Madeira

Recipe for Easter holiday:

• tropical island
• pretty girl
• sun
• sea
• abundance of fresh fish/seafood/fruit, pastries/cakes and wine/other drinks

Add all ingredients together. Enjoy:
Lapas - limpets - which taste a lot like molluscs. Very nice with some garlic and lemon. In the background is a dish of tremocos - preserved beans - which are served with beers like peanuts would be in a pub. They are also called "poor mans seafood".
This is most peoples impression of Madeira - a glitzy tourist haven full of resorts and foreigners. And yes there were a hell of a lots of English and German tourists being hustled to try some madeira or buy cane baskets/ embroidery/ceramics. Older tourists not the younger drunken yobs like Majorca/Ibiza who seemed to live around their hotel pools. I understand the appeal of the pool as the beaches are made of rocks, not sand but what sort of holiday is it if you only leave the hotel to shop, or go on organised trips?! The tourist traps were easily avoided by us as one of my geos gave us a better what to do list than you'll find in any guide book. For me it was relaxing to be in familiar surrounds but not to have to speak Portuguese, or to try and get work done, but the fact that it wasn't new for me also helped us get around a lot easier. Most of the hotels/resorts are to the west of Funchal, the main city of Madeira which has grown by creeping up the hills around the port. The old town is by the sea, a maze of streets filled with restaraunts, souvenir shops and wine shops interrupted by streams pouring off the mountains. But we never quite found the downstairs bars that are supposed to be there in their hundred.The rest of Madeira is mountainous (from sea level to 1860m on an island only 20km wide) with banana plantations cover the foothills. We hired a car to drive round the island which was amazing - going up roads which wound around the steep slopes up into the misty heights, through tunnels bored through the rock (most of the roads and all of the freeways in Madeira have involved a large amount of tunneling and engineering). The north coast is very different - here the full force of the Atlantic hits the coasts and the cliffs go from steep to vertical. Less towns, less room and the roads get narrower and wind more and more. "Fun" to drive, until you meet something coming the other way round and are faced with the choice of driving into the cliff or the ocean.