Street Sledding in the Canary Islands

 Funchal

Hi Readers, 

I'd like to share a post with you all that occurred 4 years ago when my wife and I were on a cruise that took in the Canary Islands.

Funchal is one of the Islands as you can see on the map, the main ones are to the south.

You might recall they have been in the news the past few months due to the huge volcanic eruption.

Such a beautiful part of the world, we visited a number of the islands.

Anyway, back to Funchal.

All of the islands are quite mountainous, with many cliffs extending all the way to the sea.

On Funchal, they have these wicker baskets on sleds that are driven down the streets from the top of one of these mountains.

They are driven on the roads that the cars use, and share the roads as traffic.

The road that they use is glistening smooth after so many years of these sleds travelling down the path for a few km's. When one encounters an intersection, the sleds get right of way as they are too hard to stop suddenly. 

Thankfully they have a traffic guy stationed at each intersection to stop traffic, however on our descent we did have a hairy moment when the worker was a bit distracted and a car nearly came through as we were going across the intersection!!

As we did our descent we had two drivers standing on the back. For the entire trip they just talked non stop to each other, hardly worrying about what they were doing, probably as they'd do it so many times each day.

What the clips don't capture is the real speed we were going at, as it was quite fast.

On long corners they'd make the sled drift from side to side which was quite exhilarating to say the least !

Also, they'd let the speed really build up, then leave the braking to the latest moment.

The scene at the top of the mountain.

Off we go....

 

And further down the mountain...

This was an amazing day, probably made even more memorable by the bus trip to the really high point of the mountain. The road was so narrow and windy that at some stages I could put my hand out the window and touch the mountain, while at other times I'd look out the window and not be able to see the road as we were so close to the edge.

Maybe share that in a future post.

Well readers,

That's it for today.

For my teacher friends who are all going back to school with the kids today, I'm thinking of you all.

Especially the very kind teacher who has stepped in to look after my class for the time being while I am occupied elsewhere for a few months.

Until my next post...

Cheers 😁