The town of Horta on the Island of Faial

Dear Readers, it was a 4.30 start this morning, to catch our flight from Lisbon to the Azorean island of Faial and the town of Horta. I ordered what I thought was a black coffee and a white coffee once we were airside, but my white coffee ended up with ice in it. I managed to resist the blandishments of the pastry shop though. I suspect the Portuguese must have a sweet tooth. They were even selling pasteis de nata (those delicious little custard tarts) in packs of 12.

Anyhoo, the plane was rammed, and for most of the time we were flying over the Atlantic (the Azores are nearly 1000 miles west of Portugal). But then, this….

The Azores are volcanic, and this is Pico, the most recent of the Azores to emerge from the sea and with its very own volcano, the Ponta de Pico. The volcanic soil means that there are vineyards here (UNESCO-designated to boot) and I have no doubt that we’ll be visiting them later. We landed, however, on the island of Faial, which is 30 minutes by ferry from Pico, and which is technically the western-most point in Europe.

We landed along a short runway right next to the sea. Could this be another Category C airport like Innsbruck, I wondered? But actually, no, although Funchal in Madeira is. Hah! The landing still occasioned a burst of applause from the back of the plane. And my luggage arrived, a relief as I’d checked it all the way through at Heathrow and we all know how that can sometimes work out.

Horta airport

We had a couple of hours to kill before our flight, so we did some exploring. What a fine town Horta is! Tomorrow they have a trail run with 3000 people turning up, so I was glad I was there today. There was a very noisy parade of emergency vehicles, all driven by moustachioed men in uniform, most wearing medals.

The buildings are so charming here, with a mixture of Spanish/Portuguese influences and something very quirky and different.

We had lunch in the local market, where I just managed not to buy a six-foot long cushion shaped like a sperm whale. One must have some discipline, surely.

And then it was off to the ferry for the trip to Pico, our final stop.

We watched with some confusion as various vehicles backed onto the ferry at peculiar angles, but were pleased to see a chap who drove a tractor onboard – it seemed to be towing a container full of all our bags, and some miscellaneous baskets.

it’s fair to say that not everybody has got this parking-in-a-straight-line thing down pat…

And now we’re on Pico, in our hotel, and tomorrow, weather willing, we should be off to finally see if we can find some whales! Keep everything crossed for us!

View from my hotel window

Well Readers, so far so far good – I’ve managed to get from East Finchley to an airport hotel at Lisbon Airport, in preparation for our flight to the Azorean island of Pico tomorrow. Points to note at Heathrow Terminal Two are:

• A couple of the security lanes now have those antsy-fancy scanners where you don’t have to take out your laptop or your liquids. It makes such a difference to the time it takes to get through! On the other hand, if you’re me you’re still wearing your walking boots (aka the most comfortable footwear in the world) so you still hold everybody up while you hop around on one leg.
• Heathrow now has little purple Roombaa-type vacuum cleaners. Every child under five seems to love following them around and then running away screaming when they change direction.
• Portugal from the air is full of onshore wind turbines, all arranged in rows along the hills. I’m very interested to see what the Azores does about renewable energy. I’d expect there to be lots of wind/solar/hydro and maybe even some geothermal, but let’s see. Islands everywhere are leading the way in the search for clean energy.
• I got confused at the airport and tried to go through the EU gates with my passport (because I still have a red one). But of course I have to go through the UK gates because I am, in fact, from the UK. Still heartbroken.

Anyhow, we met our guide at the airport – Lara is Portuguese and did a doctorate on social weaverbirds in South Africa so we’ll have a lot in common. The rest of the group seem really lovely and laidback, which is great. And the hotel is very nice – I have a splendid view of the roundabout, which features bushes which seem to have been trimmed to resemble the Devil’s Causeway.

We all piled out of the lift (once we’d worked out that you have to use your room key to make it work) and went in search of our rooms. Below is a typical door.

How in the inky-dinky are you supposed to know which room is which? Four intelligent women and one intelligent chap paraded from one end of the corridor to the other and we were all stumped. Until….

It’s easy when you know how, clearly….

So tomorrow, we are meeting at 5.30 a.m. in reception (breakfast opens at 4.00 a.m.). No whales tomorrow apparently as it’s too rough, but we should get out in the boats on Sunday. So, I’ll report back from The Actual Azores tomorrow if all goes to plan.

Azorean Dwarf Mistletoe (Arceuthobium azoricum)

Dear Readers, the Azores are famous for their whales, but they have a pretty limited fauna otherwise – there are some subspecies of birds such as the woodpigeon and the bullfinch, and some shearwaters and other seabirds, but not, as far as I can see, any species which are unique to the islands. What they do have, though, are some endemic plants, such as the Dwarf Mistletoe shown above, which lives on the Azorean Juniper (Juniperus brevifolia) which forms dwarf forests on Pico (the very island that we’ll be visiting). The juniper also only grows in the Azores.

Azorean Juniper (Juniperus brevifolia) Photo By Alberto Garcia from Cartagena, Spain – Brezales y helechos.Uploaded by tm, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23297652

There are endemic daisies and umbellifers, ferns and heathers. There is a euphorbia that grows only on the Azores.

Euphorbia azorica (Photo by By Ixitixel – eigene Arbeit (selbst fotografiert), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3816312)

There is an Azorean ivy that grows nowhere else.

Azorean Ivy

There is a pale-pink Azorean scabious.

Azorean scabious (Scabiosa nitens) Photo By Ixitixel – eigene Arbeit (selbst fotografiert), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3815990

And probably most intriguing of all, there is Hochsetter’s Butterfly Orchid (Platanthera azorica), possibly Europe’s rarest true orchid, which was rediscovered in 2011. It grows in the laurel forests of the Azores, a rare habitat formed by yet another endemic species, the Azorean laurel (Lauris azorica).

Azorean Laurel in Flower (Photo By Ixitixel – eigene Arbeit, selbst fotografiert, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3826347)

And here’s me thinking that it’s all about the whales (which are the big draw, of course, in more ways than one). The habitats that emerge on islands are always intriguing, and it looks as if the Azores is no different. I’m off to Lisbon for the first leg of the trip today, so let’s see what happens next!

Dear Readers, I haven’t been off on a solo adventure since 2018, when I went to Monterey Bay to watch whales/find condors/generally hang out, so it is with great excitement and a little trepidation that I’m heading off to the Azores later this week. The main focus of the holiday is whale-watching – this is the best spot in Europe for sperm whales, which I’ve never seen, and also for all manner of other whales, including blue, sei, humpback and Bryde’s whales, plus dolphins, turtles and lots of other marine life.

Being stuck out in the middle of the Atlantic (the Azores are about 900 miles west of Lisbon) means that the weather can be, well, changeable, so it’s important to pack for everything from pouring rain to baking sun. Plus, in the Azores the whales are generally spotted from the cliffs by watchers with powerful binoculars, and then boats travel to the general vicinity to observe. The Azores has very strict rules about when and how to approach the animals, and the company that I travel with, Naturetrek, also has its rules about ethical whale-watching so I’m hopeful that the animals won’t be disturbed.

We’ll be based on the island of Pico, and during the week that I’m on the island we’re due to go out for 8 whale-watching trips. I’ve never had problems with sea-sickness, but I’ve packed some Stugeron (anti-sickness tablets) just in case. And I’m hoping that the sea air will blow away the last of my cough (or give me pneumonia but fingers crossed).

The sperm whale’s blow hole is skewed to the left! Who knew? Photo by By Vilmos Vincze CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84353750

I am hoping to be able to blog from the Azores but it depends on such little things as wi-fi and time available, so if it suddenly goes quiet, don’t worry! But at the very least I hope to be able to pop up a photo or two for your delectation, even if (in the spirit of Barry Lopez) it takes a little while to process what’s gone on and come up with something coherent. So let’s take a little leap into the unknown, and see what happens….

Bears eating a caribou carcass in Denali National Park (Public Domain)

Dear Readers, I have been ploughing through a collection of the essays of Barry Lopez (1945-2020) (best known for his book ‘Arctic Dreams’) and have been much taken by his writing – he manages to combine thoughtfulness, close scientific observation and open mindedness, a rare collection of attributes. A modest man, he spent a lot of time in the company of the Indigenous people of Alaska, and in his essay ‘The Invitation’, he makes some thought-provoking suggestions about the different ways that people from different cultures view the world.

First up, he notices that the Indigenous people that he travels with rarely converse. I have to say here that this sounds blissful:  during the eclipse,  folk just wouldn’t stop verbalising their every impression until I couldn’t hear myself think or feel anything, so I had to walk away, rude as it must have appeared. I know that we can get a better range of sensory input if we just shut up sometimes.

But I think that Lopez is making a more subtle point too. Language tends to crystallise impressions, to ‘fix’ them in space and time, and to block out the more subtle things that happen – the scents, the sound of the wind in the branches. Here’s what he says:

“When an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.”

Lopez uses the example of finding a bear feeding on a caribou carcass. For Lopez, and I suspect for most of us, it would be all about the bear. But for the Indigenous people that he knew, Lopez describes it as ‘an unfolding’. The bear is situated not only in space, but also in time – there may have been signs before, in the footprints in mud or hairs snagged on a thorn bush, and there will be something after as the bear is challenged for its food, or drags it away, or cubs come, or the animal is disturbed. And this is something that I honestly believe we can develop even within an urban setting – the particular sound of crows mobbing a heron or a bird of prey always makes me look up, a  specific smell of decay and buzzing of bluebottles makes me search for a carcass to see what might have been killed, and by what. The natural world  is a long story, not a series of unrelated events. It’s all about context. But Lopez also makes the point that we mustn’t rush too quickly to attempt to find an explanation, a resolution to the ‘problem’ of the bear.

“The lesson to be learned here was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening – resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way Indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what  they encounter than to isolated objects“.

Lopez’s second point is that, as we rush to analyse and define, we start to ‘leave our body’ – we begin to ignore all the sensory input that our bodies are still gathering, and instead rely on the rational mind. How familiar does this sound?

“As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was travelling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place.”

There is much to consider here, for me at least. How often do we allow ourselves, in our busyness, to sit in a place and just let what happens happens, without trying to analyse it and tuck it safely away? For example, I love knowing ‘stuff’, and it feels respectful to me to understand the differences between birds, but I wonder if it’s not more helpful, and maybe in these difficult days more important, to consider the pattern that the bird is part of, to observe more closely the way that it feeds, the relationship between it and the hawthorn tree and the tangle of honeysuckle where it maybe has its nest.

Lopez is not romanticising the Indigenous people that he travelled with: he points out that there are inattentive, lazy and undiscerning individuals in both Indigenous and so-called ‘advanced’ cultures.

“But they tend to value more highly the importance of intimacy with a place. When you travel with them, you’re acutely aware that theirs is a fundamentally different praxis from your own. They’re more attentive, more patient, less willing to say what they know, to collapse mystery into language”.

What do you think, Readers? Does any of this ring true to you? I think that the ability to remain quiet, attentive and unjudgmental as natural events unfold around us is something that can and should be learned – witness a small child completely focussed on a piece of gravel, or a flower, and I sense that we all could do this once. Can we still enter into an event with our senses alive, our sense of mystery intact, our need to categorise and analyse for once on the back burner? Lopez describes such moments thus:

“A grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket is more than a bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. It is a point of entry into a world most of us have turned our backs on in an effort to go somewhere else, believing we’ll be better off just thinking about a grizzly bear stripping fruit from blackberry vines in a thicket. 

The moment is an invitation, and the bear’s invitation to participate is offered, without prejudice, to anyone passing by.”

Australian trapdoor spider (Gaius vilosus) Photo from https://ala-images.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/store/f/e/9/7/2f84ce62-fd70-4e2a-a147-94358a6379ef/original

Dear Readers, as I was sitting on the sofa surrounded by a heap of tissues this morning (Dreaded Lurgy Day 3) Facebook delivered up a ‘memory’ from 2016, but it wasn’t the usual photo of Mum or Dad, which always knocks me for six. No, it was this:”World’s Oldest Spider Dies Aged 43′.

And so I was reminded of what was quite possibly the early demise of Number 16, an Australian Trapdoor Spider living in the North Bungulla Reserve in Western Australia. The spider was studied in the wild by arachnologist Barbara York Main; she started to survey the spiders back in 1974 by following some spiderlings as they dispersed and marking each of their burrows with a peg. Australian Trapdoor Spiders are extremely loyal to their burrows, which serve as both traps for hunting and as protection from the elements and from predators (of which more later).

The well-concealed burrow of the Australian Trapdoor Spider (Photo from https://ala-images.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/store/a/b/9/2/ce9cceb7-b102-43ec-92d9-1840e24629ba/original)

Number 16 was monitored at least annually for 40 years, and as she grew older, a tradition grew that her burrow was the first checked by the researchers. Sadly, in November 2016 researcher Leandra Mason went to Number 16’s burrow, only to discover that the silk plug had been pierced, probably by a parasitic spider wasp, and the spider herself was missing. Spider Wasps paralyse spiders, and then lay their eggs into them, so let’s hope that Number 16 was already dead before meeting this terrible fate. The invertebrate world has (what seem to me at least) some truly awful ways to die.

Australian Spider Wasp paralysing a Huntsman Spider (Photo By Bjenks – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6264515)

The research team were very distressed by what they viewed as Number 16’s untimely end. Mason said “She was cut down in her prime […] It took a while to sink in, to be honest”. But long-term studies in the wild such as this yield such useful information, and enable us to understand changes over time, and to assess the impact of climate change and habitat degradation. It also illustrates how animals that live in such harsh environments as the Australian Outback can evolve to live quiet lives, deep underground in their burrows, with limited exposure to the heat of the sun. Who knows how old Number 16 might have lived to if she hadn’t been predated? And who knows how many other fascinating things there are to be discovered about the plants and animals that we share the world with, if we only take the time to really look?

I suppose what I find most touching is how attached the researchers clearly became to this reticent, reclusive creature. Humans have such capacity for empathy and love, given half a chance, though it’s easy to forget that when you read the news. I believe that if we pay attention to the individual behind the rhetoric, whether it’s a scary spider or a scary human, we’re much more likely to understand.

Correct sneezing poster by Meduza

Dear Readers, I suppose it was inevitable but after a six-hour plane flight with a lot of people sneezing and coughing their heads off, I have gone down with a bug and not a nice one either. Last night I was under the covers with my teeth chattering, but today I feel a smidge better, and the whole experience has got my wondering about what exactly a ‘lurgy’ is?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘dreaded lurgy’ as ‘an unspecified or indeterminate disease’, but its etymology is rather interesting. When we were growing up, a fixture on the radio was always The Goon Show, starring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Eric Sykes. Dad, my brother and I always loved it, while Mum sat in the armchair shaking her head and wondering why we had tears of laughter rolling down our faces. Anyhow, one episode (from 1954) was called ‘Lurgi Strikes Britain’, and it Ned Seagoon has to deal with a highly dangerous, highly infectious and, as it turns out, completely fictitious disease called ‘The Dreaded Lurgi’.

Nowadays, people often use the word ‘lurgy/lurgi/lurgey’ to explain why they can’t come to a social occasion, or go to school. It’s its indeterminate nature that makes it so useful – it’s a disease that’s worse than a cold, not as bad as flu, and isn’t clearly anything else that you can put a name to. I wonder if my North American readers have ever heard of/used the term, or if it’s a purely British thing?

In Canada, a related term seems to be ‘cootie’ – this comes originally from the Malaysian word for ‘louse’, but in Canada it specifically means some kind of germ or contaminant, real or imagined, especially from a member of the opposite sex (and so often used by children at their most squeamish stage). An example of usage from Wikipedia is ‘I’m not using this glass until I’ve washed the cooties off’. Along with ‘chesterfield’ for sofa and ‘toque’ for hat, this feels like a pure Canadianism that I haven’t come across anywhere else.

So now we know! And I’m going back to bed. See you tomorrow!

World Clocks at Parque de Pasatempo, Galicia, Spain (Photo By Óscar (xindilo/fotosderianxo) – This file was derived from: Reloxos no Parque do Pasatempo, Betanzos.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42176234)

Dear Readers, jet lag is a truly miserable phenomenon, as I am finding to my cost this week. On my way to Canada I adjusted within 24 hours – we travelled out early, dragged ourselves through the whole day and were so exhausted by the time we got to bed that we slept right through. On the way east, though, it’s a different story – again we dragged ourselves through the day following an overnight flight, but when I got to bed I was instantly awake, and stayed that way until about 4 a.m. At 4.30 a.m. the cat started to sing the song of her people, and so that was that.

That  was on Sunday. Every morning I’ve made sure to get up early and mingle with people (the light and being around other folk is supposed to reset your body clock), and on Wednesday I coupled that with falling flat on my face, having tripped over a speck of dust/molecule/something invisible. You might remember that I have a habit of doing this but I’m pretty sure that jet lag was implicated in the stumble. No harm done! And my trusty twenty year-old Canon Powershot survived the fall, which was something of a miracle.

The friend that I was with is a first-aider at her workplace, and as I staggered into the café she asked if the staff would break out their first aid box. Antiseptic wipes, plasters and antiseptic cream were soon applied (thank you Coal House Café) and I can recommend the coffee and the chocolate and mandarin gluten-free cake, just what you need to get over a shock. Plus, having watched every season of Masterchef the Professionals it was a delight to have a knee covered in bright blue catering sticking plasters.

So, what the hell is jet lag? At root, it’s chronobiological (and what a great word that is)  – we have a body clock in our brain, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which is closely linked to light reception, and little ‘clocks’ in our cells, which record the amount  of time since we last slept. Unfortunately, these two systems don’t always work at the same rate – we can use light to reset our SCN (and indeed elite athletes often use light therapy to help them reset their body clocks), but the receptors in other parts of our body take different rates to catch up.

People swear by melatonin (not available for use in the UK), the aforementioned light therapy, keeping to the sleep-wake schedule of the country that you came from (not practical in most cases), and various drugs, some of them illegal. This may cure the jet lag, but I wonder if any of you also have a strange sense of dissociation, when you arrive home after a trip, a feeling that ‘home’ is not quite the same as it was? I nearly always have this, and it takes a few days for things to feel ‘right’ again. I wonder if humans were meant to travel as far and as fast as we do these days – after all, jet lag is a modern phenomenon. Time was it would have taken weeks on a ship and then overland to travel from London to Toronto, and now we can do it, door to door, in about twelve hours. No wonder our poor minds and bodies are confused! Some cultures have a sense that the body travels so fast that it takes the soul a while to catch up.

There’s an interesting article about just this phenomenon by one of my favourite travel writers, Nick Hunt. He describes walking to Istanbul from London back in 2011, and then returning by plane, and how disorientated it made him feel. Here’s his description of what jet lag really is:

‘At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.

If driving breaks that continuity, flying explodes it. It shatters reality into bits that have to be pieced back together. We label this “jet lag” — a disruption of the circadian rhythm caused by different time zones — but what really lags behind is much more fundamental.'(Nick Hunt, ‘Travelling at the Speed of the Soul’)

I think there is also something about integrating and processing what has happened while you’ve been away. For me, this journey was both a delightful experience (The eclipse! Renewing friendships! Seeing beavers!) and a melancholy time, a reacquaintance with the demon of dementia and the heaviness and sadness that it brings. So I came home carrying a lot, good and bad, and maybe it’s no surprise that I fell. But today things seem to be settling a little more, and home feels more like home, and the cat only sings from about 6 a.m. as opposed to every hour, on the hour. And so, things are inching back to normal.

But not for long, because soon I’ll be off again. More on that soon!