A day trip to Pico

July 10, 2008 Thursday
Hello again,
Yesterday, we took the ferry over to Pico, 20 minutes away, and rented a car with some of the other cruisers (Merritt, and John and Shirlee from Solstice). It was a Mitsubishi Colt and decently comfortable for 5. Of course, the mountain required an aggressive use of the gears, given the load. I think we only got into top gear for about 2 minutes all day. Cool little car though - why can't we have cars like this in the States? We drove up to the top of the mountain and all around the perimeter of the island - in the car all day and used 6.7 liters of fuel - for which we paid $10 Euros!

Here is the volcano on Pico as seen from the marina in Horta - most of time it is shrouded in clouds. You can see some of the paintings that the cruisers put on the seawall. We will be adding ours in due course.



The ferry pulled into the harbor at Madalena, one of the bigger towns.


Then we drove all the way to the other end of the island - took a few hours - where we stopped for lunch. Pico is one of the wine growing regions of the Azores and grapes never had to work harder to survive. Here is a sparse vineyard near the lighthouse.


There is little level ground, so they pile up some volcanic rock and throw a little dirt behind the wall and call it a vineyard. You gotta really want some wine, I guess!


Here you see the grapes lying directly on the volcanic soil (more like crushed rock). I suppose there must be some dirt around somewhere because a few of these wines are decent. A lot are pretty rough. Most of the better wines are imported from Portugal (as are most things). A drinkable wine can be had for as little as 2.60 Euros and that would be better than 2-buck Chuck. As a result, the cruisers are having a lot of wine tastings. There is a lot of socializing here among all the boat people, but there is quite a gulf between them and the locals. The locals pretty much keep to themselves and given that few of us speak Portuguese, there is little common ground. A lot of the locals that provide tourist services speak excellent English so getting business done is easy enough.
We are going to stay in Horta maybe another 5 days of so and then start working our way East through the islands. August is the big European holiday month so everything is crowded, expensive, and crazy during that month. Therefore, there is little reason to rush to Portugal until the bedlam settles down. We just need to start before the Portuguese Trade Winds start getting light in September.