It started with a YouTube video. I came across a channel run by a hiker named Harmen Hoek — he posts these videos of himself hiking remote places all over the world. The Dolomites. South Africa. The John Muir Trail. The one that stopped me was called The Silent Hike, and it was filmed on Madeira.
The idea was simple: hike alone, no phone, no conversation, no distractions. Just you and the trail and whatever comes up when you stop running from it. That concept hit me somewhere deep. It wasn't long before I decided I was going.
What Madeira actually is
Madeira is a small Portuguese island in the Atlantic Ocean, a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. It's volcanic, mountainous, and covered in ancient laurel forest. The island has a network of Levadas — old irrigation channels carved into cliffs and hillsides — with hiking paths running alongside them. The trails are unlike anything in the US. They wind through jungle, cloud forest, and lava rock, often with sheer drops on one side and dripping moss walls on the other.
This was going to be my first real long trek. I'd hiked the Kalalau Trail in Kauai. I'd done various trails in California. But nothing longer than five days. This was ten days and a hundred miles. I was not prepared.
Almost losing my bag before I even started
I arrived in Madeira and my backpack didn't. Flying in with multiple connections, I hadn't realized I needed to check my bag when crossing between countries. By the time I figured it out, the bag was gone. I spent nearly an entire day at a cheap Airbnb near Porto Moniz, pissed off, waiting, wondering if the trip was over before it started. Nature was testing me early.
The bag showed up. I took a taxi to Porto Moniz, on the northwestern tip of the island, and started hiking.
The pack that tried to break me
I noticed the weight problem immediately. I was carrying a Canon 1D Mark III — that camera body alone weighs close to five pounds — plus a full carbon tripod slung over my shoulder like a rifle because it wouldn't fit inside my pack. Add camping gear, food, clothes, and everything else, and I was somewhere around 40–45 pounds.
The first day was steep. Cobblestone roads winding uphill through the forest, the kind of grade that makes your calves burn inside the first mile. At some point I passed a local woman who had to be 80 years old, walking uphill faster than me with a bucket of water in each hand. She didn't even look winded. I'd just come off a desk job at a college internship. The gap between us was embarrassing.
Music kept me going. Some other hikers passed me on the trail, offered some encouraging words. I kept moving.
The Fanal forest
Eventually the trail led me into the Fanal forest — one of the oldest laurel forests in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and one of the most otherworldly places I've ever walked through. The trees are ancient and gnarled, covered completely in moss, twisted in ways that look like they were designed by someone. The fog rolls in off the Atlantic and wraps everything in near silence. You feel very small in there, in a good way.
I set up camp in the Fanal. Got a little wet that night — I hadn't fastened the tarp properly above my tent and paid for it. Fixed that the next morning and moved on through the fog, past fields of cows and a baby calf I got a photo of that still makes me smile.
The rhythm of it
After a few days, the trip found its rhythm. Roughly ten miles a day. Wake up in the fog, pack up, move. The magnitude of the landscape keeps hitting you in waves — you crest a ridge and there's the Atlantic stretching out to the horizon, or you drop into a valley so green it doesn't look real.
I made it to Pico Ruivo, the highest peak on the island. Camped up there and met a few other backpackers. Good conversation, the kind you only have when you're tired and far from home and for some reason that makes everything easier to say.
What it cost me — and what it gave me
I finished the trip. But I partially tore my Achilles heel before the end. All that weight, day after day, on steep terrain — it ground me down. I actually offloaded food and gear mid-trip to other hikers just to survive the last few days. Even then it was a battle.
Madeira was the trip that turned me toward the ultralight world. Not because I read about it or watched videos — because I lived the exact mistake in real time. The classic first-timer error: pack everything, suffer for it, learn. I came home and started taking pack weight seriously for the first time. I pack much lighter now. The Canon stays home.
Why I'd do it again anyway
Harmon Hoek was right about the silence. When you're ten days in and alone and the fog is rolling through the Fanal and you're not looking at your phone or waiting for anyone to say something — that's when you actually think. That's the thing the trail gives you that's impossible to get anywhere else.
If you're thinking about Madeira: go. Porto Moniz is a solid starting point on the northwest end. Give yourself at least a week. And be honest about your pack weight before you leave, not on day three when it's too late.