Six hours after leaving Porto's departure board behind, I landed on an island I had only added to this trip because flying to it from the north was cheaper than flying to it from Lisbon. A taxi from the airport won over the bus purely on time; I did not linger to compare fares beyond that. On Track Hostel was waiting in Funchal, a place that felt less like a hostel and more like a house that happened to have bunk beds in it, and I dropped my bags there just long enough to remember I had somewhere else to be.
The tour I had booked started from Sao Vicente instead of Funchal, on my guide's advice, worked out over a message exchange the night before: arriving on the original Funchal pickup slot would have meant a separate Bolt ride out to catch up with the group afterward, and on an island where most tours start at seven or eight in the morning and you only get to do one a day, there was no room to rearrange anything once the day actually started. So Sao Vicente it was, straight off a red eye and a full day already behind me before the actual day had started.
My guide introduced me to the rest of the group as the one who had apparently come straight from the airport for a full day of driving on no sleep, which was accurate enough that I did not argue. Seven of us total: a mother and son from the Netherlands, a couple in their mid fifties from Mexico, a couple in their mid twenties from England, and me.
The route was the Enchanted Terraces, Porto do Moniz, and Fanal circuit, eight hours in an open topped 4x4 that made no attempt to hide how close the drop was on the narrower turns, gravel switchbacks with a wall of rock on one side and nothing at all on the other. We climbed above the cloud line at Paul da Serra, a high plateau that looked more like Scottish moorland than anything I associated with an island this far into the Atlantic, then dropped into Fanal, a laurel forest old enough and strange enough to be a UNESCO site in its own right, fog moving low between trunks twisted into shapes no ordinary tree bothers with.
Fanal looked like a forest that had been left alone long enough to forget it was supposed to look like anything else.
Porto Moniz came next, volcanic rock pools carved out by the same ocean that was still actively trying to get back into them, cold enough on first contact to knock the breath out of anyone brave enough to actually get in, myself included, cold enough to make the point that this was still the North Atlantic no matter how the postcards frame it. Waterfalls appeared at the edges of most of it, unannounced, the kind of scenery that stops feeling remarkable purely because there is so much of it packed into one afternoon.
We were back by five, and I finally checked into the bed I had dropped my bags near that morning. Dinner and groceries came through Glovo, the delivery app that covers half of southern Europe and apparently every corner shop in Funchal too, ordered from the hostel couch without moving, the menu translated by guesswork more than actual Portuguese. The common area filled in with the usual mix of solo travelers and backpackers comparing trail notes, and I went to bed early, on purpose this time, because tomorrow was a hike and this island was not going to make that easy either.
