Sao Miguel Azores

I took three trips within six months after retiring in 2001. One of those trips was to the island of Sao Miguel in the Azores. My retirement suddenly freed me to travel wherever and whenever I wanted, though I was initially careful to choose inexpensive locations until I could predict how well I could live within the constraints of a $58,000 pension and some investment income. I wouldn’t start collecting Social Security for another 12 years and wasn’t certain that my pension would be sufficient to live on. Retirement twelve years before Social Security? Yes, I was able to take an early retirement.

There had been several early retirement programs established for New York State government workers in the years prior to my retirement, but none were active when I retired. Instead, the legislature passed a bill that allowed me, and I think 2 others, to retire early. The legislature did not do this as a favor to me, but to themselves. I supervised 9 field offices for auditors and investigators, and my staff were finding shortcomings in some of the legislator’s favorite programs. These programs were, in themselves, potentially valuable, but some were mismanaged and/or borderline corrupt (for example, some unqualified people were hired as teachers because they also served as some legislator’s campaign staff or were relatives of these legislators). My advice was to locate new contractors for these programs. This was not popular advice, and eventually, I was offered early retirement. I’m not proud of taking it, but over the last 2 years of my tenure, I was slowly being ground down. (It’s a long story and doesn’t belong in a travel blog except to describe how and why I was able to suddenly travel all over the world). I was ready to escape into foreign lands, and the island of San Miguel was an easy, inexpensive choice.

 

When I travelled to Ponta Delgada, the largest city on Sao Miguel, I was surprised to find that hardly any other tourists visited there. Of course, I saw plenty of Germans, particularly in the spa village of Furnas. They are always everywhere I travel, so no, I am no longer surprised to have run into many Germans there. No matter where I travel, they are always there waiting for me. I saw no one from the US, however. This was odd, since the Azores were, and probably still are, easy to access from Boston’s Logan airport. Boston and Rhode Island house substantial Portuguese and Azorean communities who travel frequently enough to the Azores to support regular airline flights out of Logan. The flight itself is relatively short because the Azores sit in the Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between the US and Europe. It felt no longer than a flight from Boston to Florida. The only reason I could see for the lack of tourists when I visited was that there were few hotels catering to tourists. I didn’t see any in Ponta Delgada and always stayed in B&Bs. This doesn’t mean that Sao Miguel was devoid of hotels.

When I later reached the village of Furnas, I found two hotels that catered to the Germans and other “older” tourists who had found their way there to enjoy the hot mineral waters.

Ponta Delgada is a small city attached to a large harbor.

According to Wikipedia, around 67,000 people live there today, and I assume there were fewer when I visited 25 years ago. Back then, a long street followed the contours of the harbor. Another long street ran off from the harbor street at a perpendicular angle and up a hill, and a third one broke off at a perpendicular angle about halfway up the hill.  All these streets eventually petered out into the countryside that surrounded the city.

While Sao Miguel was not a difficult place to visit, I immediately encountered an annoying problem after I landed. I had booked an expensive Bed & Breakfast for my first night in Ponta Delgada because I didn’t want to search for a place to stay on my first day there. I found the place easily enough. It was impressive, an ancient building built out of black volcanic rock. A heavy wooden door, with large wrought-iron hinges and studs, greeted me when I arrived.

I knocked on the door. Nothing happened. I knocked louder! To the side of the door was a heavy rope attached to a large bell. I rang the bell. It was louder than I expected. I heard movement inside. A woman came out onto a balcony above me and said something in Portuguese.  I said, “Hello. I’m Terry Failing”. She said ,“What you want?” “I have a reservation.” “You no enter. My husband no here.” “I have a reservation.” “You come back later.”  “What time?” “You come back later.” I pointed to my watch. “When?” “Later.” I figured she was spooked by my backpack and also figured that they didn’t survive on income derived from guests. I planned to return after five o’clock, when her husband returned from wherever he was working. I took my backpack down to an old dock and used it as a backrest while watching the heavy traffic in the harbor for several hours.

When I returned to the B&B, the husband was there, and he showed me to my room. It was spectacular! There was a four-poster bed with a handmade quilt, paintings of men long dead on the walls, polished stone floors, and a fireplace. What it didn’t have were radiators or any other means of heating the room besides the fireplace. The room’s ambient temperature was about 50 degrees, and those stone floors didn’t make it feel any warmer. I considered lighting the wood in the fireplace, but it had all been cut to the same exact size, and I was worried that both the fireplace and the wood were only for decoration.

 

The next morning, I left my room looking for breakfast. This was, after all, a Bed & Breakfast. I found a door slightly ajar on the second floor . I peered inside and found an old wooden table with several plates of bread, cheese, and fruit on it. Was this for me? I saw no other guests. I was probably the only one who spent the night there. I leaned in and said, “Hello?” Like the day before, there was no answer. I shouted, “Hello, is anyone here?” Nothing. Not a sound. Since my appearance scared the owner’s wife the previous day, I thought it prudent not to sit down peremptorily at what was probably the owner’s breakfast table. I edged my way out of the room and left to have breakfast at a nearby diner. When I returned, the owner was waiting for me, angry that I had not wanted the breakfast he had prepared. I left and began looking for a less posh B&B. I found one and happily stayed there twice while I was in Punta Delgada.

 

In 2001, Ponta Delgada was not a particularly modern city. There were no high-rises that I can remember, no big flashy hotels, and no chain restaurants. There was little to entertain young people, no discos, no sports fields and only one single-screen movie theatre. I saw a movie there. It was a Tom Cruise film about clairvoyants who identified and arrested future murderers before they could murder. I wish I had been clairvoyant before paying to see the movie. Other forms of organized entertainment were largely absent in Punta Delgada. There were, of course, what, in the United States, we would call “old man bars”, where sad-faced fishermen sat nursing their drinks. In Ponta Delgada, these were dark and gloomy places that smelled of fried fish and stale cigarettes. Their residents sat staring at the bubbles rising from their beers, rarely speaking to anyone but themselves. Young people were more successful by making their own amusements elsewhere. Small groups of young people whose sole purpose was conversation would gather on the streets. These get-togethers involved no drugs, no alcohol, and even no music. These were simply unsupervised, cheerful social gatherings. These youth remembered better than the fishermen, that life provided all the materials needed to create a happy society. Life for the fishermen, on the other hand, had become a sleep and a forgetting. Ponta Delgada’s youth instinctively knew how to make the silk purse of happiness out of the sow’s ear of existence. We should never forget the unthinking wisdom of youth. I can only hope that I will remember better than those old fishermen.

By my second day in Ponta Delgada, I had moved to a new, cheaper B&B and had planned an exploratory excursion up the island’s main volcano. 

 

The Azores islands sit on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the North American and the Eurasian/African tectonic plates are pulling apart. Volcanic activity that spilled out from this separation created the Azores in much the same way that it did Iceland further north on the ridge. San Miguel, the largest of the Azores islands, continues to exhibit a great deal of volcanic activity. Besides sporting several smaller craters, Sao Miguel possesses a huge extinct (hopefully) volcano caldera at its north-east end. It is so large that a village sits on a small lake at the bottom of the caldera. While it looked like a long hike, paved roads led up to the volcano’s lip, then down to the village and lake inside. I decided I could make a round trip to this village in a day.

 

After several hours of walking upward, I could see the Atlantic Ocean down below, though I still couldn’t see the rim of the main volcano because of a great deal of reforestation growing above me. I finally reached this area and saw a small lake behind the trees, but this still wasn’t the edge of the main caldera; it was just a side show, a small burp of the volcano. I had been walking for over 5 hours and realized that if I reached the rim and walked the long road that twisted down its inside to the lake and the village, I would have to return to Punta Delgada at night along unfamiliar intersecting roads. At that point, I decided to turn around and headed back without seeing the lake or its village. This wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last, that I set out to find something and failed to do so. The correct mindset is not to see this as a defeat, but as only life being itself.

As I predicted, I took a wrong turn coming down through the fields that covered the sides of the volcano crater and ended up at the airport, which lies several miles outside Ponta Delgada. For a few moments, I was not only at the airport but under it. There is so little flat land on the island that the airport had to extend its runway about 500 feet by propping it up with pylons over a street below. When I later left Sao Miguel, I was a lot more nervous about the take-off than I had been about the landing!

 

After a few days, I was bored with Punta Delgada and took a bus to the village of Furnas at the eastern end of the island.

Furnas was a spa town with a large botanical garden, and many official and unofficial geysers, fumaroles, and bubbling pits.

It also possessed two hotels. One looked like it was built in the 1920’s while the other proffered a 1950’s look. I stayed in the “newer” one. I hadn’t seen any hotels in Ponta Delgada and was happy to finally experience the conveniences of a proper hotel.

 

Given the age of Furnas’s hotels, it appeared that Furnas had been drawing tourists from Europe for generations.

They came for the free fountains of mineral water, the strange, curated landscape, and a huge concrete pool attached to the older hotel. As a photographer, I believed only in the salubrious effects of the landscape. I had a hard time understanding why the bathers in the pool thought they were improving their health, given how disgusting the pool was. The water was a muddy orange and stunk of rotten eggs. Actually, the whole village reeked of sulfur, but the pool was much worse.

The pool looked and smelled like a toilet where someone had been seriously ill and then had forgotten to flush. My hotel offered me a free pool pass. I was happy to   photograph the pool rather than swim in it. 🙂

The botanical gardens were more pleasant.

They harbor several black swans, native to Australia, which were first brought to Europe in 1791. 

Another unusual sight in Furnas would be the cooking pits found outside some restaurants. Here they would cook pots of stew by sticking them into holes in the ground and covering them with dirt.

This crockpot-style cuisine is also a tourist gimmick found in Iceland, the Azores’ sister island to the north.

 

Furnas is only a couple of miles from the ocean, and one day I walked down to a small seaside enclave mostly populated by German sunbathers.

My walk passed several reforestation projects and several dairy farms.

These farms milked cows in the fields where the cows grazed, using gasoline-powered milking machines kept under tarps. The farmers tied large guard dogs to these machines to prevent any theft of the equipment. These dogs went absolutely crazy when they saw me walk down the road outside the field. Anyone who would dare to move the equipment would have to be even crazier than the dogs.

 

When I reached the ocean, I saw a small store and snack food stand, where I bought the lunch that would fuel my return to Furnas. I also saw the cement swimming platforms built to allow swimmers access to and from the ocean.

I spent another 2 days in Furnas and took many pictures of the surrounding area.