In the last decade I have had a complicated relationship with walking. Walking has given me both my best moments and my biggest heartbreaks. I thought our long separation was to be permanent, but the past two weeks in the Azores have given me a taste of all that I have missed. In the summers of 2009 and 2010 I walked 750 kms across France on ...
Gordon: During the last couple of days we have been doing a series of walks in the wilder, eastern portion of São Miguel. Yesterday we went for a beautiful coastal walk before lunch, and then an excursion up a lush canyon afterwards. On the return leg we passed through the tiny community of Sanguinho, which does not have road access. There were clearly many more ...
Ruth: We are back on Sao Miguel and once again I am blown away by the diversity of the island. This morning we went on a short hike that did a circuit of the Gorreana tea plantation. (Gordon tells me that it isn't pronounced like an S.T.D.) The plant that produces tea, it turns out, is a member of the camellia family. After visiting the ...
Gordon: The Azores have embraced the idea of walking holidays, with marked trails and brochures available from the tourist offices or on line. The island of Flores is no exception, with the tempting claim of the most westerly walk in Europe (with the exception of Greenland, if there is a west coast walk there). The west coast walk breaks down nicely into two days of ...
Ruth:I am starting to believe that Flores Island is actually the lost world of Atlantis. It turns out that the world is not in itself lost, but the people who find themselves here run the risk of never returning to their homes. Take our host Neil, who came here with his wife twelve years ago for a short holiday. On a lark, they looked at ...
Ruth: We opted for a stopover on the island of Terceira so that we could visit the UNESCO listed port town of Angra do Heroismo. It was an important staging point for the Spanish treasure fleets from the New World in the 16th century, when Portugal was under Spanish rule. In a Canadian footnote, the Portuguese captain who discovered Newfoundland was an important figure in ...
Gordon: Today we went on another hike. All of our walks have been quite different from each other, but all have been gorgeous.This morning we walked down from a road west of Ponta Delgada to the tiny seaside community of Rocha da Relva. The trail that we took to the village is the only access: there is no road and the boulder strewn coast is ...
Ruth: Yesterday's plan had Gord's name written all over it, with 18 kms of hiking and walking. By the end of the day I was singing Leonard Cohen's lines, "I ache in the places I used to play." This has become my theme song leading up to turning fifty next month. Gord, on the other hand, at sixty has the stamina I had at ... ...
Gordon: What if there was a place like Hawaii, but a few degrees cooler, so that hiking is more comfortable, only a few tourists, and, say, at a third of the cost? If that sounds like a good destination, may I suggest the Azores?We went on our first hike today, in the popular Sete Cidades area. This is a large volcanic crater enclosing two lakes, ...
Ruth: With jetlag my writing and thinking skills are absent but I will try to capure our day.During a 6 hour delay in Toronto while our pilot got his beauty rest, we tried to walk and nap at the airport until our flight left at 3:00 am. SATA only has one plane on this route and if they arrive late, as happened with the previous ...