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Madeira, Portugal (Part 2): Funchal Vegan Food, Lodging, and More
The next restaurant we tried that is worth sharing was called Copaki, which is a little farther down the coast, closer to the Contemporary Art Museum. They aren’t vegetarian but they have a veggie/vegan menu that is really great. Unfortunately, I ordered the wrong thing, like I can’t even believe I ordered it. I had the choice between deep fried aubergine (eggplant), braised tofu (omg want), lasagna (what!!), or fajitas, and like a G-D MORON I chose fajitas, momentarily forgetting that the main component in veggie fajitas are bell peppers and I FORKING HATE bell peppers! What was I thinking? I think I was distracted by the prospect of guacamole. Ughhh I had to eat so many red peppers and they make me nauseous.
Including:
BRUSCHETTA! I love bruschetta hard. I love it even more when people pronounce it right. (Hot tip: You’re probably doing it wrong.)
Next, we shared a bowl of soup. I honestly forget what kind of soup this was, but it was a pureed light colored vegetable (there aren’t that many so just you decide) and it was good.
We also stopped by Gigi Sumos one day, a juice bar chain that is on HappyCow and says it has vegan bagels and salads too. Well, they don’t really. They can make a salad vegan by removing all the stuff in it, and they don’t have vegan salad dressings! I asked the staff, but you say you offer vegan salads; how can you do that if you don’t have vegan salad dressings? And you know what they did? They offered me MUSTARD or SWEET CHILI SAUCE. Like, both condiments straight from their bottles, undoctored to be palatable as salad dressings. I mean I chose the sweet chili but DAYUM.
Okay, that’s it for food in this post. Sadly, we didn’t get to what many say is the best restaurant in Madeira for vegans, Restaurant Olives, but maybe next time. And there’s some happy news: the next Madeira post will be a fancy restaurant review, a part of the Vegan Michelin series!
The food at Porto Mare was pretty good too. As with all hotel buffet breakfasts, there was tons of cereal and fruit but nothing great on the hot food side. But, they had Alpro yogurt! So it was overall a win.
Now I bet right now you are thinking, if you loved this place so much why did you say you stayed at a different place? Well, Madeira can get crazy winds, and so it wasn’t a huge surprise that our flight home to London was cancelled because of them. EasyJet transported our entire flight from the airport to a hotel that was much, much better than I expected of EasyJet (I expected a trash motel). It was called the Pestana Ocean Bay.
We were all given tokens for the dinner buffet, which was fine. Nothing special but they had enough dishes out in the giant buffet that were veg. We talked to some fellow passengers (ack) and wondered when we’d be notified about our rescheduled flight. The email came late that night: they were putting us on a flight the next night/morning at 1 AM!!! ONE. AM. And since this is Madeira, most of the people were supes old! This sucked. We’d get in to London at what, 3-4 am? And back home no earlier than 5am and have to go to work? No no NO this will not stand! Luckily, they offered money back if you chose not to accept their shitastic rescheduling, so we refused and booked a NORMAL HUMAN TIMED flight with British Airways. We still had another whole morning to explore though, so we walked along the beach and the caves near this end of Funchal.

Huangshan, China: One of the Most Spectacular Sights in the Country…So They Say
Also, I didn’t yet mention, there are two climbing paths up the mountain – the eastern and western steps. The eastern steps are 7.5 kilometers of mostly easier, flatter, more doable steps and terrain. It’s still obviously a lot, but it’s better for the average person. The western steps are harder, to say the least, and our guide book firmly dissuades the reader from attempting to go up them. It was 15 kilometers of killer steep uphill mountain stairs. 15 kilometers. That is like 10 miles. Uphill. I tried a stairmaster once and lasted like a minute. We were not doing the western steps.
John had other ideas, though. We said, John my boy! drive us to the entrance for the eastern steps! And he said – NO! You don’t want to do that, the scenery is nothing it’s a waste it’s terrible! The western steps are what’s actually worth seeing! And despite being TOLD (by the book) that it was super insane to do, we were like, Okay John! Take us to the 15 kilometers of steep mountain stairs! We will be fine!
We were not fine – and it didn’t even have to do with how hard it was.
So to start this hike of insanity when no one who worked there could point to a freaking path beginning, we followed buses that were going a little bit farther up the road, which was super freaking scary and dangerous – this was a mountain path road, meaning it was winding and narrow and buses careen around the bends without expecting to see people walking. It was scary and dumb but it was literally the only way to start the climb, apparently. What the hell! I can’t get over this, considering how big an attraction this climb is. Where were the starting signs, Huangshan! Get your shit together!
The worst part, though, wasn’t how miserable the weather was making us. It was how miserable the weather was making the view. Or, rather, there was no view anymore. We had come to Huangshan, I NEEDED to see Huangshan, because the view from and of the mountain is considered one of the most magical sights in all of China, a must-see, just beyond comprehension how gorgeous it is. And we could barely see three feet in front of us, let alone anything in the thousands of feet below us. It was like we were just standing in the clouds, and there was no seeing anything outside of the clouds. It’s a real shame that we couldn’t enjoy the whole point of this experience and destination, merely because of bad luck and timing.
We continued. One more hour, we said. We can do this. One more hour and we can relax in our overpriced but should-be-decent hotel (all the hotels up at the mountain were overpriced for what they were because they can be, but still, hotels), we can take a warm shower and put on dry clothes. And maybe tomorrow would be better, and we could wake up for sunrise over the vista. So we trudged. One foot in front of the other. We were literally willing our feet to take each step.