Madeira is a paradise for the holidaymaker.
Unfortunately, the 5 local bus companies can also make it a confusing island where public transport is concerned.
A vital first step after deciding to holiday here is, to avoid delay, book yourself a Madeira Airport Transfers to transport you to your chosen hotel.
Next, when you are browsing through the leaflets deciding what to visit and, more importantly, how to get there, hire transport from an established Madeira Taxi company.
Having dispensed with the essentials you may be surprised to learn that Madeira has a tragic recent past.
Looking at our capital city - Funchal - right now, you would scarcely believe how devastatingly hit it was by flooding and mudslides in February last year.
February 20th is the date that will live in my memory forever.
The newspapers of the world and television news stories encapsulated just a fraction of the horror, but the news was so awful that it soon dominated the media throughout the global village that is our earth.
The preceding winter had seen wet weather that the island was unaccustomed to.
The thin earth that commonly covers the mountainous volcanic rock that spawns Madeira Island was already saturated to the brim.
The last few hours of downpour that fell on that Saturday in late February was the final straw.
Widespread flooding became inevitable.
Several areas were severely affected: Funchal, Monte, Curral das Freiras, Ribeira Brava, Serra d'?gua, Tab?a, Ponta do Sol, Calheta, Santa Cruz, Camacha.
Miraculously, my residential area was spared of any destruction and thank God it was a Saturday morning and my relatives were all safe at home.
As it all got worse from around 10am, they could well have been in serious danger, had they left the house early in the morning, as they normally do on a working day.
Also, compared to what went on, I must say what we had to deal with was of minor importance: no mains electric power for a few hours - we used a small radio on batteries to follow what was going on.
Once the power supply was restored we were faced with yet a further reality - the cable connection had been cut, so no television, and no telephone based communications - including the Internet.
As I conduct the everyday running of our business through the Internet, I was worried about any emails from our customers that I couldn't access.
After 60 stressful hours normality was restored.
By then I had about 70 unread messages, each, without fail, asking me if we were all alright, God bless them! The older district of Funchal was left submerged beneath a mixture of water, mud, stones, debris, broken branches from trees...
Inevitably, this debris got into each and every crevice it could find.
Shops, restaurants, shopping centers, supermarkets, parking lots, each was left with a task of extensively cleaning up to do.
Authority workers came out on to the terrain and did all they could, in order to have Funchal back to some semblance of normality as soon as possible.
Cleaning teams, together with shop and restaurant owners and any local people willing to help, worked really hard, day and night.
The residents are forever grateful, one can only marvel at the effort expended, they were so unbelievably quick and hard-working.
Once most debris were taken care of, reconstruction started straight away.
For our sake, and for the sake of our island, because we couldn't risk losing one of Madeira's main sources of income - tourism.
Reputations are difficult to build but quick to be knocked down! Fortuitously, the hotel region suffered nothing at all, but the thought that Madeira was disfigured, would, most certainly, keep tourists away.
Today, almost one year since that destructive day, there are still a few things that need to be done.
However, now everybody is more ecologically conscious and appreciates that some behaviors are potentially dangerous and need to be avoided at all costs, like building too close to our water channel.
Never before can a lesson so hard learnt have been so widely reported.
So, everybody reading this, thinking if it's still worth visiting our mid-Atlantic paradise - of course it is, the island is as beautiful as ever and welcomes you with all it's heart.
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