Holidays on Tenerife – NoroVirus, Spanish Sport Commentary and Finding the Real Tenerife in Las Américas

I’ve gone right into Victor Meldrew overdrive in the last few days. Exclamations of ‘Oh for God’s sake’ have been coming thick and fast…except that’s the censored version.

The first topic which has left me exasperated is the discussions about an outbreak of norovirus in the south west of Tenerife on Tripadvisor. This is a subject that won’t go away at the moment and there are at least ten threads about it.
I fully understand visitors’ concerns about this. Every November I have concerns about picking up a bug when I go to watch Man Utd in a bar full of people snuffling and coughing with cold and flu germs transported from Northern Europe.

And there lies the irony about the norovirus. Nobody can say where it came from, but there are a couple of factors which sort of point a finger. The first is that it seems to be specifically affecting areas where there is a high British visitor count. The second is that two friends who are nurses in the UK mentioned in passing that wards in their hospitals in completely different parts of the country had been shut down because of the same virus. Oh, and add to this that the Canarian population who don’t come into contact with visitors don’t seem to have experienced the virus and the evidence mounts.

If anyone decides not to come to Tenerife because of norovirus it’s a bit like Columbus and his men saying ‘we ain’t going back to the Americas – they’re full of sick Indians’.

Anyway that was the first trigger. The second was a tweeter from an American who was worried that a 70s degrees forecast they’d read wouldn’t be warm enough. That was okay, Andy replied to them reassuring them that it would be warmer and gave  them links to some of our web pages.

Well she’s arrived on Tenerife having opted for Playa de Las Américas and what was her first tweet? It was one asking if anyone knew where she could get Spanish food in Tenerife with a comment about ‘who knew it would be difficult?’

The answer to that one, love, is anyone who did their research first and didn’t opt to stay in what is probably the least Spanish/Canarian place on the island. Las Américas is a great tourist resort, but it is purpose built for visitors – it doesn’t pretend otherwise. It is not the place to go if you want to experience local culture and food. So don’t stay there if that’s what you’re looking for.

Next one to have me shaking my head in despair was a guy in the Beehive Bar in Puerto de la Cruz on Saturday. The bar was screening the Formula One race on Spanish TV before the Man Utd V Fulham game. A bloke walked up to the bar and asked if the commentary could be changed to English. When Adrian, the bar manager, replied that it couldn’t the customer went into a right strop, mumbling about how he wouldn’t be able to understand it. Another customer pointed out that it being in Spanish didn’t change the names of the drivers or who was in what place, but he wasn’t having it.

“That’s it, I’m finishing my pint and going back to my hotel,” he whined whilst Adrian took it all calmly and without comment. He sees it every week, people moaning about the commentary being in Spanish; he’s much more patient than I could ever be.  I don’t understand these people – they’re getting to see the race/game whatever. Who the hell cares whether the commentary is in English, Spanish or Swahili?

The final rant is reserved for the Canarian management team in Al Campo supermarket. It’s our friend Jo’s birthday this week and she specifically asked for a couple of CDs by Eva Cassidy and Nick Cave. Jo lives on La Gomera and sees Puerto as the big metropolis where you can get anything, she forgets that whilst there are a couple of aisles of CDs in the supermarket, the majority of discs are by Spanish groups. But there are some international artists, so we headed up there yesterday afternoon and started searching through the CDs and that’s when we hit a wall.

Get this – the CDs were not in any order whatsoever. They weren’t in alphabetical order and they were classified by music type. They’d been thrown in willy nilly. It was impossible to find out if they had specific albums without searching through every last one of them. Now whether this lack of organisation is down to laziness or stupidity I don’t know but what it isn’t, is customer friendly – and it’s not smart from a business point of view. How many people walk away without buying saying ‘stuff that for a game of soldiers’?

Anyway, that’s my moan about Americans, Brits and Canarios over – tune in next week for the French, Germans and the Innuits.

Tenerife Carnaval 2009 – It’s Party Time

It's Party Time!

Carnaval is like an insatiable lover; she’s never satisfied until she’s sucked the last spark of energy from you and even then, when your body is an exhausted shell, she demands more and like a love struck fool you have to answer her call; just for that one last taste of pleasure.

I know this only too well from previous Carnavals and with equal mixture of excitement and dread at the pounding my ‘getting too old for this’ body was about to take, I awaited Carnaval’s hedonistic holler.

Only superman or somebody running purely on Billy Whizz could manage to take in the whole of Carnaval in Puerto de la Cruz, so we’d set out a game plan of ‘must do’s’.

Attend the opening parade, first Saturday night street party, Burial of the Sardine, High Heels drag marathon, closing parade and round it all off with the closing night street party a week later…then head to the cemetery and collapse into the nearest grave.

However looking at the first night’s events, I could see us stumbling at the first hurdle, mainly because TV programmers in Britain had pulled a cruel trick. They’d scheduled Man U to play at 17.30 on the opening day of Carnaval. This meant that we’d have to watch the game at the Beehive, then head straight to the opening parade at 20.00. The parade usually starts late and lasts for a couple of hours, meaning it would be about 22.30 by the time we headed for home where it would be a mad rush to get into costume and head back down to Puerto for the street party; knackered before we’d even started.

Then the gods played a blinder. A decent downpour of rain on Thursday afternoon was enough to cause council chiefs to postpone the election of the Carnaval Queen till Friday…when the heavens opened and a deluge of water from the heavens of monsoon proportions resulted in the election being moved to Saturday. Okay this isn’t good news for the people organizing Carnaval, but it did mean that the opening parade was pushed to Sunday night (you can’t have an opening parade when the Carnaval Queen ain’t been picked yet) and we were able to enjoy planning for an opening night which was going to be less about endurance and more about having shedloads of fun.

Christmas on Tenerife – Christmas Eve

Canarians like the Spanish head for home on Christmas Eve (Nochebuena) for a big family meal. Subsequently everything shuts down early and the town is pretty much deserted apart from bars which cater predominantly for visitors. We’d debated whether to go out or not, but decided in the end to make the 3 kilometre walk (forget taxis or buses on Nochebuena) into Puerto de la Cruz to the Beehive Bar. It has become sort of traditional to spend Xmas Eve there. The music’s generally not what we would choose (usually stuck somewhere between 1975 and 1985) but it’s something of a sanctuary for anyone looking for somewhere with a bit of life on Christmas eve, so it attracts Scandinavians, Germans, Dutch, Belgians and all sorts as well as British.

The walk into Puerto de la Cruz was a bit of a surreal affair. There wasn’t another soul to be seen on the streets on the outskirts of the town, it was like the start to the movie ‘28 days later’.
It took us about 40 minutes to make the 3 kilometre trip and as we approached the Beehive our hearts dropped. Every year it seems to be the same song which welcomes us…Mambo no5. Visiting the Beehive on Christmas Eve can be a bit ‘Groundhog Day’, but the staff are very friendly and welcoming and it can be good fun…if you’ve consumed enough combinados to get you in the right frame of mind.
Thankfully ‘Mambo no5’ was just a blip in the matrix and Carlos, the personality barman, had actually put together some new sounds which strayed ever so briefly into the 21st century – he actually played some Scissor Sisters. However, when a ‘Killers’ track came on it was cut short… clearly still just a bit too modern for some patrons of the Beehive.

Adrian, Carlos (no, not Lee Evans) and Santi

What I really enjoy about Christmas Eve in the Beehive are the Scandinavians. I love Scandinavian season on Tenerife. Generally speaking, they’re the nicest natured people going. Some of them also end up as the drunkest people in the Universe, but are smiley, happy people with it. Adrian, Carlos and Santi (the barmen) always hand out cotillons (party bags) and invariably the younger Scandinavian customers end up with two pointy hats on either side of their head which looks a bit like horns…hmmm, horned helmets and Scandinavians? Maybe there’s some subconscious predilection for that ‘Viking’ look that they just can’t kick. Saying that, Andy wasn’t much better, except she had turned our pointed hats into a ‘Madonna’ type bra (personally I think she should drink vodka combinadas more often). I would have posted a photo, but it didn’t get past the house censor!!!

At midnight, Adrian opened the Cava, the music changed to Latino, the Spanish started to arrive and things became a bit hazier all round. Somewhere in the wee small hours we self regulated and decided to head for home just as the town was just starting to liven up around 3.30 with young Canarian locals heading to the clubs to dance off their Nochebuena dinners.

En route we bumped into a Finnish musician from Helsinki with her young daughter who couldn’t find her hotel. As it was on our way we walked with her back to it. She was clearly quite an impulsive person, because when she heard we lived just outside Puerto, she announced that her and her daughter would come and stay with us for a year.

We ‘accidentally’ forgot to actually tell her exactly where we lived before we said ‘goodnight’ and headed for home at a brisk (more of a sprint), if slightly unsteady, pace in case she decided to follow us.