Sao Miguel and Lisbon
the Azores
|
Sep 1 - Sep 12, 2022
Our trip was very well planned and Sao Miguel Island is much more beautiful than expected. The hotel view was so calming and delightful and the staff was eager to please. However, by the third day, we escaped the breakfast buffet as it was too crowded and the food became boring a repetitious. I may never eat scrambled eggs again.
Our first tour guide was Natasha who took us off-road to see the blue and green lakes at the top of the crater. She was very informative, but we later learned, through our other guides, that some of her information was inaccurate.
Our second guide, Paulo, was very kind while we hiked to the top of the caldera to see Fire Lake. What was not part of the description of this hike is that there are NO restroom facilities and the hike, although labeled "medium" difficulty, was probably only medium for mountain goats. The hike took us approximately 8 hours and covered over 22,000 steps, up a very high mountain (hill) and down the other side. It was worth the hike because the scenery was breathtaking, but became increasingly more uncomfortable because of the lack of facilities. I've never learned to "go in the woods" so that wasn't really an option, and because there were so many other hikers, privacy would have been difficult to find.
Our third guide, Gary, did a really masterful job of driving us into a caldera and hiking us around the lake at the bottom. This hike was the day after we summited our equivalent of Mt Everest, so by the end, we were done and asked Gary to bring the car and pick us up, which he happily agreed to do. We got a very good history of the island and more accurate information. All the cows are not milked by hand but rather with moveable milking machines. I do not recommend booking two hikes back to back as we did, and therefore had little time to recover.
My horseback ride was primarily through residential neighborhoods and the forest was really just overgrown, abandoned land, so not like the forests we saw in the other places we went. Also, the path we took was very littered, which was disappointing, as most of the island we saw was really clean.
The blooming hydrangeas and yellow ginger lilies all over the island were so unexpected.
Our trouble began when we left the Azores and went to Lisbon. The hotel we were booked into, Hotel Mundial, is surrounded by homeless people and the air smelled like urine. My view was of a very old building that looked like a crack house. We found a much better hotel, closer to the water, and moved, which was a pain, but totally worth relocating to a much lovelier and safer part of town where the air smelled sweet. We had to do this on our own because we were told that other hotels were $700 euro per night; we paid $200 euro at the Pastano CR7, which we found while waiting on our tuk-tuk tour, guided by Dominic. I would skip this if I go back. The streets are exceedingly bumpy and the ride uncomfortable. We got only a small bit of history.
Our very best tour was with a different Paulo who took us to Sintra and Cascais. He was so knowledgeable about the country, history, and political changes and made the whole day so worthwhile. He was our very best guide for the entire trip, and he should be requested as a guide if possible.
The rest of our trip was uneventful and restful and we were picked up timely for our trips to our next destinations. I felt that we received a very good value and overall, we had a wonderful trip and learned many things that we will take with us as we plan our next excursion.
Thank you, Bea, and the rest of the KimKim team for making this a vacation we'll remember and talk about for years to come.
Hotel Reviews
The view of the harbor each evening was so relaxing. This is a well-located hotel and very busy.
We changed hotels because this one was impossible to stay in. The neighborhood is surrounded by homeless people who must use the gutters as their toilets, because the air around the hotel smell like urine, and worse. Also, the neighborhood it is in seems to be very shabby and run down. I would never recommend this hotel to anyone who has had experience with better equipped and more modern facilities. I think the in-room hair dryer was an original model from last century, probably from the 1970's.
Activity Reviews
This was my favorite part of the trip; the guide was amazing in his knowledge of the country and was very friendly.
This area was so unexpected in its beauty. We could have been in Colorado.
This hike is rated medium on the difficulty scale, but it isn't or wasn't for me. It was very difficult and parts of the hike are straight up which means other parts are straight down. This is not a hike for people who are not in good shape and have little hiking experience. Sticks would have made this much better, but they weren't suggested. Our guide, who does the hike, probably weekly, didn't break a sweat, but we were exhausted and exhilarated when we finished. The views from the top were worth the trouble. He explained that the government determines the difficulty scale, and I know I would never do a hike they deem difficult. I can't even imagine what that would be like.
