Hawaii of the Atlantic?

“I really think you should upgrade to the next class of vehicle.”

“Na. I’m good with what I reserved.”

“Sir, you really should consider paying a little more for something with a larger engine… “

Normally, I don’t need convincing when someone is arguing that I should consider a car with more horsepower, but in this case I was set on renting a Fiat Panda. For Top Gear nerds, the Fiat Panda is kind of the joke car - small, under-powered and cheap. Alex and I have always wanted to drive one, but they were never imported into the US. Now was my chance!

I should have listened to the sales guy.

Madeira is barely known to Europeans, and almost completely unknown to Americans. The best way to describe it is to compare it to one of the more remote Hawaiian islands. It’s a giant volcano with jagged peaks that climb to 6000 feet above sea-level. The whole island is about 30 miles wide, and about 12 miles North to South and located about 500 miles off the coast of Morocco. The waters are 75 - 90 degrees year round with air temps between 70 and 85. Climate-wise, it’s quite nice! … especially during winter in Amsterdam!

Landing in Funchal (‘fun-shull’) after a 4 hour flight you immediately get a sense for how the island is laid out. First, I don’t think there’s a flat space more than about 50 feet long on the entire island. Everything is a jagged plane that starts very low, and climbs. To accommodate a runway, they built an artificial flat area that had to be extended with concrete pilings. In other words, we landed on a runway… on stilts.

The island is dotted with small towns with Funchal and Santa Cruz being small-ish cities. In the case of Funchal, the city starts at sea-level and climbs to at least 3000 feet… in a matter of a few miles. Madeirans are very proud of their ability to build houses that cling to a mountain side which means roads (and driveways) are unbelievably steep.

… which leads us back to our intrepid Fiat Panda. The Panda is a hybrid with a combined power output (gas and electricity) of 81 horsepower. My educated guess is that the 1 liter gas engine has about 65hp, and maybe 60 when the air-conditioner is on. The car has a 6-speed manual transmission, but I think we were in 6th gear once. Madeiran highways have wild elevation changes over short distances meaning that in the steepest sections, I was downshifting to third-gear to try and hold ~45mph. On one of our hiking excursions, I could almost hold a steady speed in second-gear, but briefly had to go to first gear with the gas-pedal to the floor to make it over one particularly steep section after the hybrid battery completely drained. 

“Shut off the air-conditioner!”

The Panda is actually smaller than it appears in this picture...

The Panda was fun, and added quite a bit more ‘adventure’ to the adventure, but I’m not sure I can think of a less-suited car for the island of Madeira. My old motorcycle had twice the power.

Along with being a beautiful place, the island has a few more things going for it, especially when compared to Hawaii. First the cost. Hotels are about one-third the cost of a Hawaiian equivalent. Meals are about half. My Fiat Panda was €26… FOR THE WEEK! Nearly everything we bought was shockingly cheap which is unreal given how much must be imported from the mainland.

The island enjoys a more European vibe. You don’t have the tourist-ie plastic veneer over everything like you do in Hawaii. Similarly, the food is many levels above what you get in Hawaii… and for about half the cost or less.  And you’re never seated next to the weekend big-shot who finds pleasure in abusing the staff.  

And then there was the Bolo Di Caco… a local bread that’s infused with fermented yams… ignore what that sounds like and trust me when I say it’s some of the best bread I’ve ever had. The bread is usually served slathered in garlic butter. You might find it hard to believe that anyone could get excited about garlic bread, but by the end of our trip, we were eating Bolo Di Caco for every meal, and even smuggled some home on the plane.

Although the native language is Portuguese (which sounds a lot like Russian in the Madeiran dialect), nearly everyone speaks English.

One downside to the island is the lack of beaches. The entire coastline of the island is jagged volcanic rock. There’s still good snorkeling, surfing, sailing, kayaking, and other water sports, but you won’t be sleeping on a beach. That said, there are many things to fill your days. Leaving Amsterdam, we noticed that many of our fellow passengers boarded in hiking boots and pants. Yep. The hiking is pretty good. The one downside is that the trails are much more crowded than what we would have liked. Being that many people traveled to the island specifically to hike, the trails had lots of hikers along the entire trail, not just the mile or so from the parking lot. This was remarkable being that a few trails were quite technical and strenuous. All in, we hiked 3 of the 5 days on the island, and only on one particularly strenuous section were we the only hikers.

If you’ve read any of our other adventures this last year, you will know that we have become addicted to food tours in new destinations. Madeira would be no different. We spent most of a day running from one venue to another in downtown Funchal tasting meats, beers, deserts, chocolates and of course Madeiran wines. For the uninitiated, Madeiran wines are much closer to a port than a wine - not overly sweet, but thick and rich with flavor. And, of course, more Bolo Di Caco!

Along with the tourist stuff, we also ventured out on a recommendation to a farmers market on the island interior. This was a great way to see more of the ‘real Madeira’. Lots of fruit we’ve never seen, colorful locals, fresh Bolo Di Caco, and Poncha. 

Poncha was recommended to us by the guy who drove us from the airport to our rental car. We didn’t know anything about it other than he recommended it. So, while ordering two full orders of fresh Bolo Di Caco, we also ordered 2 Ponchas. The very sturdy woman behind the counter who was also kneading bread dough gave us a bit of a shocked look, which we read as, “How do Americans know about Poncha?”

We were wrong. Like Fiat Panda in Madeira wrong.

Very quickly, we learned that Poncha is a mixture of rum and passionfruit juice… and more rum. It comes in a plastic cup and looks colorful. It’s not until you bring the glass to your face that you realize, “this is probably not something I should put into my body at noon on a Monday.” Just the rum evaporating from the plastic cup was enough to burn my eyes when the cup was close to my face. Considering ourselves adventurous travelers, we each took a drink and smiled at our new sturdy friend who was eyeing us with curiosity… then we walked just out of site, poured the poncha onto a piece of ground that will now likely be baron for the next 10 years, and handed our empty cups back with big smiles of satisfaction. “Obrigado. Muito Bom!”

After about a week on the island, we noticed something interesting about Madeira. From all of our travels around the world, I theorize that the places with the happiest people and least amount of social problems are those with the smallest gap between rich and poor. Most places we know of like this tend to be at the lower end of the economic scale. Madeira was smack in the middle. In other words, ~95% of the island was firmly embedded in the middle class. They are very happy and have very few problems (crime, etc…). If not for it being an island (it’s probably this way because it’s an island), I would consider Madeira to be one of the best places on Earth to retire.

The pattern for our traveling this year has been to see as much as we can in the limited time we have. For most of the places we’ve visited, we’ve stayed less than 3 days. Madeira was a nice break from that… especially since it was just Laura and I while Alex was off skiing in Austria with his school friends. Although not the most exciting place on the planet, Madeira was the perfect mix of adventure and relaxation. Ironically, we could have happily stayed another few days. We’re already planning another trip… and setting aside the budget for the Panda upgrade!