Hyatt Adventures

After 6 straight days of not seeing land, we arrived in the Azores. We were so excited to start exploring that we were the 2nd ones off the ship!

The Azores are a chain of islands 950 miles off the coast of Portugal, which is about as far as it is from Bradenton to New York City. The main language is Portuguese, although most people spoke English fairly well. We docked in Punta Delgado on the south side of the island of São Miguel. You know it must be a pretty cool place if the National Geographic ship is docked next to you!

We didn’t like any of the tours offered from the cruise line since they really didn’t get into the heart of the island and see what it was like, so we did a little research and found our own; a coast to coast buggy tour that covered a lot of ground as well as going to some remote off-road places.

There was one other couple from our cruise on the tour with us and as it turned out, Wayne is a retired engineer who used to be a surveyor and worked for Stantec (one of our clients) in North Carolina for 40 years! Such a small world!

Our guide, Felipe, was fantastic and told us so much about the island and its history.

It was absolutely stunning! Volcanic mountains that reach all the way to the deep blue sea. So many picturesque overlooks, each more beautiful than the next!

São Miguel is known as the green island, and we could certainly see why! Lush green grass & foliage everywhere. It was also very windy, so the tall grass was waving with the breeze, which was beautiful.

There are ancient rock wall “fences” around most properties and on either side of the road. As surveyors, we thought if there was a property line dispute, it would be impossible to move the fence line since it is lava rock cemented together!

The streets are also very narrow and many were cobblestone created centuries ago. In most towns of São Miguel, each central street or plaza has their own pavement pattern, which is very pretty. A lot of roads were barely wide enough for two cars to pass, some not even that wide. Again, with the rock walls on either side, it would be near impossible to widen them.

LOTS of cows. So much so that they have issues with all the cow manure and where to put it.

Most of the island is mountainous, so we saw farming on the slopes of hills, which was very different for us and we could imagine the issues that would create.

There were beautiful churches and other buildings in the villages. We stopped for lunch at a local restaurant in Ribeira Grande, a former fishing village, on the north shore of the island. Delicious local food served buffet style. I tried most of it, including Bacalhau, a Portuguese white fish. One thing I did not try was the octopus, which is a delicacy there.

It was a beautiful sunny day while we were there with temperatures in the lower 60’s. It rains a lot on São Miguel Island, which is one of the reasons everything is so incredibly green there. We were lucky, on the day we were there it only rained a little bit. We skirted the rain on our buggies, but there was one part where it was unavoidable. Fortunately it didn’t last long and the sun was back out warming us up again.

Our tour lasted 6 hours with lots of stops along the way. Afterwards we walked through the city of Punta Delgado and to a pretty town square.

We also walked along the coastline looking at all the boats in the harbor. Mostly fishing boats since that and farming are the main industries here.

Of course we had to stop for rolled ice cream at Mucca on the way back to the ship!

It was a long, fun, adventurous day and we felt like we learned a lot about the island, its culture and way of life here. We were both glad we chose this tour. When we got back to the ship, we took a hot shower and didn’t feel like going to the dining room for dinner, so we ordered room service and relaxed.