Another beautiful sunrise this morning as we walk around the upper deck track for our morning exercise.  It is breezy and chilly too, with beautiful views as the Cape Verde islands emerge from the fog as we sail into the harbor. Lovely!

We have yet another ship tour today – hiking and walking, we shall see how this goes!  Completing our morning routine, we head to the Cabaret for our stickers.  Turns out we only have 19 people on the tour.  The yellow fever vaccination requirement has really affected ShoreEx with tons of cancellations. Roughly a third of the passengers can’t get off here, which has started much grumbling and complaining. But it is a Cape Verde rule, not Azamara. Nothing the ship can do about it. We’re doubly in compliance, so no worries on our end!

Tour time arrives and we head out to our little bus – they are using city public transport as tour buses – meeting our adorable guide Humberto.  He is an absolute hoot, keeps us laughing all through the day.  We start out with a ride up to the highest point of the island, Monte Verde at 2500 feet tall.  The road up to the viewpoint took 20 years to build, all hand laid rock cobblestones, winding up the barren sides of the mountain.  Gorgeous views, if not a little scary ride.  Good thing we aren’t driving!

At the top of the mountain we have beautiful views down into Mindelo city and across the other side of the island – although it is too cloudy to see across the bay to the other islands.  Sort of gives everything a magical feeling though, with the clouds swirling around.

Coming down off the mountain we turn into the Monte Ingles valley, so named after the English who settled the area.  Here we get to do our valley hiking – more like walking, or maybe trekking.  For about a mile, we trekked over some farm vehicle path between the mountains, again with great views to either side.  And everyone was fit enough to make it the whole way!  Of course, it wasn’t all that strenuous, just a little bit of hazardous walking because of the loose stones. 

Our next stop is Praia Grande for a Capoeira dancing demonstration.  A combination martial arts and dance, accompanied by music, we are treated to a wonderful performance out on the beach.  The dance troupe is great, performing a number of different dances from the martial arts type to traditional island dancing while we watch from a safe distance, sipping on the local Cape Verde drink – Grogue, a mix of dark rum and cane sugar.  Ed enjoyed both his and mine!

We are now circumnavigating the island, heading back to Mindelo, with a stop at a view point looking out over the wide sand that arrived here from the Sahara in a huge storm decades ago.  Incredible, we know we are right off the coast of Africa – but it’s not all that close!  To imagine all the sand coming from the Sahara is just mindboggling.  And beautiful.

Then it is back to Mindela for our lunch at the Hotel Porto Grande.  A lovely place, where we have the dining room all to ourselves and dig into our meals of tuna carpaccio and grilled tuna (the big catch here in Cape Verde) finishing off with goat cheese (another big commodity here due to all the goats – many of which we saw today on our explorations) and candied mango.  All accompanied by 2 beers – no wine – but hey, you can’t win them all.  An incredibly good lunch – especially for a hotel lunch service.

Now we are off for our walking tour of the city – starting on the harbor, passing the fish market which is being broken down at this late time in the day, then visiting the Torre de Barro which houses a nautical museum with lots of artifacts from the many shipwrecks off the coast here – as well as great views across the harbor and the city below.

Continuing on the walk, we visit the Quintal das Artes (yard of the arts) where there are old carnaval figurines spread around the courtyard. There are also little artist shops in the buildings that surround the area.

Around the corner is an African market with all sorts of vendor stalls. The city took over this area, which used to be a children’s play park, to move these vendors out of the city streets proper, and give them one area for everyone to sell their wares.  We have 15 minutes here, which gives us enough time to wander through the stalls and ascertain there isn’t anything we really want to purchase.  So on we move, minus one lady (who was a pain in the bus asking weird questions and nastily re-asking questions Humberto didn’t fully answer – oh and calling him Alberto the entire time) who decided to go back to the ship.  Ok, at least she told someone who relayed that to Humberto, so we didn’t have to stand around forever waiting for her.  Our next stop is the Ingreja da Nossa Senhora da Luz, the oldest catholic church on the island, which is unfortunately closed, so we move onto the Mercado Municipal, the largest fresh produce market – which is lovely, but not too populated – probably because of the time of the day.

Back to the bus, we are now missing 2 more people, who obviously just left during the walk. They were with us when we left the African market, but not now. Would have been nice to tell someone!  Sigh.  Humberto does his best to find them, searching the market and then having the driver take us back around to African market to see if they are on the streets – but to no avail. They are gone. And so are we! Up to the highest point in the city for views across the harbor and the colorful city.

Two notable photos – one of a ship that sank years ago and they just left in the harbor, the other, that house on top of the mountain.  That is one house belonging to one man who imports all the groceries into the island and is said to be the richest man on the island.

And we’re done!  Back to the ship after a nice long day.  We go about our normal evening routine, including some beautiful sail away shots, especially as we sail past the totally cool lighthouse perched high up on basically what is a rock out in the water.  We are still puzzling over how people dock a boat and get up to it!

Then the big news of the day is that we are ditching Madeira due to a huge storm coming across the waters.  Exactly what Ed had predicted this morning.  We are also switching around our port schedule, heading to La Palma then to Tenerife the same evening for an overnight, to try to hide from the storm.  Doesn’t matter to us, as we just changed our rental car reservation for Tenerife and canceled Funchal. 

So it is onto dinner we go, and then to the Assistant CD Astrid’s show; Maiden India.  Fabulous show where Astrid danced all the different styles of dancing and explained for what each was used. It was wonderful.  A perfect end to an excellent day!