After a good night's sleep, we began our day with breakfast in the hotel. At 9:00 AM, we were on the bus to begin our tour.
(reminder: an image can be enlarged by double-clicking on it; clicking back-arrow to return to blog)
TOUR DESCRIPTION:
In the morning, you will depart from Ponta Delgada and head north to Ribeira Grande. There you will explore the 2nd settlement of the island. Our next stop you will visit one of Europe’s oldest tea plantation. A tour of the plantation will show how the tea is cut, then dried, and then processed. Continue to the Furnas Valley; there you can stop to have the famous “cozido” for lunch. Afterwards you will be able to walk the village of Furnas and see the different geysers that are in the town. As we start heading back to Ponta Delgada we make stops in the Vila Franca do Campo and Lagoa. You should arrive back in Ponta Delgada around 6 PM.
TOUR EXPERIENCE:
The first difference that comes to mind comparing the description with the experience is that we did the tour in reverse order and with extra stops, returning at 7:00 PM.
The first stop was near Lagao at a ceramics factory. Pam and I having been to such places on other trips, we were hopeful that we would not be looking back on this stop as the high point of the day.
For more information on Ceramica Vieira, click on any of the three pictures above. This will take you to a website. The information will appear in Portuguese, but there is the option for an translation into English. Also, further down in this entry and probably in future entries you will see a word or name underlined and in a text color other than black. Clicking on the word or phrase will take you to a website with more information on the subject.
Thankfully, more interesting things lay ahead on the tour, although the second stop was a bust. Having had horses, watching "the last blacksmith on the island" make a horseshoe was less than enthralling although it was a nice change of pace to not have to write a check for having a horse receive the shoe.
Things got more interesting when the blacksmith had volunteers try an old remedy for a case of shingles. The blacksmith seared wheat with a red-hot poker, then had the volunteers apply the resulting pasty residue to their wrist. Since neither volunteer had shingles, the most they could report was a not-unpleasant sensation on their skin. Whatever the sensation for them, for the rest of us the smell was most unpleasant. The volunteers were strongly encouraged to wash the paste off before the bus doors closed.
We stopped again a short distance later at Vila Franco Do Campo to look at an island with a nature swimming pool formed into it. This is apparently a popular local attraction in the summer with boats ferrying swimmers to the site. Today being overcast with the threat of rain, it did not look inviting.
Okay, so maybe this blog entry hasn't been exactly a page-turner so far, but we were just getting started on the day.
We headed inland and started climbing. The corn fields, corn being almost exclusively grown to feed the island's 75,000 dairy cows, gave way to pastures at higher elevations where the cows grazed. Dairy products, particularly cheese, milk and butter, are major exports of the Azores.
What we were ascending on the bus was the side of an active volcano. Our next stop was inside the crater of the volcano where our lunch was being cooked by burying it in the ground.
The ground around the places where water and steam percolate to the surface was understandably warm to the touch. Our guide explained that below the surface the earth is hot. Appropriately, we were in the a town named Furnas, its pronunciation very close to "furnace".
To prepare a traditional Azorean cozido, beef, chicken, sausage, cabbage and other ingredients are put into a kettle that is lowered into a hole. A lid is put over the hole and then covered with dirt. After about seven hours the kettle is extracted from the ground, the food inside it fully cooked.
After seeing our dinner kettle extracted, we returned to the bus for a short ride to a restaurant where we enjoyed serving ourselves from an intimidatingly large platter of food. About the time our table of eight had made a respectable dent in the pile of food, a second platter arrived. No one left the table hungry.
Our next stop was Terra Nostra Botanical Garden. It included a swimming area with "medicinal" mineral waters from hot
springs. Some of our group, including Pam, went off for a swim while
the rest of us explored the gardens.
After leaving Terra Nostra Botanical Garden, we visited the hot springs in the center for Furnas.
Driving north up out of the crater, we stopped at the rim to look at the lake formed in it. The guide said there are actually three areas inside the crater that they call lakes, but two of them are permanently dry. When is a lake not a lake any more? I chose not to ponder that question.
At about 5:45 we arrived at our last destination of the day. It was the only remaining tea plantation in Europe - Cha Gorreana.
Teas is still processed using machinery originally installed int he late 1800's.
One machine although far from new, was certainly build in the 20th century. Can you guess what it is? (The answer is at the bottom of this posting.)
Onto the bus one last time, driving along the north coast to Ribeira Grande where we crossed the island to Ponta Delgada arriving at the hotel about 7:00 PM. The weather had been mixed with a few periods of light rain, but it had not hampered what was an informative, enjoyable day.
We dropped our things in our room and went across the street to a waterfront restaurant - 100 Espinhas. Given the lunch we had, we exercised moderation in what we ordered and enjoyed what we had selected. We then returned to the hotel for the night.
And the answer to the question about the machine at the tea plantation is... a tea bag maker.
TOUR DESCRIPTION:
In the morning, you will depart from Ponta Delgada and head north to Ribeira Grande. There you will explore the 2nd settlement of the island. Our next stop you will visit one of Europe’s oldest tea plantation. A tour of the plantation will show how the tea is cut, then dried, and then processed. Continue to the Furnas Valley; there you can stop to have the famous “cozido” for lunch. Afterwards you will be able to walk the village of Furnas and see the different geysers that are in the town. As we start heading back to Ponta Delgada we make stops in the Vila Franca do Campo and Lagoa. You should arrive back in Ponta Delgada around 6 PM.
TOUR EXPERIENCE:
The first difference that comes to mind comparing the description with the experience is that we did the tour in reverse order and with extra stops, returning at 7:00 PM.
The first stop was near Lagao at a ceramics factory. Pam and I having been to such places on other trips, we were hopeful that we would not be looking back on this stop as the high point of the day.
Thankfully, more interesting things lay ahead on the tour, although the second stop was a bust. Having had horses, watching "the last blacksmith on the island" make a horseshoe was less than enthralling although it was a nice change of pace to not have to write a check for having a horse receive the shoe.
We headed inland and started climbing. The corn fields, corn being almost exclusively grown to feed the island's 75,000 dairy cows, gave way to pastures at higher elevations where the cows grazed. Dairy products, particularly cheese, milk and butter, are major exports of the Azores.
To prepare a traditional Azorean cozido, beef, chicken, sausage, cabbage and other ingredients are put into a kettle that is lowered into a hole. A lid is put over the hole and then covered with dirt. After about seven hours the kettle is extracted from the ground, the food inside it fully cooked.
Teas is still processed using machinery originally installed int he late 1800's.
- - - - -
We dropped our things in our room and went across the street to a waterfront restaurant - 100 Espinhas. Given the lunch we had, we exercised moderation in what we ordered and enjoyed what we had selected. We then returned to the hotel for the night.
And the answer to the question about the machine at the tea plantation is... a tea bag maker.
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