The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

 

 Back in 1980, I read "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," Douglas Adams' sequel to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Like most books that I've read, I now remember very little about the plot, but at the time and in the ensuing years it continued to evoke a feeling of a place perched on the edge of time and space which all manner of life forms from different civilisations frequented.

 I recalled the reactions that the descriptions induced when visiting Jema el-Fnaa, the square in the centre of Marrakech. It provides a gathering point between two worlds at the threshold of the Sahara where the people, sights and sounds converge to create a unique encounter for the visitor.

 Moving on from Sao Miguel described in my last post we arrived in Horta on Faial. Immediately that awareness of the boundary on the rim of the familiar world was invoked again. In the past Horta provided a stop-over for trade ships ploughing across the Atlantic Ocean, it then emerged as an important whaling post and then in the 1960's started to give refuge for yachtsmen on long distance passages and adventures.

 The pace is slower than in Ponta Delgada. Sun-wrinkled men with long, grey hair, dried by the sea and sun, sit in Peter's Cafe Sport; you assume they arrived here by sailing boat years ago and never left. You are over dressed if you forgo shorts and an array of tattoos. This is a port where high heels and painted nails are most definitely taboo.

 

 

 

The view across the port, dotted with yachts from both Europe and America, is dominated by Pico, the dormant volcano on the neighbouring island of that same name which towers 2351 metres above sea level although often hidden by cloud. Seeing that emerge beside us as we flew in by small plane was astonishing. The climate feels lush and tropical, at least in July and the harbour is decorated with pictures painted by visiting sailors in an effort to guarantee good luck on their onward voyages.

 

The town has an attractive black sand beach in a bay that accommodated a whaling factory with stories of how the water turned red when a catch was made and the giant mammal pulled to the slipway. Fortunately only a museum in the premises of the old factory and boats offering whale watching to eager tourists are the present reminders of the savage trade on which the islanders relied for their survival.

 

Away from the town, the weather denied us a view of the large caldera responsible for the creation of most of the island. We did, however, visit Capelinhos which last erupted at the end of the 1950's extending the land area of Faial, only for much of the extension to be claimed back by gradual erosion from the waves.

 An island with an appropriate pace of life for retirement? Perhaps not. Lying above the tectonic plates of the mid Atlantic, the Azores continues to be home to 26 active volcanoes and that's before we consider the earthquake that occured on Faial as recently as 1998, damaging 35% of its buildings and rendering 2,100 people homeless.