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Day 134: Funchal, Madeira - More Wine ..

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Today, we spent a delightful day on the island of Madeira. We had our third World Cruise Party and then walked through the town of Funchal. A lot is happening on a Saturday, made easier because the harbor is right at the end of town, making everything very walkable.  Madeira is an island about 300 miles west of Morocco and a couple of hundred miles north of the Canary Islands. You probably know it for its wine. 🍷 Geologically, it’s part of Africa, yet culturally and politically, it’s 100% European and a full Portuguese Region. Like all the other islands out this way, it was created through violent volcanic activity. The island was originally uninhabited, but the Portuguese discovered and settled it in 1419 and 1420. It was the first piece of land “colonized” by the European powers as they began the expansion and land grabs in the 15th and 16th centuries. However, there is strong documentary evidence that the Romans knew about it and that the Vikings had a temporary settlement between
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Day 133: Santa Cruz De La Palma - The Canary Islands

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  A fun stop today, featuring volcanoes, wine, and a cute old town high street. The Canary Islands are a set of 7 large volcanic islands between 75 and 200 miles off the coast of Morocco. They’re now a playground for the rich and famous of Europe and Africa, living up to their ancient name of the “Fortunate Isles”.  The Canary name is derived from Roman times, and has nothing to do with cute little tweetie birds, but with dogs (Latin: Canaris = dog as in canine). The birds are named after the islands, and not the other way around!  The islands are between 7 and 20 million years old, and there is still volcanic activity on some of them today. They're reminiscent of Hawaii, as there is a "hot spot" deep underground that slowly slides because of tectonic plate movement, causing new islands to be created. Multiple eruptions have occurred over the last 50 years, and the last major explosion was only in 2021. Driving through La Palma today, there were remnants of lava fields an
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Day 130: Mindelo, Sao Vincente: The Cape Verde Islands

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Day 130 - we're now only 3,343 miles away from home. This morning, we had an early sail-in to Mindelo, Sao Vincente - one of the Cape Verde Islands. These are a group of 10 islands in a horseshoe-style pattern, located about 350-400 miles off the shores of Senegal in West Africa. They are yet another set of islands that we had never heard of and knew absolutely nothing about. So - another opportunity for fun and adventure. After ten days of sailing northwest up the coast of West Africa, we (and the entire boat) needed a spiritual and emotional break from the sights, the slavery, and the squalor. Sao Vincente delivered. Not spectacular - but it offered some awesome scenery and clean/safe streets. The islands have existed for between 2 and 5 million years and were formed by volcanic activity. One of the islands, Fogo, still has an active volcano, but the rest are considered dormant but not dead. They were uninhabited until the early 1400s when Portuguese and Spanish explorers discove
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Day 128: Dakar, Senegal - Cooking!!

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This is our final stop on the mainland of West Africa, so we decided to revert to vacationing instead of traveling and chose two rather more fun excursions. Allison took a highlights tour of the city, and I signed up for a Senegalese Cooking Class. You can read our stories through the photos below. Also, as you look at the map, you can, with a bit of imagination, picture the country as a Pac-Man. In the middle, running east-west along the Gambia River, is the country of Gambia. That's a former British colony, and although Gambia and Senegal have tried to merge several times in the past, the whole British-French thing gets in the way. First, as always, a bit about the country. Senegal is the westernmost nation in Africa. It is, including Mauritania to the North, where we see tropical storms spin off into the Atlantic, which later become hurricanes. About 18 million folks live here in a relatively stable (by African standards) political environment. Dakar (the capital ), famous for
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Days 126-127: Sea Days - Cruising The Bay Of Guinea Towards Senegal

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For the next few days, we're sailing over 1,000 nautical miles from Ghana to Dakar, Senegal, across the Bays Of Guinea and Sierra Leone. This part of the world has always fascinated me, even when I was a young kid into geography. I remember taking a world map and carefully cutting out the shapes of Africa and South America. Then I slid them together - and .. wow .. they fitted! I thought I had made major scientific discovery at age 7.  Alas, I was only 150 years late to determine one of the most visible signs of plate tectonics. But here's what happened. Up to 200 million years ago, Antarctica was joined to South America, Africa, India, and Australia as a huge supercontinent called Gondwanaland.  Then, they split up, like leaving a party. Antarctica left first, and other landmasses drifted away until only South America and Africa remained. They parted company, quite amicably, somewhere around 80 million years ago, forming what we now call the South Atlantic Ocean. The picture a
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