To The Azores - Part 5 - Transit to Furnas

View of the Camillia Fields at Gorreana Cha Plantation

We had originally planned on getting a view of the caldera of Mt Fugo but it is too cloudy today. (It turned out to be too cloudy all week so we never bothered going up there. We went to a view other places where the fog was so dense you couldn't see anything so I am going to assume that the view was the same).

We did stop in some interesting places:

Sete Cidades: (Seven Cities)

View from Lip of the Caldera

Our tour leaders mixed up the days activities some to try and get good views of the calderas that we were visiting. However, we were very cloudy up high for pretty much the entire trip. The Sete Cidades hike was conceived as hike on the caldera rim with a stunning view of the twin lakes of the volcano down there in the valley. The clouds were so think, however that the view would have been more like the person walking in front of you. What we did instead was descend into the caldera and do a little hike partially around the larger (blue?) lake. These two round lakes are connected at the center and when viewed from above (and with the right lighting) one appears to be blue and one appears to be green. Our guide informed us that the traditional story told was of a princess on one side of the valley falling in love with a farmer’s son on the other side of the valley. They said their last goodbye on the bridge over the passage between the lakes. She had blue eyes and her tears filled up one lake, he had green eyes and his tears filled the other. Good thing they didn’t have brown eyes, I say. Oh, the truth of the matter is that it depends on where you stand. One lake tends to reflect the blue of the sky and the other tends to reflect the green of the caldera wall. Like that.

The Walls of the Caldera were Lush with Invasives.

Note Clouds obscuring rim of Caldera (no looking down from there)

 

Portable or Mobile

On our hike we did more talking about the dairy business. We see a lot of dairy trucks running around, these are small pickups with big stainless steel tanks in the back that I assume are filled with milk. We had been told that there were Portable milking machines that the farmers deployed that could be taken to the cows (instead of having them in a barn). These portable machines are built in the Azores. Well, I was envisioning some sort of big suit case like machine that the farmers slung into the back of these pickups and used them to fill up the tanks. I mean, Portable.

I asked our guide for more technical details. 

“Oh,” he says, "I see one right over there in that field.”

I look.  “You mean inside that green shed?”

“No, it IS the green shed”.

“You said the machines were portable”.

“Yes, that shed has wheels. You can pull it with a tractor”.

Ah.

Websters says that portable is “Small and light enough to be easily carried or moved”.

A cell phone is portable. A folding chair is portable. A car is not portable. Even though it is easy to move around.

On the other hand, my Daughter teaches 5th grade and she works in a Portable Classroom. Is it easily carried? No. Is it easy to move around? Hell no. You know as well as I do that once those things get planted they never get moved. Even if you wanted to move them, you would need a tractor trailer to budge them. Why would educational professionals, of all people, allow for something like that to be called ‘Portable’. What would I call them? Perhaps ‘Prefabricated’ or ‘Transportable’ or 'Really Ugly and why would you put our children in them?". But I digress.

Which just leads to more confusion with our Guide. Luckily for the world, our guide, unlike the educational system of the United States, has the sense to listen to me. He started calling them ‘mobile’, which is OK with me. A car is mobile, so anything you can pull with a car is mobile. I would call them a ‘Mobile Milking Barn’. Visiting the Azores is so fascinating.

This is either a centuries old farm house or a
New Modern Summer home. I forget.

 

We did not spend a lot of time in Sete Cidades. We have a Tea Plantation tour to attend and then we have to get all the way to the other side of the island for our hotel this evening. We were told that Sete Cidades means “Seven Cities” and is believed to be named after the 7 distinct craters that are found inside the Caldera. (I looked up the difference between a Caldera and a Crater and found like 3 different scientific results all conflicting somewhat with each other. This is why I don’t let geologists tell me how to solve my life problems.

Making Tea: (Gorreana Tea Plantation)

On our way to our next hotel on the island. We stopped at the oldest continuous tea producing plantation in Europe. That is, the oldest place that has continuously grown and processed tea. It was founded around 1850. This was after oranges became no longer profitable and some other crop was needed. Tea manufacturing is much more interesting than I was aware. I thought there were different plants for different kinds of tea, especially for the main differentiators of Black and Green. 

However, at least according to our tour, all tea comes from the same plant, the Chinese Camellia. (yes, the camellia).  All of the tea comes from the new sprouts off of the top of the bush. The new leaves come in groups of 3, a small , a medium , and a large. The small is processed for Green tea, the medium is processed for black tea, and I couldn’t make out what that last leaf was processed for though they referred to it as ‘broken leaf’.  This means that each of the leaves needs to be picked separately, or perhaps picked and then separated. After that they are processed in slightly different ways. The green tea is steam sterilized and then slowly dried. The black tea is dried more quickly, at higher temperatures, that creates oxidation and the darker color. 

The factory was pretty neat, they had all of the power that runs the conveyer belts and the shakers and the cleaners and the driers running off of belts and spinning bars like they would have originally done if the factory was run by steam or perhaps by watermill. The guide said that one of the ways that the plantation has stayed open and profitable over the years is that they have their own water source that they use to generate 100% of their own electricity. 

The fields of Camellia are very geometric and sized such that the picking machines can be run with wheels down either side of the bushes. Unclear to me exactly how these machines work, I will look for pictures. There were not any out in the fields when we visited. It is the wrong time (either of the year or of the day or of the cycle). 

Power to the factory distributed by belts and wheels.
Just like in the water or steam era!

A green tea shaker

The hedgerows are spaced such that the picking machine
can roll down the rows.

Ginger LIly -

Ginger Lily is an invasive large leafed plant with a pretty flower (that we didn't get to see) that was imported into the Azores during the big Orange growing times. During these year, the Azores were the major supplier of Oranges to Europe and growers on the islands made a lot of money. With their lots of money they built nice big houses (many of which you can still see) and made large plantations and then proceeded to engage in trendy occupations like formal gardens of exotic plants. Many of these exotics escaped the garden and have lasted long past the Orange years to plague the island.

Ginger Lily is everywhere but especially up the hard to get to canyons of the upper volcano slopes. It just covers everything with its 4 foot long stems and broad leaves. I didn't realize what a pest it must be until I saw some of the expanses of it up near Furnas (Furnash).

Our guide told us that there is a new exotic, a Rhubarb, which is expected to be even worse once it takes hold. Perhaps the two plants will slug it out.

That something rhubarb

Lago de Furnas – 

We are staying for our last few nights of the tour in the pretty village of Furnas (pronounced Furnash). This place is defined by Fire and Water. They have a lot of water. It is running everywhere. It flows down the center of town in a large fast moving creek. So much water that they use it liberally for constant irrigation of the narrow yarrow fields that line the creek elevated banks. The water is also coming out of the ground all over the town in little artesian springs and hot spots. Some of the water that comes out in springs is naturally sparkling and cold. In other places it is heavily flavored with Sulphur and can be arbitrarily hot, even boiling. And so the fire, there are hot springs and fumaroles scattered around the town and the adjacent dormant caldera. I tried some of the spring waters when we stopped for a little sightseeing just before debarking at the hotel. There is a little area (like a public park) that is filled with many places where the water comes boiling or pouring out of the ground. There is also a little creek that runs through. You can see that the hot and sparkling waters must come from a different source than the creek as the springs are up above the creek. The springs all come out of little pipes or larger reinforced holes. Though the holes are pretty close to each other (between 2 and 20 meters) they each have a different name (printed on a tile sign and usually named after a saint) and a claim of different healing or other magical properties. I tried one of the cold ones. It was slightly sparking and tasted pretty good. Then I went down some steps and some of the hot into my metal water bottle. It was much too hot to taste. In fact it made my water bottle bottom to hot to carry. So I mixed it with a different cold sparkling one that I found by walking on flat stepping stones across the creek.  This resultant mixed tasted heavily of Sulphur and something else but I sort of liked it. I drank maybe a cup of the mixture. Later I did not feel so good. I felt flushed and a little strange. Perhaps I was just constipated, perhaps I misunderstood the comments by the guides and I wasn’t supposed to drink from the hot ones. Not sure I want to chance repeating the experiment at this point. Nice to know that it is possible to get all natural sparkling water, however. I wonder why they don’t offer it at the hotel. Perhaps it is not good to offer something that isn’t covered by some sort of purity testing before bottled. Of course, if a stupid tourist happens to drink water that comes out of a pipe in the wall…. Well, that is a different story.

Yes, that appears to be boiling water

Our hike for the day was around the Lago de Furnas, the lake that has formed in the Furnas Volcanic Caldera. To get to the lake, you have to walk a half mile up a steep hill from the town. Yes, the lake is uphill from the town, though both are in the larger structure that could be argued is part of the Furnas Volcano. In the 1600s there was another lake that was in a slightly higher and smaller Caldera, but a large earthquake caused the collapse of a wall of that crater and the water poured down into the Furnas lake. Our guide said that the same thing could happen to the town of  Furnas if a large quake or eruption were to disturb the wall of the caldera above the town. Always a little excitement with these tour guides. 

We are walking our biggest hike today, almost 7 miles. About halfway were are going to be visiting the Furnas Monitoring station to receive a scientific briefing on the work of the monitoring station. Myself and many of the other peoples on the tour had assumed that the station was monitoring volcanic activity, but this is not the case.

The lake in the Caldera

Lake house

Centuries of wanton dairy farming have caused great damage to the water quality of the Furnas Lake. The cows and the farming practices that were used introduced a lot of fertilizer and cow excrement and other nutrients into the local streams and these streams all ran down into the lake. These nutrients caused the growth of algae and other small water life which then proceeded to clog and ruin the pretty lake. The lake is currently only about half of its historic depth because there is 20 feet of decayed materials accumulated there. The Acorean government (in what I think is an unprecedented move) decided to take action to reverse this situation. They bought up all of the farm land and moved the farmers to other lands on the other side of the drainage ridge. Then they did a massive effort to clean up the farm land and convert it over to a sustainable and non-destructive silage use. This was a big multi-year effort and required a lot of trash removal. For instance, our scientist informed us, the farmers used to store their silage (ground up corn and/or hay) under large plastic tarps that they would weigh down with old car tires. When they were done with it, they would just leave the tires sitting. The cleanup crew had to remove some 6000 tires (and the lady scientist said she knows because she had to count them in order to pay for their removal). I am guessing that at the time used tires were free because there was no place to recycle them on the island and no place to throw them away (well, I guess there was the sea. Hate to look down there). 

The fields were all replanted with many different species of clover. Clover has the following advantages: it fixes Nitrogen from the atmosphere, so it actually enriches the soil, It can be used by local beekeepers to make excellent honey, and it can be harvested and then shipped to the same displaced farmers to use on their new farms as silage. In effect, the scientist having been spending a lot of time and effort to teach the local diary farmers how to do sustainable farming. 

The machine that cleans out (harvests?) the weed like algae

A Bamboo Farm. Invasion? 

One of many stump carvings along the path

Recovering our Lunch

One of many public mineral springs

Have these efforts yielded any good results? Yes, but they are measured in the form of fewer bad things rather than good things. For instance, this year was the first year on decades that there wasn’t a huge algae bloom in the lake. The following is Jon guessing: The lake has a long green plant/weed that chokes the water and makes it dangerous to swim. Our guides keep referring to is as algae. Since our guides have a lot of botany training, I am assuming that they are right and it really is an algae, perhaps somewhat related to giant kelp (another algae). That weed algae is harvested with a big harvesting machine, not sure if the weed is useful for anything other that compost. My assumption is that the algae bloom was another algae, perhaps the blue-green algae that makes poisonous blooms in the Willamette river during some really hot summers.

The goal of this entire process is to reverse the Nitrification of the lake. (OK, I thought our guide said Nitrification, or perhaps Nutrification. But Nutrification isn't a word and Nitrification doesn't make sense (since it only happens under ice in a frozen lake. Some searching comes up with the word: Eutrophication), perhaps eliminate the algae (by starving it). And turn the lake back into a usable recreational resource. 

During the hike it struck me that it would be pretty great if we could do that in the states with a similar lake, like perhaps Klamath Lake in southern Oregon. That lake is also choked with weed and algae from all of the farming run-off. It would be pretty hard to buy up all of the farms uphill from that lake, however. Not something that I think the Oregon government has the wherewithal to pull off. It is, perhaps, too much of a forward-thinking project to be expected of Americans. I guess we did really well when we set aside the giant US Parks and Forests in the west of the country (Not soon enough to set aside similar chunks of land in the east).

Geothermal Energy - 

Since we are touring around a place that not only has a lot of geothermal energy but has actively been using it for a couple of centuries I thought I would take a moment to talk about the use of Geothermal in modern ways in the Azores. This is the use of Geothermal energy to generate electricity (which our lecture called ‘power’).

We sat in a meeting room at our very nice little hotel in Angra and received a little slide show and lecture from the head of Geothermal in Terceira. She talked about geothermal in general but also about specific uses and amounts in Terceira and Sao Miguel.

My take-aways on this:

1. There is a thermal gradient from Earth’s Core to the surface. To make efficient use of geothermal energy, you need a large gradient close to the surface. These happen at hot springs and volcanoes. This means that geothermal isn’t for everyone.

2. Geothermal is not just “let the steam turn the turbine”. It is much more complex and expensive than that. Because of this it is only cost effective in places that have lots of heat and other resources are more expensive (like on an island).

3. The use of the energy is also dependent on there being groundwater that is being heated and rapped in an underground aquifer.

4. The Azores wants to have around 50% of their power supply be renewable. They are at around 42% right now and most of that is Geothermal.

5. The amount of Geothermal energy you can get out of a site is calculable. You can’t get more than that out without diminishing the resource.

6. It is difficult to quickly increase or decrease the power coming out of a geothermal generator. This means that this method is good for a base layer power as opposed to ‘on demand’.

7. The very hot steam and water that comes out of the ground is chock loaded with caustic salts and chemicals. It cannot be used directly for power generation. Instead, it is used to heat a special liquid (not water) that is then used to spin the turbines in a closed loop system. The caustic steam and water are cooled in this process and then injected back into the ground. They do this for reuse but I suspect they also do it because they don’t want to dump all of the brine on the land and poison it.

8. In Terceira, they are just about at full usage for the resource they have available. If they try to generate more power they will cool things off too much to work.

A field trip to the facility would have been fun. <hint hint>

Terceira Geothermal Plant Image Stolen from Interwebs