First morning together. We clean the boat a little, to be able to live better on board and we leave for the marina office. We ask them if we can stay for winter and we are looked at with an air of saying “there is little chance”. We tell them that we had asked to reserved a place in May, and after minutes that seem much longer than normal, they find our boat in the reservations for the winter. We did well to book well in advance. So we can enjoy the rest of our holiday without stress.
We join the others and we leave in a rented car for our first stop… to find a restaurant open on Monday. Not easy! We finally stop in a small Portuguese restaurant! Delicious meat soup as a starter (it could have been just that too because it's stuffing). Salad as the main meal, including a little worm playing on an olive. That's life, and I guess the standards are not the same as in Canada, so I put the olive aside and I continue to eat. I watch the little worm move and at some point, don't ask me how, it's on my hand! The rascal! I position it again on its olive and eat again. I ate too much but we'll go for a walk afterwards... we have to ;)
Oh, before I forget, not all restaurants are open all day, some are only open from 11am-3pm and 6-10pm for example. Be aware of this if you come to the Azores. Being in a small car with 5 is also a sport, especially when I'm sitting with the men behind 😉
We then leave for Gruta do Natal, a cavern/cave of dried lava. It's great to see the traces of the lava flows. You have to be careful where you step though because it is not a paved path. I like to see the mini stalactites in formation, to feel the humidity of the cave and especially to see vegetation growing near the heat and the light of the lamps. Life always finds its way, even in the darkest places.
I haven't talked about it yet but these are practically the only activities that I had time to research and that I wanted to do. All this on the first day that it rained. Well, rain is a big word, let's say a drizzle. Nothing alarming, especially not on vacation.
We drive in superb landscapes of red cedars, called Japanese cedars, because they were imported in the middle of the 19th century and cultivated for the production of wood. You feel so small there. It's magical when we cross them on the road, imagine walking in these woods!
We then go into a tunnel, a kind of volcanic chimney of almost 100m: Alga do Carvao. If you only have one place to go to Terceira and I would even say the Azores, at least what I saw of them, and I still saw some natural beauties, this is the place go.
We take an interior corridor, built by man, to go halfway up the "chimney". We arrive on stone stairs and look up. It's all greenery. A green chimney in height. And at the end the sky, which sends us a little rain / drizzle to create an even more magical moment. Water allows nature to charm us even more with all its smells. Truly, a magical, unreal moment!
Then, we descend towards the bottom, towards the cavern part. But a cave so high that you could feel "hobbit" in the Lord of the Rings. And at the very bottom, a pond/lake filled with rainwater. What an incredible show!
We then went back to reality and went for a swim in a natural pool near Biscoitos. There were a lot of people there enjoying the place. There are different places to swim, but it's not very deep and we don't have water shoes, so we look for the places a little deeper. Louis and his brother Jacques will even jump into the water from the top of a volcanic wall. There are so many people jumping there that there is a dedicated lifeguard there.
We will have dinner there and then return in the evening. It will have done 27/31 Humidex today. It's hot, but not like in Quebec, maybe being near the ocean helps to temper the climate. Another fantastic day in the Azores Islands!
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