What a lovely way to celebrate my birthday although I'll gloss over the age! Presents first and Colin even brought all the cards sent before we left for me to open. It was so sunny and hot today that it was a pleasure to be able to wear shorts and a T-shirt after the polo-necks and scarves of last week at home.
We headed to the nearby village of Jardim do Mar which literally means garden of the sea first. It is an incredibly pretty place with Atlantic waves crashing in on the front and quite steep terracing with houses and cottages hidden down little mosaic covered paths. From there we commenced one of our more challenging drives (lucky I was navigating) on what was supposed to be an A road but was actually more of a single track up through the mountains up to the Paul de Serra Plateau and a hamlet called Rabacal. In some places the road had disappeared altogether with landslides after bad weather a few months ago but we continued on. We were above the clouds at this point for the start of our walk down into a cleft valley to the Risco levada. The walk down was longer than expected and quite hard on the knees but eventually we arrived at the start point of the levada. We hand fed the tame Madeiran chaffinches before heading off on the lush mossy path lined with ferns. The levadas are a feat of engineering and bring water from the wetter North East of the island tot he fertile drier South East. The waterfall was pretty impressive at the end.
We walked back and slightly cheated by picking up a minibus to avoid the long trek up the valley. The route down did not seem quite so bad as going up.
In the evening Colin refused to tell me what he had organised but it turned out that he had booked a table in our local favourite restaurant. They had decorated the table with balloons, flower petals and had even bought me a bouquet of flowers. There was no decision to be made on the menu as a certain person had chosen all my favourite dishes which we 'washed down' with a bottle of the local red.
Starters of mussels, then prawns in garlic followed by a 'blue' steak and I'll admit I couldn't force down a dessert so had to help Colin with his passionfruit mousse instead. All in all a very nice birthday but as I said… I'll gloss over the age bit!!
