Hotel Reviewers' Stories

04/2006: Madeira: 'learning to drive and the good old weather...'

My taxi driver knocked over a pedestrian today. Fortunately (for me, not the pedestrian) I’d just got out of the car. He’d taken off with the customary racing start and boom, a middle aged Madeiran lady somersaults in the air. The driver stopped and got out, the woman got up, they exchanged a few words, he drove off and she carried on walking down the road. Bizzare. Probably not an unusual occurrence judging by the way people drive here. There seem to be two speeds - stop and fast. The roads are very steep and need plenty of revs to get up, and no-one seems to bother taking their foot off the accelerator coming down the other side. I’d hate to learn to drive here. Every start would be a hill start.

Today’s taxi driver tells me that the weather has “gone bad” these last few years. Thirty years ago he could tell tourists that the weather would be fine from March to October without any problem. Now it rains one day, is windy the next. He blames “too many things in the sky”. The jacarandas were apparently always out by March, now it’s April and they’re not blooming. Think about mentioning Russians and rockets to the moon, which is who my Grandfather used to blame for bad weather, but decide it might lose something in the translation. He harks back to the good old days for a while, telling me how poor the island was and how his mother and sister went blind slaving all night sewing handkerchiefs for 70 escudos a week.

Very windy again today. Have a hairdo Bob Marley would be proud to sport.

The next day, a maniac bus driver nearly rams another bus on a steep mountainside road not once, but twice. All the tourists on the bus scream. The locals laugh. What is it about Madeirans, who are a nice polite people on two legs, that turns them into glassy-eyed homicidal maniacs once they get behind the wheel?