Part The Second - Exploring the island of Sao Miguel and Azorean Hospitality

One of the great features of the AZAB Race is that we had a stopover in the Azores before returning to the UK for rest, repairs and recreation.

Once we had cleared immigration and customs, which was a little hazy after the previous 36 hours and a couple of dawn pints, we got the boat tucked up in a snug berth:



Once rested we had a good crack at recreation in the bar of the Club Naval, a fantastic institution that treated us like royalty:



We had a fair bit of work to do on the boat, which was just as well as the weather was a bit dreck for the first few days, then we hired a minibus for a group of friends and family who had flown out to meet us to explore the island. On the Saturday we headed North and West, this is Mesteiros a typical village on the North coast:



Passing through villages on weekend lunchtimes, the local sport appeared, for the male population, to be competitive street-corner-standing, with, I imagine complex tactics and maneouvres to obtain prime positions. Patience was rewarded for competitors in one village when a brawl (alright, fisticuffs between two lads) erupted on the steps of a church as a wedding emerged. The architecture is Portugese colonial, with faded stucco and ornate metalwork and gives a rewarding feeling of 'foreign-ness', of having well and truly left Europe behind.

Outside of the main town, Punta Delgado, life is generally agriculture based, neat and tidy but a comfortable mix of new and low tech - donkey and cart with shiny new stainless tank would be used to bring milk to the road to be collected a wholesaler, or even the aluminium churns I remember from my childhood. Cultivation takes place wherever the geography can be beaten into submission, with large amounts of fruit grown, including pineapple, papaya, bananas and famously, St Michael oranges - these were prized for their flavour in the 19th century, with clipper ships racing back to London to be the first to unload their cargo in time for Christmas. The soil is very fertile and, I think, acidic, being purely volcanic - hydrangeas in blue and white and blue agapanthas grow everywhere. The Azoreans take enormous pride in their environment, the roadsides are so well cared for it's like driving through a formal garden - in fact the author of the Bradt guide to the islands dedicates the book in part to the people who tend the verges.

The Western end of the island is made up of the caldera of Sete Cidades, within which its 500m walls contain the eponymous village, two lakes - one blue, one green, and six later volconic cinder cones. This picture taken from the western side wall from a single dirt-track road, with the sheer 500m drop down the inside of the caldera on one side and the relatively gentle slope of the outside on the other. Challenging driving in a Hyundai minibus, especially as we only ended up there after a wrong turn!



Passing through the village, we saw a couple of cars parked haphazardly by a field. Two seconds later so were we:







I do like a bit of garnish with my steak, but....

As it happens, one of the joys of Azorean food is the beef. Quite frankly I had some of the best steak I have ever had there - incredibly tender yet flavoursome. I think it must be the very fertile pasture and a complete lack of intensive farming.

Other aspects are little more surprising - back in the yacht club (Club Naval) on the night/morning arrived, our third round of beers arrived, along with dawn, with a small ridged skillet with grilled limpets, foot-side up, shells down and nestled neatly in the pan ridges. Surprisingly good, with a good peppery, herb and oil treatment - like good escargot, but with a subtle saline twang and not as chewy as you would think. Which, if you have ever tried to lever a limpet off a rock, or seen the grooves a mature specimen has left in the rock on which it has lived, is very surprising. We're not talking (peri)winkles here, which might as well be Goodyear or Pirelli offcuts.

There is one dish they're very proud of, but really is an aquired taste. Their pineapple is second to none - like all the fruit sold on the island, it's picked when it's ripe, not sometime earlier so that it will survive the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune that agribusiness hurl at our poor benighted foods, but when it's meant to be eaten. Effing revelation. Sadly they insist on serving it with a style of black pudding. Nothing wrong with a good black pudding at all. Sadly this isn't one of them.

Gosh, seems churlish to segue into another off-putting food situation, but we headed towards the East of the island, to Furnas, which sits inside another caldera, and has hot springs - proper-job volcanic steam vents, belching, amongst other things, lots of hydrogen sulphide, the very stuff I spent all my time making with my junior chemistry set...



...until my parents worked out where the stench of rotten eggs was coming from. It took a little while since we lived in a rural farming community at the time, so you couldn't rule anything out. If, however as should have been the case before the island was built up enough to rise above the waves, these vents were deep underwater, then they may well have been the sort of location where an ecosystem based on sulphur rather than carbon may have formed (click here) - Not (I think - I'm winging it a bit here) because of the structure of these organisms, but the source of their fuel, which seems to rely in the integration of symbiotic bacteria within the host organism that process or metabolise sulphur, rather than the use of CO2, sunlight and chlorophyl.

Crikey, talking about straying from the point! Which was food. We saw piles of sacks around a hot spring, couldn't work out why, until we saw the guys from the shack selling sweetcorn turn up with more:



Given the stench of hydrogen sulphide I'm amazed anyone ate any but judging by the sacks they must have had some takers.

By the end of the week we had been wined and dined to within an inch of our livers life. Even the evening when we were supposed to be entertained by the mayor, who forgot entirely, wasn't wasted, as every single one of the competitors and supporters who had turned up(i.e. all of us - we had to. We had no choice. Ann said so. Fabulous woman, fearsome organiser, no race without her. You know her, or her long lost relative, she'll be the one making sure that all the community events that you enjoy happen) merely decamped to the bar next door, thereby giving cause for the bar owner to develop a grin you could hang a coat on.

Anyhoo, just a snapshot of a fantastic place, I will certainly be taking my kids back there when they're old enough, and with any luck it'll be by sea!