April 30
This morning was our disembarkation day, with an evening flight to Lisbon. A morning tour had been arranged for us, visiting the western portion of São Miguel, dominated by another set of calderas with beautiful forested sides and lakes at their bottom. We walked in a national park, and were a bit startled by an area where the trails were closed to enable the replanting of endemic grasses and shrubs. Those hillsides were a mass of erosion— from just two years of visitors going off-trail to “get a better picture”. It was a sobering lesson on the fragility of native ecosystems.
We also visited a pineapple plantation. The Azorean government subsidizes pineapple cultivation, as it is culturally important but no longer profitable. Azorean pineapple is a different strain than we eat in the US or is cultivated in Brazil. The pineapple is grown in greenhouses. The uniquely Azorean feature to their cultivation is that after the plants flower, they are exposed to smoke for two weeks. This practice developed after it was observed that plants in a greenhouse that burned matured more quickly and uniformly.
We ate one last lunch together in a local restaurant near the airport. In the parking lot was a car that had clearly been there for some time —- nasturtiums and morning glory were climbing all over it!
Last night we watched a slide show of images from our three week journey from South America to Africa to Europe, composed from photos that passengers and staff took along the way. It was a great way to reflect on the full trip, and to appreciate that we had many unique experiences because there were only about one-third of the normal passenger load on the ship. Swimming in the open ocean, visiting Ilhas Desertas, spectacular multi course dinners and wine tastings, and some of the land excursions would have been impractical with a larger group.
Pictured: the multi-lake calderas, pineapples and some of our colleagues in the greenhouse, the floral car
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