I’ve already given you a bit of an overview of the island of Madeira that I stopped at (as our one and only port day) on my Transatlantic cruise over to Europe in April/May (you can see how far behind I’ve gotten on my travel blog here). I wanted to give separate posts about the two highlights of the tour I took there, however: the cable car ride and the toboggan ride. We’ll start here with the cable car ride.

I’m a little obsessed with cable car rides, as you’ve probably noticed since I do a post about the cable car in pretty much any city that I visit that has a cable car. I just think they’re a great ways to get a leisurely, bird’s eye view of a city and they’re usually quite inexpensive. This cable car ride in Funchal was shorter than expected and also quite a bit more expensive than most of the others I’ve been on, but that’s Europe vs. Latin America for you. Besides, it was included as part of my tour so off I went.

One of the few downsides of traveling alone is that you often end up with a travel companion for the day, whether or not you were looking for company. As I mentioned, I like cable car rides because they’re typically leisurely and relaxing. This one was less so as my cable car buddies included the man in his 60’s who talked my ear off all day and offered to meet me on the naked sunbathing deck that afternoon and bring me “room service” later that night and a pair of ladies who were rather afraid of heights and squealed for 70% of the ride. Ah well, it was still a lovely view of the island, which you can check out below: