Madeira has to be one of the most beautiful jewels on this planet. She is the prom queen of the Atlantic: naturally beautiful, exotic yet welcoming. She wears bright colours, her makeup is bold and her fragrance is heady. By all means she should be a garish assault on the senses. However, she has, it seems, never realised this and, in her ignorance, succeeds in being the girl you can’t take your eyes off. The time I spent wandering through her gardens held the same mystique as those secret hours as little girl rooting through my mother’s vanity drawers hoping not to be found and forced to stop exploring. Sampling exotic floral perfumes and finding colourful silken ladies scarves I had no idea how to wear but that mysteriously appealed to me.

I rose early, flicked on the channel that showed the temperature outside: 18’C and not even 8am. Wonderful. I scrambled for jeans and a vest top impatient to get on my way. I allowed myself the secret pleasure of wearing my bikini under my clothes. It was January, the UK was freezing, literally. A bikini! It felt ever so cheeky!

I made my way from the shuttle bus along the sea front. My fellow travellers peeled of left and right, tempted by fruit markets, cafés, museums, but I kept on. I was headed for the crystal building that was the base of the cable car. The tops of the hillsides were shrouded in mist, as I crept on in the queue each preceding car vanished into the white… I was intrigued. I knew that two famous gardens were on those hilltops. I had heard that Madeira was second to none for vegetation and beauty, but I craved to see it proved. I had a feeling I would be disappointed. How foolish I was.

Emerging through the mist, the cable car approached a carved hole in the luscious green rock. I say ‘green rock’ because not a section of that hillside seemed not to be alive. Life bloomed everywhere. The car slowed and the doors opened as a small well-built man with dark curls, a winter jumper and a face accustomed to frowning let us pass. I smiled at him, unable to keep my pleasure to myself. His dark eyes twinkled, the frown reversed and a smile spread like treacle. “Wilkommen Madeira Frauline”. I may take this opportunity to tell you that my ship was not the only ship in port that day. There was another, larger, ship moored next to us. This was the Mein Sheiff, a German owned ship with mainly Dutch and German passengers. My blonde hair and appearance therefore led all locals to continuously address me in German regardless of my English answers and confused looks.

The first thing that hit me as I exited the cable car was the smell. At first I couldn’t pinpoint the familiarity. I was overcome with the memory of British summer evenings: damp greenery, herbs and that sweet decay of leaves after a rainfall. Lavender peaked and rosemary countered with a shot of fresh sweetness. I spent a full minute just breathing. In my opinion, a minute well spent.   Then I realised, there was fresh wild mint growing up the entire summit for the hillside. The smell was intoxicating. I rounded the corner following the dewy paving stones down a deserted section of mountainside. Through the mist, on my path, there suddenly appeared an aged man in work clothes trimming the foliage and placing the cuttings into a tatty supermarket plastic bag hooked on his belt. His back turned to me, he seemed as intoxicated on wild mint and lavender as I and whistled a jaunty tune. Clipping a rogue shoot and popping it in his pouch, he saw me. I received another smile like molasses, then, “Gutten morgan”. I smiled back, “Danke”.   I hope never to forget that little old man tidying a mountainside inch by inch, either oblivious to the enormity of the job, or happy that the tidying of this mountainside would last all his days. I’ll never know which is true, but I’d like to think it was the latter.

I made my way through the morning damp mist to the next cable car: my transport to the botanical gardens I had read so much about. The next 10 minutes I spent alone, suspended above a cavernous valley as the mist took shape into rainbows and the sun tried to burn its way through. The botanical gardens take up an expanse of hillside on the south of the island. It includes an Arboretum, cultivations of fragrant vegetation, indigenous plants, homages to different styles of gardening (sculpture of plants, water features etc), agricultural vegetation, a botanical museum and a ‘birds of paradise’ aviary.  All this is overlooking the Atlantic and the port of Funchal. Regardless of its multiple facets and their botanical value, this hillside is a riot of colour. It looks as though someone has painted acrylic colour on top of everything you see. Each flower jovially boasts its own existence from its vantage point looking out towards America. “Look at me!” They shout over each other with noisy discord resulting in a dramatic cacophony of fuchsias, turquoise, gold, violet, fiery red and boisterous greens.  A school of cacti towered above me as I marched eagerly down the cobbled slopes. Between their branches epic spiders’ webs made gossamer sheets filled with unfortunate morsels for the hidden owners lunch. I’m quite glad the architects of these stayed hidden, as, judging by the size of their handiwork, they must have sizable enough to rival a small dog and would surely have dampened my spirits! Feeling very proud of myself for only imagining spiders having fallen on my head a couple of times, I made my way to the one beautiful building in the garden: the museum. Looking more at home in the southern states of America that Europe, the museum is a 19^th century house complete with white panelling and a wide veranda.

Accompanied by the flip-flopping of my feet I danced up the steps and slipped into the central of the 3 available rooms I got the impression that, rather than a botanical museum, I was entering the parlour of a Georgian mad scientist. The place was utterly deserted but for me and a century of specimens. Rows and rows of sea creatures in formaldehyde stared blindly out of bell jars, all of which were labelled with aged fuzzy type stating their capture date. A flounder, bleached ghostly white by time, grinned through his jar as he balanced in a perpetual headstand. His eyes were wide and dark contrasted by his insubstantial body. They stared out knowingly. It occurred to me that he looked in need of a good conversation. His label read:

Neoscopelus Funchal 18/4/1924

Urging myself to move on and not to make small talk with octogenarian mummified fish I wandered through to the larger of the three rooms, into what seemed to me to be a dining room for want of a table… and was met by a tuna fish, 2 seals, a huge leather-back turtle and a shark! All of whom were propped up on wooden frames as though they were gathered for a tea party which I had rudely interrupted. Their glassy eyes all focussed on me, the party crasher. I regarded their other guests who lined the walls 8 shelves high from floor to ceiling: hundreds of birds, all shapes and sizes. They huddled together in their cases spilling secrets in the silence and eyeing their aquatic hosts with unblinking expectation. Above the fireplace sparkled a case of 51 butterflies between them covering the whole spectrum. On closer inspection the eyes of the shark were trained on these guests.  As I made to leave the room my weight shifted and the floor creaked a long sigh breaking the silence. I glanced over my shoulder, half expecting to see the toothy gent swimming through the air to play with his insect friends the moment my back was turned! The final room contained wood. Old wood. Leaves from 2 centuries ago filled wooden cabinets which stood next to ancient stumps and carved bath tubs. With a lack of labelling one could only imagine the botanical importance of a bath tub. With that thought, I slipped out of the cool parlour back into the warm sunshine, and headed for the aviary.

A box of butterflies

There is something about the cries of birds of paradise that can pierce ones heart. The squabbling of parrots, the bickering of macaws or the chattering of cockatoos for some reason quickens my pulse. Maybe it was because they were the voices of the living relatives of the silent tea party guests I had just left, or maybe it was because I have been lucky enough to hear them free in the jungle, something in me could recognise the cry of a caged soul – but I shan’t dwell on that. They were beautiful creatures: well cared for, clean and boisterous. Blurs of blue and green raced one another from pillar to post whilst a yellow and black puffed up ball of feathers showered sunflower seeds on them from a perch in the rafters, its one visible cheeky eye squinting with laughter. Around a small pond snow-white ducks waddled and quacked resulting in a chorus of kazoos adding to the throaty symphony. On the opposite side of the track a green pasture shaded by palms housed, at first glance, a huge rock. As I got closer, the rock blinked, once, twice. I made out an ancient tortoise unmoving in the shade while smaller turtles splashed in a nearby pool. I wound my way through the aviary past peacocks and countless birds I had never seen before, gradually getting closer to a deafening screeching. Finally I came to the largest enclosure of them all. Six or seven giant parrots avidly discussing politics in their native tongue with gesticulating wings and questionable pecking of lovers and rivals. I guessed it was politics due to their demeanour, but looking back they could well have been staging a protest at their incarceration. As if to incite more demonstrations from the rainbow coloured inmates, a pigeon landed just outside the cage. I could have sworn I saw the parrots stop, catch his eye then gaze outraged as the free bird, taunting his audience, swaggered cockily across the threshold and off into the shrubbery. Mayhem ensued, and, sending the naughty pigeon a disapproving look, I made my way back to the peace and quiet of the arboretum.

The Church overlooking the bay

The lonesome ride down the mountain took me once more through the clouds towards the sea shore. Between cable cars I resisted the traditional toboggan journey from halfway up the hillside to the town centre, opting instead for a quick wander round the local church. I lit a candle for my grandmother and father just before the need to indulge myself with some shopping and sunbathing caught up with me. I hopped on the last car. As it swung into the town I saw my friend Tom milling around the grassy park below. We managed to while away the rest of the afternoon sipping bright red pomegranate juice and buying the contents of Zara. As I arrived back at the ship I clutched my laptop and headed up to the comfy Crows Nest bar for a cup of tea and the opportunity to write about such a lovely place. I looked out of the panoramic windows as Madeira took a fading bow through the radiant sunset. Rainbows played on her hillsides as they were tucked into their foggy duvets until the morning. Windows shimmered one last time in the sun, then winked out. The sun was sinking into the sea dead ahead of us. Sailing west, we were, quite literally, voyaging into the sun. Next stop: Barbados.