toured the place extensively. I'd happily take another long stroll in the cool of one of its "secrets", the Monte Palace Tropical Garden (more pix on a French site). Marianne took this shot of one of the Chinese corners in the exotic miracle dreamed up by the aristocratic José Berardo.

We were based not in Funchal, like most tourists, but in the small western town of Machico (another little tip I really shouldn't put online). The "flower island" was really such a delight that I kept it quiet for a year, but this first August weekend, with the French capital suddenly empty of many of its residents, my thoughts inevitably turn to this time last year.
The Machico beach is not dirt black, but almost as good a swim as leaping off the side of a boat. The island, 600 kilometres (320 miles) off the Moroccan coast, is volcanic -- like the Dröme -- and the people who live there go elsewhere to stretch out on your more regular kind of sand. What I couldn't do was take many photos in the beautiful inner highlands and the lush valleys heading up into the mountains, because the most spectacular road bends there are often unsafe places to stop.
The hills that surround Machico turn ablaze on some summer nights, when the villages up in the heights put on striking firework and light displays to celebrate one of the numerous religious feast days. Roman Catholicism has taken deep roots in Madeira, which is not a recommended destination for frenzied youth in search of drunken nights and an "easy lay".

There's Madeira itself, of course, the drink. Production of the fortified wine is largely an English-run affair, but the island also exports vast quantities of flowers and parts of it are good for banana plantations. One of the main local industries seems to be digging.
Sensibly, given a choice between building a new airport on a windswept plateau or extending the existing one near Machico, people decided against new motorways and stretched the runway right out over the ocean, beside sheer cliffs. Pilots need a special licence to land there and when you do it's pretty obvious why.
In the interior, rather than build over mountains, there's a preference for tunnelling straight through them and bridging valleys in elegant and spectacular fashion. When we were there, much of this digging was aimed at laying a fast road right from the western to the eastern end of the place. Unfinished bits of it were to be glimpsed in the most astonishing places from local buses driven round the currently used hairpin bends with heart-stopping panache.

Given the closeness to Africa, I expected to see more black faces than we did, until I thought a bit about the nature of Portugal's colonial history -- not a story for a lazy Sunday afternoon -- and settled for being in what was rather more like a part of the Mediterranean that had drifted into another ocean's sealanes.
It feels like this here today, with a street thermometer on the shady side below my flat up at the 33°C (91°F) mark.

In Madeira, people traditionally coped with the heat -- and the winter -- by living in these semi-Hobbit houses, now largely a vestige of the past given new materials and the economic development that came after the Portuguese revolution (Marxist perspective at the time) of 1974. Marianne, who would kill me if I said she's in this picture, had learned about that from Maria de Madeira's splendid film 'Capitães de Abril' (2000; the man in Arizona who wrote the latest, stinging review of it at the IMDb is decidedly at odds with all the Portuguese people I know who've seen it, but to each their own).

Sadly for my daughter, she has singularly good reason to want me alive at the moment. As a forthcoming post will disclose.

After so many lush and green sights, a long trek out on to the eastern spit of the island, São Lourenço, brought another surprise. This is where the prevailing wind comes in, as well as the jetliners today. It's scrubland and cactus terrain that you cross if you plan to be as lucky as I was and catch the cliffs in this kind of light.