The Antidote to Falling out of Love with Tenerife

The sad truth is that I fell out of love with Tenerife in June 2011. But I didn’t realise I’d fallen out of love with the place…until it charmed me back again.

Saying I’d fallen out of love with Tenerife is a bit misleading. Whatever happens in the future, Tenerife will always hold a special place. It wasn’t the island I was tired with, it was some of the people who inhabit it.

I can trace the problem back to our trip to Costa Brava in early May. There we met professional, forward looking and ethical people who put themselves second to what was best for the location they were promoting.

It highlighted for me that this isn’t always the case on Tenerife. On returning to the island this growing dissatisfaction with how things and businesses are run here was added to by an unfortunate sequence of experiences. The sad thing about Tenerife is that I now expect a lack of knowledge and professionalism…and I’m rarely disappointed. There are examples of business practices here that would be laughed out of any serious business in the more savvy parts of Europe. People who don’t turn up for appointments or worse, bugger off somewhere when they’ve made an appointment don’t appear big or important to me. They come across as unprofessional and incompetent. Busking doesn’t make me think they’re knowledgeable and flashing bling doesn’t impress it merely makes me think that the person hasn’t a clue about what they’re talking about and that they’re crass.

When you’re used to dealing with highly professional people, as we were before we moved to Tenerife, dealing with people who employ the business tactics above is just depressing as hell. So, after an unusual run of experiences related to the above, by the middle of June I was well and truly hacked off with the place.

There’s a story super video blogger Diego Pons told me recently about sheep standing in the way of the Transcantábrico luxury train in Asturias. The train driver blared his horn but the sheep didn’t move. He hit the horn again and again, but still they stood on the track, their blank eyes staring at the oncoming train until it ploughed straight into them. They were too dumb to move out of the way of what was inevitable. Sometimes business dealings on Tenerife remind me of those sheep.

But then came the week beginning with the 23rd June. And what happened that week swept all the buskers and bling brigade under the carpet.

A sultry night in Santa Cruz listening to wild man Andy J. Forest growl his way through spicy Louisiana blues whilst swigging from can after can of beer, playing a harmonica and what looked like my mother’s washing board as well as entertaining us with tales of nonsense brought me back. Santa Blues reminded me what I’d been dealing with over the previous few weeks wasn’t the real Tenerife.

The next morning I dragged myself out of bed to watch goatherds and caballeros from the Orotava Valley drag their livestock kicking and screaming into the harbour waters of Puerto de la Cruz.

The following evening at a music festival I stood beside an old fort at Playa Jardín as the sun illuminated Mount Teide. It was a sight that caused one of the performers at the European Music Day concert to gasp and proclaim it was the most beautiful setting for a concert she’d seen.

A day later I was at my neighbour’s Moroccan barbecue with people who were the antithesis of those who’d caused me to fall out of love with Tenerife; a Canarian teacher from La Camella with her two talented sons; one of whom was a musician/painter the other a marine biologist with his charming wife. They were smart, witty, interesting and interested and despite their obvious talents possessed absolutely no airs and graces.

A few days after that I was strolling the streets of La Laguna admiring the Corpus Christi flower carpets when a girl engaged me in conversation because I was photographing her friend’s alfombra. We debated (me poorly as it was in Spanish) whether La Orotava’s or La Laguna’s flower carpets were the best whilst people around us ooh’d and aah’d at the displays. I’m never completely comfortable talking in Spanish, but I felt more comfortable on that old street than I had during the first part of the month when most of the dealings had been in my own language.

By the end of the week these experiences reminded me why I feel so passionate about Tenerife. The antidote to falling out of love with Tenerife had been to dive deep into the real Tenerife once again and completely cleanse my body and soul of that other place.

Corpus Christi Flower Carpets on Tenerife 2010: The Final Touches

On a blisteringly hot day on the eve of the Corpus Christi celebrations in La Orotava on Tenerife, a handful of alfombristas (master carpet makers) put the finishing touches to this year’s tapestry made from the sands and soil from Teide National Park. Here are a couple of shots to give you a preview of the almost completed work of art.

The theme this year is The Last Supper and the three main designs feature traditional religious imagery with a Dali influence in the centrepiece. As always the detail in the images is breathtaking, with clever little transparent touches – look at the detail even in the bricks behind the figures.

The overall carpet is livened up this year by the presence of butterflies of varying sizes fluttering around the edges of the giant sand picture.

Once again these maestros of sand art have come up with a masterpiece.

Island Life: From the Island of Bute to Tenerife

Last night I dreamt of Bute again…and the haunted hotel on the hill.

I’d never thought about how small Bute, the island I grew up on, was until Jose pointed out to me that El Hierro was a bigger island with more of a population…jeez, that made Bute seem really small.

I hadn’t really thought about Bute for a long time, but a couple of things recently had me reminiscing about the island ‘doon the water’ as it used to be referred to by holidaymaking Glaswegians. The first was when Andy, Jose, Colin Kirby and I had taken some time out from the hot steep La Orotava streets during Corpus Christi to have a beer and some pinchos in the cool leafy shade of a guachinche beside the town hall. I was telling Jose about the fact that people born on Bute were called Brandanes after St Brendan, coincidentally also the name of the Canary Island’s legendary eighth island (I’m not counting those other little ones near Lanzarote), San Borondón. I’m not sure how we got on to the subject of Bute, I think it was something to do with links between Scotland and Tenerife, but as we were speaking pretty bad Spanish (clearly not Jose); it could have been some other reason altogether.

The other thing that made me think of Bute was an excellent interview with Jack Nicholson I’ve just read. The interview was about the experiences he had working with Stanley Kubrick during the making of The Shining.
The Shining is the scariest book that I’ve ever read and the reason it reminds me of Bute is for the same reason that the book terrified me. At the time I read it a thousand years ago I was an impressionable youth working as a night porter in a grand old Victorian hotel which dominated the hillside overlooking Rothesay Bay.

As if choosing a book like The Shining to keep me company in the dead of night wasn’t foolhardy enough, at the time I read the book the hotel was closed for the winter and most of the lights were turned off to save on the electricity bills. Part of my job involved walking the corridors with a flashlight to make sure everything was in order. If you know the plot of The Shining you’ll realise that, whilst you probably couldn’t have dreamt up a more appropriate environment for reading The Shining, it might not have been the smartest move I ever made to read it under these circumstances. I spent night after night positively crapping myself.

There were places in that hotel which terrified me; places which sent the hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention like soldiers on parade. The toilet outside the ballroom where a guest had once been found dead, Elvis style. Every time I passed Room 201…and I don’t even know what happened there. I could tell you two or three tales of incidents which convinced me that if there weren’t such things as ghosts, there were some things at least that I couldn’t explain away…but maybe another time.

Anyway, these incidents reminded me of Bute and funnily my mum, who still lives on the island, phoned as I was writing this. My mum’s 77 and still works. She looks after old people would you believe? That cracks me up. She’s just told me about a woman she helps who’s 101. Last time she visited her, the old dear asked my mum to phone the police because her mother had gone out and hadn’t returned!

The funny thing is that Bute is an absolutely stunning island; especially the bit that crosses into the highlands…it is a scenery overdose. And yet I’ve hardly got a photo of it. I also know far more about Tenerife than I do about the place where I grew up despite it having a history which makes Tenerife’s seem like a toddler.

It’s strange how sometimes you only recognise the uniqueness and beauty of your hometown from a distance.

Corpus Christi Flower Carpets of Tenerife part 2 – Say it With Flowers

It was another stunning day in La Orotava and the flower carpets as always added a sea of vibrant colours to the already ridiculously picturesque old streets. But although the carpets were sensational, there were other things which caught my eye this year. Images and scenes which brought home to me the real essence of La Orotava’s rainbow coloured celebrations – the first was the sight of four toddlers sitting on the ground picking petals from  flowers.

Child Labour in La Orotava

The carpets are clearly the magnet for the thousands of people who visit La Orotava, but having photographed the carpets over the last few years, I was looking to try to take some different shots, so this year I focussed more on the people creating the flower carpets.

"No...it definitely goes there!"

I find them incredible to watch; each family member’s role is clearly defined from the most mundane snipping petals from flower heads to the careful placing of each individual flower to create evocative images. The younger kids are entrusted to carry bags of sacks, a bit of petal pulling and some laying the grass seeds in the less detailed sections…watched closely by the supervising abuelo who barks stern words when they get over enthusiastic. There are even individual carpets created solely by children. It really is an all round family affair which ensures that the tradition will be carried on ad infinitum.

A message of world solidarity...even if the Chinese person has an odd shaped head

The family atmosphere even extends to visitors and although by midday La Orotava is buzzing with people, the chances are that if you’re a resident of any nationality, you’ll bump into someone you know.  At various points we bumped into Colin Kirby (admittedly there aren’t many people with blond hair wearing a CD Tenerife shirt, so Colin’s hard to miss), Phil Crean (composing a photograph with a patience I just don’t possess) and our friend, Jose, who we hadn’t seen since last year’s carpets.
As Colin mentioned in his blog, an attempt to ‘storm the tower’ to get some aerial shots was thwarted. But at least we weren’t physically rebuffed like some overly keen young local lads who also tried to rush the entrance to the Iglesia de la Concepción’s tower.
Thanks to Jose, I did manage to get halfway up the tower at one point and snapped a few quick shots before being shepherded back to ground level by a trainee jobsworth. To be fair, I understood his reluctance to let just anyone up on to the roof. It’s not designed for spectators and somebody falling with a splat on a flower carpet might have been spectacular, but would probably have ruined the day.

From a Room with a View

To get the full sense of what is going on a few circuits are required to see the streets being transformed from being full of crates of exquisitely coloured petals and grass seeds into an open air gallery for floral masterpieces.

The heat of a June day combined with La Orotava’s muscle testing slopes can make it a test of stamina, but the rewards are always worth the effort and anyway a rest stop at a Guachinche every so often rejuvenates. One of the things I noticed was that carpets retain a similar theme each year. Some alfombristas stick to traditional designs or religious imagery whilst others use more contemporary designs which need a bit of contemplation to figure out. Thankfully Jose provided priceless information when we were stumped. I just couldn’t make out what one carpet was at all until he pointed out it was a fallen angel.

Here's Angel...but where's Buffy?

As the day progressed, the town became a little less manic and ironically by the time many of the carpets are having their last petals placed, between 4 and 5pm, the streets were relatively quiet. It’s a good time for photographs, but we were shattered. I knew that I really should complete another circuit; that the best shots lay out there waiting for me.
“Home?” Andy suggested.
“Absolutely.” I answered without hesitation. At least for us it’s only a five minute drive.
We strolled past the church again and headed down hill. A little kiosk beside the church was buzzing with some of the alfombristas who, now that their work was done, were enjoying the late afternoon sunshine with a caña in their hands. It looked inviting.
“Cerveza?” Andy suggested.
“Absolutely,” I replied without hesitation.

That’s the problem with this colourful family affair; it’s very difficult to drag yourself away from it.

Click here to see a slideshow of the La Orotava Corpus Christi Carpets

La Orotava, Corpus Christi on Tenerife 2009 – Part 1

An evocative image made from sand and soil

I always like to take a trip up the hill to La Orotava the day before the main Corpus Christi celebrations to watch the alfombristas (carpet makers) put the finishing touches to the main sand tapestry outside the Ayuntamiento (Town Hall).

The weather hasn’t been kind to the alfombristas this year. An unseasonable heavy downpour of rain a couple of days ago must have caused a few squeaky bum moments, but a sloping canopy saved the wonderful work of art. An alfombrista told me it’s actually the idea of wind that…errr puts the wind up them, so not the disaster it could have been.

This years offering is quite magnificent, as good as that of two years ago and the centrepiece is an incredibly vibrant image despite being created solely from volcanic soil. Don’t take my word for it, here’s a preview of the near finished masterpiece which will be unveiled in all its glory tomorrow.

The Centrepiece of the Sand Tapestry 2009

Have a look at more images here.

Just stick to what you do best.

"Are you 100% sure that's the famous Millenium Drago Tree?"

Ayuntamiento (council) websites on Tenerife can vary enormously in quality…those that actually exist that is.

One that I would have expected to be on the ball, especially in relation to content which would be of interest to visitors, is Arona’s; the municipality which is home to Playa de las Américas, Los Cristianos, Costa del Silencio and Las Galletas.

And sure enough they recently launched a new website aimed specifically at visitors. It’s bright and simple enough to navigate around.

However, I think they could have left out the ‘And Don’t Miss’ page of the Cultural section. When I think of ‘Must See’ locations on Tenerife, Masca, the rock pools of Garachico, the Casas de los Balcones in La Orotava, the Millenium Drago Tree in Icod, Mount Teide and the old town of La Laguna all spring to mind; the Almácigo de Arona – a nine metre mastic tree – doesn’t. And the picture of it didn’t convince me that this was a ‘must see’ that, until this point, I’d never heard about.

Then I noticed the entry titled ‘museums’ which intrigued me, because I couldn’t really think of any museums in Arona offhand. When I had a look through the list, I understood why; none of the museums included were actually located in Arona. They were all in either Santa Cruz, or the north of Tenerife.

These are just me being picky, Andy will eagerly confirm to anyone that’s willing to listen that it’s a bad habit I have, but what did really get me started on my moan about the website was the picture that went with the Corpus Christi entry in ‘Events to Remember’ under the ‘Get to know Arona!’ section. The text is about the flower carpets in Arona Casco and the picture is…from La Orotava.

Now the municipalty of Arona has many ingredients which make it a very attractive destination for holidaymakers, but depth of historic culture isn’t at the top of the list, that’s the north’s domain…stop trying to nick it!

BUT…glug…I DON’T…glug…HAVE A…glug…GLASS!

Following the summer fete atmosphere of Corpus Christi, the Romería de San Isidro Labrador and Santa María de La Cabeza in La Orotava was a much more rumbustious affair. We’d been to the San Roque Romería in Garachico before, but this was a much bigger event. Up to 75 decorated carts pulled by lumbering huge beasts, rumbled and rolled through La Orotava’s quaint streets, followed by an assortment of gaily dressed men, women, lads, lasses and various donkeys, horses and other creatures.
The first surprise was seeing the fiesta queens leading the parade on the backs of a couple of camels (or were they dromedaries?). Where they looked elegant at the flower carpets a couple of days previously, here they looked decidedly edgy and smiling for the cameras came second to actually staying on their irritable carriages .
From 13:30 oxen drawn carts filled the streets. Children in traditional costumes leaned over their wooden sides handing out papas arrugadas (delicious salty potatoes), gofio cakes, eggs, almogrote sandwiches and, bizarrely, bags of popcorn. However, the real goodies were to be found at the back of each cart where the men folk turned savoury chistorria sausages, pork kebabs and slabs of meat on makeshift barbecues, filling the air with smoke which stung eyes and teased nostrils. Vino del País (potent country wine) was also being distributed from the backs of the carts; a fact which sort of explains why the longer the romería lasts, the livelier it becomes.

One of the things I love about the fiestas here is that they’re not exclusive. If you’re there, you’re part of it and nobody minds that you’re clicking away with a camera; quite the opposite in fact. Everybody wants their photo taken. I tried to focus on a ridiculously cute donkey and four girls jumped in front of the camera.
“Saca un foto, saca un foto,” they screamed.
Two lads in scarlet embroidered waistcoats, breeches and designer sunglasses didn’t want to be left out.
“AQUI, AQUI,” they shouted.
As Canarios danced and sang (I could be way off base here, but it sounded to me that there are only about three songs in the Tinerfeño repertoire) their way through the afternoon, the distribution of food and wine became more enthusiastic. At one point I thought I saw a man kissing a guinea pig. It turned out he was quaffing wine from a goatskin pouch. I have to admit to being disappointed, but I lined up the camera anyway. As I did, a hand grabbed my arm.
“Vino, vino?” A smiling young man held up a bottle of red wine.
“No, gracias,” I replied, but he wasn’t having any of it.
“Si,” he insisted, pushing the bottle my way.
“Pero, no tengo un vaso(but, I don’t have a glass).”

Apparently that wasn’t a problem. The bottle was at my lips before I knew it. By this point it would have been seriously rude to refuse, so I opened my mouth and swallowed for what I was worth, hoping that I wasn’t going to drown in his generosity.
“Bien,” he shouted after he’d poured about a quarter of the bottle down my throat. He laughed, patted my shoulder and moved on to bestow his gifts on some other unsuspecting soul.

It occurred to me that my British trait of thinking I was being polite by not accepting everything that was offered to me was way out of place here. In fact it’s rude not to accept the overwhelming amount of food and drink that comes your way, even if it means that by the end of the day you’ll be a fat, but happy drunk. Okay, I can sign up to that, but next time I’m bringing a glass.

Tonic for the Soul – The Flower Carpets of La Orotava

The murder of the mouse played on my conscience; we had cash flow problems due to late payment of overdue earnings; there had been a water burst in the banana plantation (which had at first resulted in seriously poor pressure, then the water company ‘fixed it’ leaving the area without any water at all), but sitting on a pavement outside a palm frond fronted ‘guachinche’ (makeshift bar) in the company of Andy, Pamela from Secret Tenerife and her friend, Jose Mesa with the sun on my face and a cold ‘Dorada’ in my hand during the La Orotava Corpus Christi celebrations proved the perfect antidote to what, up until that point, hadn’t been the greatest of weeks.

It’s amazing how a cold beer, or two, on a sunny day can help you see the world through rose tinted spectacles again, especially when you also happen to be immersed in an atmosphere as warm as the sun’s rays. The Corpus Christi daytime celebrations had the air of a summer fete; full of smiley happy people enjoying the world famous floral carpets and themselves.

A couple of circuits of the carpeted streets had flooded our senses with the most wonderful sights, sounds and smells:

Freshly cut moss, herbs, delicate perfumes from a million petals, barbecued pork, candy floss, hot caramel; the bells of the Iglesia de la Concepción ringing out joyously, competing with jaunty riffs from a group of Asturian pipers and drummers; an image of Jesus Christ made from volcanic sand with a second image, ghostlike, hidden in the design; three nuns admiring a floral carpet of a boy and a lamb; fiesta Queens smiling and posing for anyone who asked: chic elegant young ladies wearing white lace headdresses and picture postcard streets filled with the most vibrant, imaginative, beautiful and painstakingly created floral carpets.

It was, quite simply, a perfect day and a tonic for the soul.

It’s not every day you get accused of being an assassin!!

It’s funny the impact that apparently irrelevant choices can have on how your day is going to pan out. This morning I threw on a T-shirt for the simple reason that it was clean and didn’t need ironing. How was I to know that I’d end up face to face with a group of visiting exiled Miami Cubans who would take exception to the three images of Che Guevara on my chest?
I simply wanted to change my bank details with the local water company, but previous experience told me that this little job would take all morning, so I decided to mix pleasure with business and use the visit to photograph the La Orotava flower carpets which were being laid out for the Corpus Christi celebrations on Thursday.
The carpets attract visitors from all over the world and by the time I reached the town hall there was a multi-national crowd craning to get a good view of the designs. The town hall’s balconies are perfect for getting a good shot of the carpets and it was from one of these that I inadvertently caused a ‘Bourne Identity’ moment. As I swapped places with an elderly gent on the balcony, he looked in my direction, scowled, and mumbled something in Spanish. Before I could say ‘serious mistaken identity here’ I was surrounded by a group of men and women pointing at me and shouting “Asesino, asesino!”
Apparently one of them had lost their father during the Cuban revolution and another claimed that he had shared a girlfriend with Che and that he’d had to leave the love of his life and flee Cuba for America to avoid death. The sight of me wearing his image even as a fashion, as opposed to a political, statement sent them wild.
I apologised for accidentally offending anyone, but added that Che Guevara was actually a hero to some people which started them ranting again, and so I diplomatically retreated back to the mind-numbingly boring, but safer confines of the queue outside the ‘Consorcio de Tributos’ office and like everybody else filed another couple of hours of life in the ‘unnecessary use of my time folder’ as we quietly waited our turn.