Madeira 5

That day for sunrise we went back to Miradouro da Ponta do Rosto. Now I have to tell you about flying drones in Portugal. I wanted to fly mine as well so well ahead of leaving I had started to request the permits. That procedure is a nightmare. First you have to register with the Aereonautical authorities. Which was still the easiest step. Then you have to request permits for each and every location indicating the coordinates. When you have never been to Madeira and have no clue where it is worth flying a drone that already is a nightmare. I found a website from someone who had listed 9 places where he had flown his drone. I requested permits for them and for 5 of them I got them. But that is not all. If you fly on a beach or over water you then have to request additional permits from the harbor-police or if it is a National Park the authorities there need to give additional permits. So once I got the Ok from Aereonautical authorities I sent those emails to the harbor police but never heard back. I was already for a week on Madeira so I sent a reminder asking if there was any news. And they told me that I needed to send the approval in a specific format… that was the point where I finally gave up. Didn’t fly my drone. But I saw lots of others who did and I am 100% sure they never bothered to even register with the aereonautical authorities. That morning when we were there for the sunrise we could see planes fly above us because we were close to the airport and next to me three women stood there ready to fly their drone. It is a well known fact that flying drones close to airports is never allowed… I don’t know why they request all those permits when they obviously never check them…
When I had already taken all my pics and packed my stuff after sunrise suddenly the sun was shining of fog over the water. That was a wonderful light situation. Looked like magic. We had to hurry to get the cameras out again because this wonderful light didn’t last long.
Anyway… after breakfast we had some quiet time and then … tada…. we went up the mountain to Pico do Arrieiro. Up to 1800 meters. Raik had looked for a street that was supposed to go along specific trees he wanted to show us. But we didn’t see them but the way up there was an adventure. After the storm it was open but hadn’t been cleared yet so we had to drive over branches. And small streets in villages were very narrow and steep. We had some good laughs – but were glad when we finally arrived up on top. 😀 We sat in the cafe, ate pizza, were freezing cold (I should have brought my Norway-clothes) and were waiting for the rain to stop. When sunset came closer the rain stopped but it was still very windy and soooo coooooooold…. there are paths along the hills that you are supposed to climb up and down but I didn’t do that. Again I held on to a railing in order to steady my tripod/camera and my fingers were freezing. I couldn’t really see anything on the display of my camera so I was kind of ’shooting blind‘. But some pics came out not so bad. Once the sun had gone down there were beautiful colors over the water that we could see from up there. After we had returned to the hotel we went to our new favorite bar (with the VW-bar).