Running round Madeira

Not sure what I had on my head here!

And so, back to the Funchal Half Marathon after a two year break. This time I came away with an interesting looking trophy for coming in second V65. It's a well run event, the course was altered slightly which was a benefit as it meant less running on cobbles in the old part of town. We met up with Julian and Jo from Macclesfield who also found themselves on the podium. Vicky didn't quite make the prize list but was happy to get through another half marathon in one piece. We thought we'd introduce Julian and Jo to the Fugicidade bar for a few local craft ales to  avoid the ubiquitous Madeiran Coral lager. On tired legs we walked into town to find the bar was shut on Sunday evenings - we had to settle for The Hole in One, not a golfer's pub but a bit of a tourist bar - not very busy at this time of year but still on the noisy side.

What do you think Betty?

Of course we had to go back to Fugicidade the following day and met up with the very pleasant and knowledgeable owner Duarte and his wife. Their business plan involves bringing over craft beers from Lisbon and one of their favourite breweries is Musa who supply fine ales with a musical theme. Regulars on tap at Fugicidade include Red Zeppelin and Born in the IPA which are a couple of American style IPA's. We were quite happy to drink the Frank APA (which was on tap rather than in bottle) - Frank, we were informed by Duarte, is named after Frank Zappa!

 I can see our house from here!

Here's the famous botanical gardens, photos of which feature in just about every travel brochure for Madeira. Even out of season the patchwork terrace garden looked good but the rest of the gardens were pretty interesting. We'd decided to walk up from town and it was certainly steep, glad we'd brought a backpack with our lunch in it! It's a little bit cooler up here than down in the port area so on a hot summer's day it must be a welcome relief from the heat. We took a minibus tour of the North of the island seeing as we got some cut price tickets - this was thanks to us sitting through a two hour presentation from a persistent Portugueser who was trying to sell us rooms at the Savoy Hotel for the rest of our lives! The tour was excellent though enabling us to see a different side of the country including banana trees planted on every available plot of land!

Fishy Madeira

Don't go too close!

They're fond of fish in Funchal. Here's one near the cruise ship terminal outside the CR7 Pestana Cristiano Ronaldo hotel made entirely of debris collected from the sea. From a culinary perspective we ate some wonderful fish including varieties that we are familiar with such as tuna, bream, sardines, hake, calamari, etc., but we also came across locally popular specialties such as Parrot Fish, Black Scabbard, Cusk, Corvina and Nile Perch. Thinking that these might all be locally caught we found that in fact only the Parrot Fish and the Black Scabbard came from Madeiran waters. The dastardly Black Scabbard is found deep down in the ocean and is a strange looking creature with big eyes and long sharp teeth - at the Funchal fish market we found the fishmongers cutting the heads off and they were selling them separately - must be for some tasty Portuguese fish stew!

Chips as well perhaps?

Here's a jolly row of Black Scabbard fish on the slab at the market with a tuna steak sitting behind them at the top of the picture. They are a good metre or so long so you can get plenty of the firm flesh from one fish and very tasty this is too. They live about a mile beneath the sea surface but rise up at night to feed on all sorts of other marine life, so presumably that's when the fishermen can snaffle them. The other strange fish that we found at our hotel restaurant was the Nile Perch, this is a large freshwater fish very common in lakes and rivers in Africa. Again it's a firm fleshed species and can reach 2 metres in length. One night the restaurant buffet display of fish one night featured just one of these huge things. Two of these could certainly feed a multitude!

Another strange export form America!

And along with the various interesting fish we were served a variety of vegetables, many of these are fairly commonplace such as carrots and potatoes but some foxed us a little. The Madeiran chefs are big into something they call Christophene, this consisted of pale green slices of something that looked like marrow but was firmer and a little chewy. On further investigation we found examples of Christophene at the local market, I thought I'd seen these before, they're called Chayote elsewhere and are widely used in South American cooking. America  is indeed where they originated - maybe the name of this vegetable is connected to Christopher Columbus? They are now grown worldwide and in Australia, where apples are hard to grow, McDonalds made their apple pies with Chayote instead of apple - or so the urban legend goes!