Posts Tagged ‘santa maria’

  1. Lazy days in the Azores

    September 12-15, 2014
    Posted on October 30, 2015

    The sunny island of Santa Maria is quiet and days there can be very uneventful. Which is kind of a good thing.

    On Friday, the oddity of the day was meeting a guy from Brazil on Praia Formosa, and chatting with him a little bit in English, and a little bit in Russian. We distracted him enough that he missed the oncoming high tide and his bag got thoroughly soaked in sea water.

    Quintessential Santa Maria landscape: green pastures, blue ocean and white chimneys.

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  2. The Mountain and the Red Desert

    September 11, 2014
    Posted on June 7, 2015

    As quiet as the island of Santa Maria is, it’s got a rather respectable amount of points of interest per km2. Aside from the ocean, it has a mountain peak, Pico Alto, measuring a whole 586 m. Hey, it’s still taller than Curaçao’s Christoffelberg or anything in the direct vicinity of the flatland that is Toronto. More curiously, Santa Maria is home to a red desert known as Barreiro da Faneca. Unique in the Azores, this landscape makes you double check if you have been accidentally teleported to Mars. Who wouldn’t want to ride a scooter on Mars?

    The surreal landscape of Barreiro da Faneca.

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  3. Riding around Santa Maria

    September 9-10, 2014
    Posted on May 29, 2015

    There is a certain kind of laziness to Santa Maria that is contagious. Sleep in, have a really long breakfast, look at the ocean, go down to the beach, ponder about life, the universe, and everything…

    There is a temptation to just stay put and enjoy the view, because you’ll be hard pressed to find a better one. There is also a suspicion that there are other interesting things to see, and new is always better, and when you have a scooter, everything looks like a road. So as a compromise, we wake up at sunrise to watch it happen, then continue sleeping a little longer and take off in a randomly selected direction with the hope of making it back in time to watch the fabulous moonrise again.

    We are running out of light just as the road begins to look interesting.

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  4. A Tasting of Santa Maria

    September 8, 2014
    Posted on May 24, 2015

    We woke up in the dark at 5 am, had breakfast, and by 7 am found ourselves on a brand new island, just as the sun was rising somewhere behind an overcast sky. The flight from São Miguel to Santa Maria is barely 30 minutes, including taxiing on the runway. You are in and out before your body even fully wakes up.

    A coastal village on Santa Maria

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