Pico das Pedras Brancas

This morning consisted of little more than relaxing and recovering from my hike. But once midday hit, I figured it was time to get the day going. As I had packed my things to grab my rental car and complete the Sao Lourenco hike to the East, MJ had arrived in the room. I invited her to join me, and we headed off to grab the car. A quick coffee break meant that we missed the guy at the car rental and had to kill time for an hour while he had lunch. As such, we wandered the town of Machico some more and bought a deck of playing cards to kill time. Eventually, it was time, and we picked up the car and headed to San Lourenco for the hike. Because it was much later in the day, the track was much quieter and much nicer as a result. It was quite a long walk, but MJ and I chatted for hours and stopped for a quick swim, ensuring that time went by a bit quicker. The walk was incredible, traversing and zig zagging from cliff face to cliff face looking vertically down for 100m+ into the Pacific ocean. It was unbelievable and made you realise how secluded we were on this little island in the middle of nowhere. As we approached the final stage of the walk, we noticed that this had also been closed off. You can see from one of the photos the amount of the land that had been lost into the ocean at the final ascent to the top. Providing quite a thin pathway to get through. But, once again, we weren't going to back down. We continued up and were rewarded handsomely with an incredible view. 360 degrees of ocean and beautifully green landscapes. We spent quite a bit of time up here embracing the experience. It was only when we realised there was no one else within sight that we started to head back, beginning our race with the sun to get back to the car before it was pitch black. It was as we went down that we began to see how much damage the landslide (or landslides) had caused. We could see where the path once stood. Pieces of timber once creating a smooth and gradual incline, now lie in a huge ditch at the bottom of the hill. Remediation will take a long time and will likely be expensive. As we were then forced to climb our way down, we understood why it would be closed. We were fine, but other tourists mightn't be so lucky. We were probably 15 minutes from the car when it became pitch black. This meant that we got to watch a beautiful sunset, but now provided a much higher chance of falling right at the end. We did make it, however. We had planned a to picnic at sunset, but our dawdle through the hike meant that this was no longer an option. Instead, we went to the viewpoint that was on the way home and saw it during the night before heading home. When we arrived, we were too lazy and hungry to make anything, so we went next door for a feed and some poncha. A quick and easy meal that was quite cheap, too. It was quite an early night after this as we needed to recover from a big day.Read more