“And it’s my birthday too!” I added needlessly but truthfully. Even I could hear how pathetic that sounded as the worlds tumbled uncontrollably from my mouth. People need to know it’s your special day when you’re seven, not in your late fifties. I was only adding to what was already probably a gentle sense of concern in the eyes of my rescuers, all of whom were decades younger than me. “What a strange, hapless old man,” they probably thought, and were only prevented from saying by their own politeness. “Happy birthday!” came a small volley in response. “It would have been a shame to get lost on your birthday.” Until that moment I’d almost forgotten what day it was – and staggering to a lonely death in plunging temperatures at an altitude of over eleven hundred metres above sea level didn’t seem the best way to mark the occasion.
Ten minutes earlier, I was confident I’d find the way back to the car easily enough; despite it having disappeared completely from view three hours beforehand, I’d only wandered two or three hundred metres at most. Five minutes after this, I was approaching the early stages of panic. What light there was had started to fade as the thick fog that hung over every inch of my world darkened slightly, giving me no indication of exactly where I was. There was no discernable path that I could see. I was in no doubt that I’d walked past the big lone tree earlier, but I couldn’t remember exactly where from. I was sure I’d had the fence to my left, but now there was more than one fence to choose from. Maybe it had been on my right side after all? I had passed a group of three small benches, but now they appeared to have been removed by the local council while I’d roamed the trees, pointing my camera at every shape that loomed out of the fog and into the viewfinder. While the five layers I was wearing and the continual wandering around had stopped me getting cold, Bill Bryson’s tales of hypothermia induced insanity in “A Walk in the Woods” appeared at the forefront of my mind. If I didn’t find the car, or the road before darkness fell, I was going to be in trouble. Again, I studied my phone; there’s a place at home where I always get lost and where Google Maps always sets me right again – but we weren’t in Ladock Wood at the moment and the location service on my phone was still firmly of the opinion that I was at the bottom of the mountain in Ribeira da Janela. And why had I left my head torch in the top flap of the suitcase? Hadn’t I specifically brought it on this holiday for these moments I’d spend blundering around in the dark? The truth was we’d only gone a little way up the hill six hours earlier for a pastel da nata and a cup of coffee in the café that had been recommended to us. The rest had crept upon us, slowly and certainly as we headed further up the mountainside and disappeared into the mist, so far in fact that Fanal became the obvious destination.
And what a destination it was too for that matter. Under its white shroud it delivered everything and more that I’d hoped for. Six hundred year old Laurel trees, each of them distinct from the others, each of them full of character, shaped and bent by the elements over time. Every one of them cloaked in gowns of dark moss and an abundance of tiny green ferns. Like the proverbial seven year old in the sweet shop I lost all sense of time and meaning as I immersed myself in a landscape like none I’d ever seen before. An intimate and compact landscape where only what was visible existed, and what I couldn’t see was irrelevant. Specimens such as Treebeard here seemed as though they might uproot themselves at any time and tread away into the fog to converse with old friends. Over the nearly eight years since photography became something more than holiday snaps, a handful of places that I’d probably never otherwise thought of visiting had stood out in my mind as the memorable ones, and now Fanal Forest had crashed the party and joined the A list. I can only wonder at what the fog was hiding from me; what I might have seen on a clear day. Somewhere nearby there’s a lake, but for now it remained undiscovered somewhere down the slope. It begs me to return - I like having reasons to go back to places.
But as I took my last shots and eventually persuaded myself that it really was time to go and find Ali, who was waiting in the car with the novel she’d picked up from the shelf in the house where we were staying, I realised that I wasn’t quite sure which way I’d come. With the shroud tightening around me, the knot of woodland between the car and I had disappeared completely, and the big lone tree was the only marker that I was certain of. If I could find the road I’d be ok – it would just be a case of walking up the hill a bit – but what I wasn’t sure of, was whether there were any nasty surprises lying in wait. Madeira is full of enormous vertical cliffs and I wasn’t certain of what lay out of sight. I set out from the big tree a second time, then a third and a fourth, before returning to what I knew. And then I saw the figures, grey shapes moving through the landscape ahead of me – five of them chattering away happily to each other; very probably the group I’d silently cursed an hour earlier as they’d posed for selfies in the middle of the composition I was eyeing up. With no idea what language I was listening to, I raced along behind them, calling out to my unknowing saviours.
We were in a car park now. Not the one we’d pulled up at earlier in the day, but at least I now knew where the road was, and finding my way back was assured. There’s only one road up here after all. I began to walk along it but the rescuers called out through the darkness, insisting they drive me back to my car. One American among them, the rest were from Slovenia, a country full of mountains. I guessed they knew what they were about in a place such as this then. I was glad I’d found them – full of kindness and friendship. Within minutes I had been returned to my car, where Ali had given up reading and begun to wonder whether she’d ever see me again. I thanked my new friends gushingly and waved until their cars disappeared down the track into the approaching night. Maybe I was being melodramatic – I’d probably have found my way back eventually, but for fleeting moments I was definitely beginning to get worried. As birthdays go in middle age, it had been the most memorable one in years; a bit of a close shave, something that I hope never happens to Treebeard here - he'd lose something of himself I'm sure you'll agree.
A few days later we returned to Fanal after walking the nearby Levada do Risco, where it had been clear and sunny. Again, ending up here was inevitable, and this time we thought we would have very different conditions. Yet as we crept down the slope, glimpsing the one and only cloud inversion of our fortnight through the windscreen at a spot with nowhere to stop as we did, the fog rolled in again. This time I parked in the big car park and made certain of my journey into the mystical forest. This time I took photographs on my phone to show me the way back. This time I tore myself away before darkness fell, and I found the car without the help of a team of mountain guides.
“Here is a town to shame the world,” wrote William L Shirer of Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital in March 1937. “It is full of statues and not one of them a soldier. Only poets and thinkers have been so honoured.” It was a paragraph that struck me profoundly and stayed with me when I read it, and ever since I did so nearly twenty years ago, I resolved to one day visit Slovenia. Maybe it’s time now. Maybe I’ll watch my step in the mountains and make sure I’ve packed my bivvy bag.
I hope you have a lovely weekend, and I hope for your own wellbeing you meet some Slovenians along the way to guide you if you're in the hills lost in fog.
