San Miguel is the largest of the Azores, a chain of volcanic islands that rise from the mid-Atlantic ridge. They gave Portugal a real edge during the age of exploration in the 15th Century and were a strategic base during WW II, first for the Germans and later for the Allies.
There isn’t much to recommend them today except as an excuse to leave your rolling cruise ship for a few hours on terra firma, emphasis on “firma.” Wood smoke and freshly cut grass smell sweet indeed after more than a week at sea. Heck, even the cow manure was a nice change!
Rather than book a ship-sponsored tour, we hired a private taxi to take us to some of the sights, Crater Lake and the town of Ribiera Grande. It probably cost us more than the tours but it was nice to get away from the crowd for a while. Connie scored some new birds to go along with last night’s Manx shearwater we mistakenly called an albatross, bringing her total to over 2,400. We had our driver drop us at the Ponta Delgada public library where we hoped to find a field guide for birds for making positive IDs. Language was an issue, at first in explaining what we wanted then in finding what we were looking for. It took a little of this and a bit of that, three languages and four books before we were satisfied. Portuguese is just similar enough to Spanish to make things really confusing, but the inflection and cadence, not to mention the tone, is more like Italian.
Now that we have visited, Connie insists I can count Portugal as my 55th country but I think I will hold off until we get to Lisbon.
