"Sintra is beautiful. But you should not go there when it is raining." We were told this by several people, including taxi driver in Lisbon. We were lucky that is was not raining, but not very much, because it was quite cloudy. It might not be visible from displayed photos, but there was much less blue sky than I would like. So our experience was somewhere in the middle of two extremes. But I don't want to call it 'average'.

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Is there a building done by Calatrava in the city? So that Zuzka must to see it. Actually I like his architecture too. Now to convince Peter... It could be much easier if there were other things too. Hm, there is oceanarium. Maybe that helps.

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Our flight from Funchal to Lisbon was boring compared to flight to Madeira :-) But we prefer it this way. We had hard time to find taxi driver waiting for us, because we misunderstood directions what to look for. Eventually he found us and we could go to our accommodation. It took longer than it should, because main street was closed due to preparation for some "fiesta".

At least our driver acted as tour guide and talked about many topics we could be interested in Lisbon. He even answered the most important series of questions - how long does it takes to get to airport by metro, whether it is full early in the morning and where is the closest metro station to our accommodation (well, he got the last one wrong).

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This was our longest hike and I would say also the most interesting. It was along levada again, but this time there were new attractions - houses with thatched roof and tunnels you need to pass through. So if you want to go there, don't forget headlamp or flashlight.

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Both of these trips were last moment decisions. I hoped to go to Eira do Serrado all the time, but it somehow did not fit into our schedule. Encumeada was just the 2nd try after we failed to get there from Rabaçal.

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When Zuzka planned details of Madeira trip, she made very good decision to go to Rabaçal. We were sure we want to do one or possibly 2 hikes there. We were nearly sure we will not manage 3rd one. That would be too much. Especially because we arrived quite late. Fortunately a parking lot is much bigger than at São Lourenço. There were more cars here, yet we managed to find a spot. It was a bit further away, but good enough.

We used small trick here, we actually disqualified ourselves as hikers, because we used shuttle bus to get to the starting point of hike. But we saved 1 hour by that, so what?

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Bom Successo means Big Success. But our walk from Monte through Levada do Bom Successo was quite a big fail. We were "promissed" (and expected) nice walk along the levada, with water and waterfall, but it was just boring hike down the hill in dry environment.

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After visiting São Lourenço we continued to the north. Mountains around us were much greener than what south part of island could offer until now. Green, steep mountains surrounded by nice houses with orange roofs complementing greenness.

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Our first real hike in Madeira happened at eastern end of island. São Lourenço is long and narrow peninsula. It does not look like the rest of island, at least it does not look like that in summer. Rest of Madeira is green. This place is brown. No green grass, just a little bit of flowers and definitely not flowers you can see at other places of this island.

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Madeira is nice green island with many colorful flowers growing nearly everywhere. But there are also botanical gardens. We have visited two of them.

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