An hour and a half before sunrise a van picked me up in the dark, and by the time we reached sixteen hundred meters I understood why every warning about this tour mentions clothing twice: Funchal had been shirt sleeves the night before, and Pico do Arieiro was a different climate entirely, cold enough that my breath showed and windy enough to make standing still an actual effort.
Pico do Arieiro is Madeira's third highest peak, eighteen hundred and eighteen meters, and at that hour it was mostly silhouettes: other tourists wrapped in every layer they owned, a ridge line just barely visible against a sky that had not decided yet whether it would cooperate. It did, eventually, in the unhurried way sunrises have of building an argument and then winning it all at once, color arriving somewhere below the horizon and climbing until the clouds themselves were doing something with it.
A short stretch of PR1, nicknamed the Stairway to Heaven for reasons that became obvious after about four steps, added another layer to the view for anyone willing to pay a few euros and climb into thinner air before breakfast. I was willing.
On the way back down we stopped at the Glass Platform, a transparent floor bolted to the cliff at Guindaste with nothing between your shoes and several hundred meters of open air below, which is exactly the kind of thing that sounds like a bad idea until you are actually standing on it.
The second half of the day traded altitude for coastline: the Larano trail, seven kilometers between Machico and Porto da Cruz, cliffs dropping straight into the Atlantic on one side the entire way. Two and a half hours of it, moderate enough not to punish legs that had already been asked a lot of that morning, spectacular enough that nobody in the group said much for long stretches at a time. One island, one day, somehow both a mountain cold enough to see my breath and a coastline that never once stopped being blue.
Back at the hostel by mid afternoon, the rest of the day went to packing, properly this time, suitcase and scale both doing their jobs without drama for once. Tomorrow was a flight to Edinburgh, of all places, which was never actually the destination so much as the cheapest way back to London, where a cousin was waiting to show me a city I thought I had already mostly seen.
Packing left the evening free, and the hostel kitchen filled it for me. A former prison officer from England now training for the army, a vet from Australia who had settled in England, a college dropout from the US, a twenty two year old businesswoman from Mexico already running something of her own, a Belgian who had quit her job outright to hike her way across the world, and a few others I never got the full story on. I ordered biryani. Someone else brought out ice cream, cooked sandwiches, then beers, and we stayed around that kitchen counter for three hours doing nothing but talk.
