Madeira, Portugal
Most of my Portugal photos are indistinguishable from my Spain photos and I’ve always wanted to visit the island of Madeira, so when I had the opportunity to take a photo tour, I packed my camera bag, a carry on, and high expectations.
Unfortunately, the tour guide was the worst I had ever encountered. The one good thing he did was pose for a photo I took that cried out for a subject:
This was at the Ponta de São Lourenço, on the eastern side of the island, taken in the morning looking for a sunrise shot which never came. Of course, that’s not his fault.
I showed up a day early and spent some time at the Funchal Airport, where I couldn’t resist a few shots of landing airplanes. I’ll just use the most colorful as an example . . .
Condor Airlines, by the way, is a German company who adopted “Vacation is Stripes” as a motto. (Beach umbrellas, towels, etc.)
Of course if you take me to a dark sky location, my priority is going to be the Milky Way. Day One on tour did not disappoint.
That was at the Fanal Forest, a location we came back to several times . . .
We spent almost a week on Madeira. It is a photogenic island and reminds me a little of Kauai, Hawaii. This particular shot is from Ribeira da Janela. Our tour guide said there are only two beaches in Madeira with sand, most are rocks like here. So maybe it isn’t like Kauai after all.
I mentioned that the tour guide wasn’t very good and the list of reasons is very long. But here is one example. We were using the PhotoPills App to plan our sunsets and as best I could tell, the sun was going to miss the mountain here at Pico do Areeiro. He showed us the shot he got a year ago where that peak just touched the bottom of the sun.
I compared my results with my fellow tour members and we all made excuses that we weren’t as good with the App as the tour guide and we should trust his judgement. As you can see, that was a mistake.
This was at the Miradouro do Cais da Ponta do Sol. We had to go down a narrow pier to get this shot and we were racing the sun. The tour guide quite literally raced us down the hill and to the end of the pier so he could get the best location. I managed to get one of the leftover spots and I’m not sure being at the end would have been any better. But I used this as the lead for my five page critique of the tour guide to the company. This was with PhotoPills, a company I’ve had great success with. Lesson learned: make sure you have a good tour guide before you write the check.