An Island-Spanning Journey

It was 5.50am. Imagine a lizard slowly emerging from a cave, crawling on all fours. Then imagine it in a state in between sleeping and newly awake. That was how I felt when I was awoken to prepare breakfast with the other kitchen-helpers, to the rest of the crew, who had had the luxury of sleeping for an hour longer. It was the music that gave me enough life to work, after having crawled to the kitchen. They were the kind of songs you usually don’t listen to but still know the lyrics, and of course we danced a bit too. When breakfast had been served, eaten, and the tables cleaned, we all got on deck for the line-up at 8am. We were informed by our superiors that we were to be on the dock in two hours for our beach excursion as well as some nice places to visit.

I immediately took the opportunity to extend my six hours of sleep with a seventh, awoke ten minutes before departure and just barely made it to the dock in time. The whole class then took the bus to Praia do Areal de Santa Bárbara, a beach on the other side of the island.

We spent an hour there, searching for all kinds of organisms for our biology assignment. Some people saw fishes and crabs by the rocky part of the beach, but I just found seashells there. But there were some Portuguese man o´war and a small pufferfish on the sandy part of the beach. When we were done, the bus took us atop San Miguel, the island's tallest and most central mountain formed by a volcano, which is now a gorgeous crater-lake. The drive there offered one of the most scenic views I have ever seen, with half of the island visible, including Ponta Delgada. The mountainside was incredibly steep, and by the roadside it was sometimes almost 90 degrees. The nature was also beautiful. Great bushes with pink flowers and a palm tree-looking plant, which we learned wasn´t a palm tree, but the largest kind of ferns. When we reached the highest point we could we got off the bus and walked up the road towards the viewpoint. We were among the clouds, but the green-blue-shining lake was somehow still visible in its entirety. It had an interesting shape, almost round but with two peninsulas sticking out towards the middle, leaning towards each other to form something like a huge claw. It was breathtaking.

Most of us walked down the small trail that curved its way down the mountainside towards the lake, but had to turn back to catch the bus back. On our way back we visited Europe's oldest tea plantation, where my comrades almost cleaned out the shelves, but I didn´t see the point in it, when we have better and cheaper tea at home. But luckily San Manuel had more interesting places to visit. The island is rich with natural hot springs, we visited some, near the town of Furnas. Here boiling water bubbled up from the earth to release a foul smell, like a rotten egg, but also creating a very interesting environment. On our way back to Ponta Delgada we drove by a large lagoon, also created by volcanic activity. There were some interesting facts about the cobblestone in the road next to it, but by then i was too tired to get off the bus, and the view was just as nice from our seats as on the ground. Though the landscape was pretty there was no way it could trump the view at San Manuel or Cete Cidades, another breathtaking place I visited some days before.

When we got back from our eventful road trip we had a movie night, with a horror movie so horrendously awful it transformed into a comedy. Then we all went to bed and were gently cradled to sleep by the waves.

//Henry A. Forsberg, Starboard