Photographing Tenerife, Viewing Things Differently Through a Lens

A thought occurred to me as I focussed my camera on a sun-dappled, tree-lined street populated by smiling strollers wearing chic summer clothing; the women in colourful, light cotton dresses of various lengths that complimented their curves; the men in loose shirts and three-quarter length pants that were both casual and stylish. The camera liked them.

The thought that occurred to me was that my camera likes some places on Tenerife more than it likes others and that has possibly fashioned my view of some of the towns and resorts on the island.

Over the years I’ve photographed many towns, resorts, villages and hamlets on Tenerife for print and web publications. For many of these I use the images to compliment the text by trying to show the subject at its best. This isn’t always easy as there are lots of places on Tenerife that I don’t find particularly photogenic.

You can more or less point and click in La Orotava and get a result

The old towns and cities are easy. There are places like Garachico, La Orotava, La Laguna and Santa Cruz that I could return to again and again and still find new things to photograph. The rural places like Masca and Santiago del Teide have scenery to boost their lack of streets and historic buildings.

Towns with a fishing community have harbours, colourfully bobbing boats, fishing nets piled high and grizzled fishermen and those are always good subject matter.

Hill towns can sometimes pose a challenge, especially when the population has grown and breeze block buildings are in the majority like in Santa Ursula, La Victoria, La Matanza, San Miguel de Abona and Granadilla de Abona. But these have history and there are always quirky corners to uncover.

It's got a church and the buildings are inoffensive - but it's 'blah' lifeless

It’s the purpose built resorts where I struggle. Remove the beach from the equation and there’s usually very little left to interest the camera. Being new they don’t even possess any urban grit.

Funnily, Playa de las Américas, which is often unfairly held up as Tenerife’s tackiest resort by those who don’t know it has a lot of potentially interesting shots. Whereas once I move away from the beach at Playa del Duque in ‘upmarket’ Costa Adeje my camera positively yawns with boredom.

Worst of all are the purpose built resorts without a beach where the architecture is new-ish and often characterless. What the hell do you photograph there? And if there’s no sunshine, forget it. I’ve tried Callao Salvaje, Playa Paraiso, Golf del Sur and Costa del Silencio a number of times and never been satisfied with the result.

I tried to use the holes in the wall in Playa Paraiso...but still no cigar. Just can't get a decent picture.

Of course that could be my limited creativity, but search Flickr for any of the above and the evidence suggests otherwise.

The upshot of this is that there are places on Tenerife that bore me in photographic terms and subsequently I avoid spending time in them.

Another thought occurred to me as I focussed the camera and that was the people in the photograph. I point a camera up La Noria in Santa Cruz and the people in the frame are very, very different than if I point it along the promenade at…say…Puerto Colón. But that is the topic for another blog completely – and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to go there…for the moment.

If there’s anyone who has managed to get really good shots of the places that I mentioned I struggled with (I don’t mean HD, sunsets or over processed so that they don’t match what the eye sees) I’d love to see them.

The Development of Tenerife, the Long & Winding Road

I’ve driven around Las Américas and Costa Adeje many, many times. But I always take what seemed like incredibly circuitous routes to get anywhere.

Last weekend, after crippling myself on 12 Beaches Boulevard I got the chance to see which route Tenerife’s bus drivers used to travel between Los Cristianos and Fañabe.

We had a look at taxis first but, after noticing that the fare from the centre of Los Cristianos just to the port was €5 I figured that as I’d never paid to get screwed, I wasn’t about to start now.

With a bit of advice from bus route guru Colin Kirby, Andy and I boarded the 417 bound for Guia de Isora. From Los Cristianos to just before San Eugenio the route was pretty straightforward, but it was from there I was really interested. Blow me if the bus driver didn’t take the route I thought that I must have always gotten wrong. To get from one part of Costa Adeje to Fañabe on four wheels you really do have to cross the TF1, go round a couple of roundabouts and re-cross it again.

I’ve always suspected I was missing something, but no – it is actually a complete mystery of road planning. It just doesn’t make any sense and betrays that someone wasn’t exactly looking at the bigger picture when they were developing the area.

As we turned this way and that way on a convoluted route from A to B, La Laguna popped into my head. The reason being that when La Laguna was being developed nearly 5 centuries ago, the grid layout used for the town was revolutionary. It was such a logical and clever layout that many South America cities used it as a blueprint.

This thought occurred to me; is it possible that five centuries ago road planners on Tenerife were smarter and more advanced that they are now?

As an epilogue of sorts, when we crossed into the Fañabe the bus headed back towards PDLA before turning and coming to a halt at a bus stop. It was quite a distance from the hotel, so I advised Andy that we should stay on the bus until it got a bit closer.

My heart fell when the bus, instead of taking the road I thought it would, headed right back across the motorway again in the direction of Guia de Isora, presumably because there was no way to rejoin the motorway from the side I wanted to be on (those pesky road planners again). Thankfully we managed to get off on the other side nearly opposite our hotel, so it wasn’t a disaster and we didn’t end up with an unplanned trip to Guia, but it was a close call.

What’s the Weather Like in Tenerife? Finding the Answer makes the CIA seem like Choirboys

If anyone was to compile a list of the most popular question asked about Tenerife, I’m willing to bet that ‘What’s the weather like?’ would be head and shoulders above every other question.

What people don’t realise is that by asking that question they could be entering a murky world of intrigue, subterfuge, double bluff, misdirection and deception where it’s difficult to know who you can trust?

If you really want to know the truth about Tenerife’s weather, tighten the trench coat, light a Lucky Strike and allow me to introduce you to the players.

Tenerife Weather from Travel Agents
Firstly it’s easy to weasel out who you can’t trust – and that’s anyone selling you a location. The simple rule is anywhere they have accommodation, the weather will be fab. Anywhere they don’t will no doubt be cold and wet.
Always, always seek a second opinion.

Tenerife Weather from Official Forecasts
You can trust official forecasts…yes? Absolutely Not. Any report that gives one forecast for Tenerife should be completely ignored. The island is made up of a series of micro climates and weather patterns in different parts of the island vary considerably, as does the climate between the coast and the hills.
I know a hamlet where it can be raining on one side of the village and bone dry on the other – and it’s not a big place.

Therefore, weather forecasts from somewhere like the BBC for example have limited, or no value. The most reliable forecasts are ones like AEMet (the Spanish Met Office) which break down their predictions into separate municipalities on Tenerife. But even then, many readings are taken at a few hundred metres rather than the coast, so in winter forecasted temps will be lower than the coast and in summer might be higher.
But as we’ve discovered with our weather check on Walking Tenerife, even AEMet aren’t infallible.

Tenerife Weather from Webcam Images
The camera can’t lie? Damn right it can. You’d think that a quick check of the webcam for the area would show you exactly what the weather is like, but it ain’t necessarily so.

First of all there’s the spin. The webcam picture which always shows unbroken sunshine. I’ve clocked a couple of webcams on Tenerife that do this. With these you have to actually click on the image to see a live stream – dastardly, eh?
On the other hand, there are a couple of webcams that unfortunately broke on a cloudy day. At the moment Los Gigantes and El Socorro look as though they’ve been under perpetual cloud for weeks. The people in these places don’t know how to play the weather game.

The other thing about webcams is their position. Point a webcam out to sea on Tenerife and more often than not, you’re going to see blue skies – doesn’t matter whether you’re in the south or the north. The reality is that the image on screen is not always a true picture of what the weather’s actually like.

Not having your webcam in a ‘smart’ position can work against a place. Look at this webcam looking towards Puerto de la Cruz…

…and a photograph taken in Puerto at the same time.

Weather Reports from Someone Who is on Tenerife
So that leaves on the spot reports of the weather from someone who’s actually there. That has to be accurate and trustworthy doesn’t it?

Firstly, like official weather forecasts, you can immediately dismiss anyone who says ‘I’m on Tenerife and the weather is…’ and then simply gives one umbrella report.
But then, putting the people who think that Tenerife is only the two streets around where they live aside, we enter a really confusing world.

A few weeks ago on different forum sites there were varying views from different people in and around Las Américas about the same week . Two people commented on the fact that it rained; one questioned what was up with the weather as it was cloudy then sunny and the last remarked that it had been a lovely week.
I’ve read forums where people in the same town have argued over each other’s take on the weather.
I’ve seen people report on disappointing weather in the north during their holiday in a week where the sun shone most of the time.

I’ve sat beside someone who was telling a friend on the phone that the weather was glorious when actually I thought it was quite overcast.

What it seems to boil down to is this: one person’s sunny with a bit of cloud is another person’s cloudy with a bit of sun.

To be fair, the weather here can change in no time. So depending on where someone was and what they were doing at certain times of the day, it is feasible that two people in the same place can experience different weather. But that doesn’t account for all the variations.

All of this would make it terribly confusing for anyone trying to find out what the weather is like on Tenerife and who they can trust…except for one important factor.

The default setting for weather on Tenerife – all coastal areas of Tenerife – is warm and sunny changing to hot, hot, hot and sunny in the summer months.

Clearly there can be variations and sometimes cloud and rain, but Tenerife has been known for its year round good weather for centuries and that hasn’t changed one iota.

You can trust me on this…then again, can you?

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.

The British Guild of Travel Writers in Tenerife – Did They Find the Real Tenerife?

There was a moment on Thursday night at the gala dinner in honour of the British Guild of Travel Writers, visiting Tenerife for their AGM, when I suddenly felt like Alice through the looking glass.
The Disney-esque setting of the luxurious Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque combined with a laser show, which made feel as though I’d just tripped the hi-tech alarms in a heist movie, created a scene which was bordering on the surreal. I thought back to the previous Sunday when I was in San Antonio in La Matanza’s upper reaches for the San Abad celebrations.

Gran Hotel Bahia del Duque

Up there, sharing a bench with a pair of narky looking eagles and filling glasses from a carafe (a pepsi bottle) of sultry wine from the kiosk owner’s own vineyard seemed like the most natural thing in the world to be doing on a Sunday afternoon. That’s the Tenerife I know best. The plush, luxury hotel setting would be as alien to the people I had mingled with the previous Sunday as their world would be to most of the people who temporarily populate the tourist conurbations in the south of Tenerife.

But that didn’t make it any less real. It was simply a different face of Tenerife. In fact the gala dinner was a lively and enjoyable affair and Andy and I met some truly interesting people – no surprise there I suppose. If you’re passionate about travel and other cultures and you mingle with people who clearly share this passion, then their company is almost guaranteed to entertain.

The Tenerife Cabildo (government) had laid on a series of very diverse excursions to expose the BGTW members to the many different faces of the island and to try and drive home the message that Tenerife is much more than the tiny, purpose built area which grabs much of the attention…outside Tenerife that is.

Real Life in Tenerife's Hills

Pretty much all of the people I spoke to praised the organisation and the effort that had gone into showing them Tenerife. Although some trips had impressed more than others, most members seemed to have learned things about Tenerife that they hadn’t known previously.

I’m hoping that the learning process has been two way. In the short time I had to speak with various guild members it was obvious that their wealth of expertise and experience could help the Tenerife Tourism Board enormously. John Bell pinpointed marketing strategies which could revolutionise the way Tenerife is perceived in Britain. Sarah Monaghan’s knowledge about eco-tourism was a deep well which was there to be drawn from and Michael Howorth’s insight into the yachting fraternity’s view of marinas on Tenerife should have had tourism board officials scribbling furiously. I could go on and on.

If the powers that be on Tenerife are serious about the island modifying its media image so that it attracts more visitors who have an interest in the culture of the island rather than just its temperatures then they also have to adjust. They need to learn to listen more to and, more importantly, follow advice from external sources.

What impressions the BGTW will take away from their visit to Tenerife we’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully they will have been exposed to enough of the real Tenerife to convince them that Tenerife is full of, ironically given its annual amount of visitors, ‘undiscovered’ treasures.

However, my heart sank when I woke the morning after the gala dinner to read that after the dinner some journos had headed straight to the infamous Veronicas in Las Américas.

No prizes for guessing what they encountered there. I’m sure their visit was motivated by journalistic fascination, but just in case it wasn’t I’ll repeat what no doubt will be inscribed on my tombstone…

That is not a part of the real Tenerife; hell, it isn’t even representative of Las Américas these days.

Things That Make Me Go ‘WOW’

The recent 7 Rockas Festival in La Laguna made me think of Bruce, and Bruce made me think of a guy I met in Las Américas, whose name I forget, when we were putting together a magazine feature.

The bloke in Las Américas seemed to model his behaviour on the Colin Farrell character in Phonebooth. He wore designer clothes, a designer watch and talked consistently about his flash car, other people he knew with flash cars, attending flash events with models on his arms… he talked money, money, money. His conversation left me as cold as the Arctic Circle (actually in these times of climactic change, probably colder).

Bruce on the other hand was a very nice bloke I met on a trip up the Yangtze. Bruce taught me a simple trick with two wine corks which confused and ‘wowed’ me. Clearly, as it involved wine corks, we had been partaking of the odd glass or 5 of wine and so it probably wasn’t that difficult to confuse me. It’s a useful little trick to know whenever a ‘party piece’ is required (unfortunately it’s impossible to describe in words) and it impressed the hell out of me.

Our friend Sarah has done lots of things which have also impressed me no end. She’s climbed to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro for charity, been a dead body on the beach for the cover of a crime novel and gave up a very good job in the NHS to go and work for the VSO in Sri Lanka.

A while ago we interviewed an eye specialist in Santa Cruz who goes out to Mexico a couple of times a year to administer free eye treatment to the poor – I was very impressed by him.

On the same trip that we met Bruce we also met Joan, a ninety year old woman travelling on her own. She was as fit as a flea which was impressive in its own right, but what really impressed was a throwaway line as we flew across a piece of desolate land somewhere between China and Russia where we could see the occasional camp fire flickering beside large shadowy tents.

“I once spent the night in a tent with a prince down there,” She remarked and said no more, lighting my imaginative blue touch paper.

At a party a few years ago some people were talking about what they’d just been doing work wise. One bloke mentioned that he’d just finished making a movie about Bob Marley. As I’m a movie buff and had just read the review in Empire movie magazine, I was really, really impressed by that one.

The reason why Bruce made me think of Phonebooth man was that they existed at opposite ends of the spectrum. Phonebooth man and people like him try to impress everyone by parading material goods, but ultimately there’s no substance to them. Bruce and the other people I’ve mentioned haven’t actually set out to impress, they just did things that were, to me anyway, incredibly interesting and therefore impressive.

But what’s all this got to do with the 7 Rockas Festival in La Laguna, I hear you say?

Part of the 7 Rockas Festival involved an air guitar competition which reminded me that Bruce was the proud father of the UK national air guitar champion.

How impressive is that?

Supporting Puerto de la Cruz’ First Woman Mayor – Politics on Tenerife

On Saturday as most people headed to the beach to try to cool down with the help of the Atlantic Ocean, Andy and I stood in blistering heat chanting ‘NO A LA MOCIÓN, NO A LA MOCIÓN,’ and ‘QUEREMOS A LOLA’ with somewhere between six to eight hundred other supporters of Puerto de la Cruz’ first ever female mayor, Lola Padron.

Lots of placards expressed people's feelings.

It’s been fourteen years since the last time I took part in a political rally. The last one involved wearing gorilla suits outside the houses of parliament and being introduced to the Right Honourable Tony Benn, this one was on a much smaller scale.

What was particularly nice about it was that people weren’t in Plaza Europa to protest, but to declare their support for Lola Padron. Whereas a protest a couple of weeks ago by people opposed to Lola had involved a handful of old guys shouting angrily outside the town hall, this show of support include men and women of all ages, singing and chanting at the tops of their voices to let Lola know that her attempts to improve the town weren’t unappreciated.

Lola came out of the town hall to meet her supporters for a short time before going back inside and re-emerging on the balcony, clearly emotional. It was impossible not to be moved by the event and be stirred by Lola’s inspirational and heartfelt speech.

A Show of Solidarity (Lola's the one in red)

The funny thing is that what initially pricked our interest in what was happening politically in Puerto wasn’t because we particularly supported Lola or her party – we didn’t know much about the politics of the town to be honest. It was because of a TV programme on Mi Tierra TV. I’ve mentioned this programme before, but the vitriol that was being spouted on this programme left a really bad taste in the mouth. Every time we watched it, we felt ourselves mouthing the same word – fascists.

It’s ironic that a programme supporting a political party should actually arouse such emotions that it makes you start listening to what their opposition has to say, but that’s what Mi Tierra achieved.  It helped convert us to supporting their political enemies. Smart eh?

What’s going on here is grass roots politics. It feels like a battle between the old order and the new. A move from politics that belong in the past where towns were run by which family had the most money and influence to council leaders being chosen because of their ideals, not because of who they are. Some people don’t like that.
You know what one of the insults levelled at Lola was? That she was trying to turn Puerto into Playa de las Américas. That tells you what these guys think of the visitors who bring their money to Tenerife.

Politics for me have become very simplistic here. I look at Lola’s eyes and listen to what she has to say and I see and hear sincerity. I do the same with the opposition and I see hatred and hear insults – it makes it very easy to choose which to support.

Which is why on a searing hot Saturday afternoon we did a ‘Citizen Smith’ and chanted and sang (or hummed along anyway) with the good people of Puerto at a political rally – by the way what’s Spanish for ‘Power to the People?’

Support for Lola Padron outside the town hall

Is it the End for Playa de las Américas?

You’ve heard it here first, within a few years, maybe sooner, the resort of Playa de las Américas on Tenerife will simply cease to exist.
This news will come as a terrible shock to those millions of Brits who return year after year to enjoy its promise of almost guaranteed sun warming its man-made golden beaches and its lively bars and tribute act heaven nightlife.

For those who consider themselves travellers rather than tourists and for whom the mere mention of those four words Playa-de-la-Américas elicits the same reaction as if they’d just been served a montadito topped with a fresh dog turd, the news is unlikely to ruin their day.

‘So how come I haven’t heard anything about this before?’ I hear you ask. That’s because nobody is admitting it, but it doesn’t take a Robert Langdon to spot the writing on the wall.

Playa de Troya - Once in Las Americas...but no longer

First it was the rise of Costa Adeje; a few years ago an ambitious young upstart hanging on to PDLA’s wild and reckless shirt tails. But now it has spread its wings, reclaiming parts of the coastline which everyone who holidayed there once knew affectionately, or otherwise, as PDLA.

The invasion has spread as far as the two beaches which are officially still called Playa de las Américas I and Playa de las Américas II, now renamed Playa de Troya I and II lest anyone should think for a second that, god forbid, they are actually in Playa de las Américas.

This little manouvre has worked well with potential visitors who would never dream of staying in such a ‘downmarket’ resort as PDLA, but it’s confused the hell out of those who have happily been holidaying in PDLA for years. I’ve seen outraged debates from some visitors who love their holidays in PDLA, but now find themselves holidaying against their will in Costa Adeje, even though they haven’t actually changed location.

...and if this is no longer PDLA, where the hell is?

Technically there’s a valid reason for this; the area which has metamorphised from PDLA into Costa Adeje always was in the municipality of Adeje. Rightly, or wrongly, Costa Adeje has more of an up market image than its neighbour, so from a marketing point, it works in its favour to ‘rebrand’ and I’ve watched with amusement as PDLA has continued to ‘shrink’ over the last couple of years.

What took me completely by surprise was finding out that the Hotel Conquistador, which I always believed to be in the heart of PDLA is in fact in Los Cristianos. It must be true, I’ve just read it in the Arona Ayuntamiento website.

What this clearly means is that PDLA is now shrinking from both sides and soon will be no more than a fond, and possibly blurred, memory for the millions who visited over the years.

At the moment, by my calculations, PDLA now consists of three rocks on the beach in front of a rather tacky souvenir shop selling ‘Keep PDLA Common as Muck’ T-shirts and one Brit bar where they you can get a pint of beer and a roast beef and yorkshire pud meal with all the trimmings for €1.50.

Everywhere else, of course, has gone way, way upmarket.

Confused? Join the club.

Does anybody actually know anything about Tenerife?

To keep up to date with what’s happening on Tenerife you have to be out and about pretty much constantly. A couple of times a month we head ‘down south’ and this week we travelled to Playa de las Américas (PDLA) and Costa Adeje.

The trip to Playa de las Américas was mainly to research an article we’re writing and to take some photographs; the trip to Costa Adeje was to meet up with some friends, Irene and Dennis, who were on holiday in Tenerife.

The perfect beach...not a grain of sand out of place

I find PDLA one of the most difficult places to photograph on Tenerife. As much of it was built in the 70s, the architecture (apart from a couple of the newer hotels) isn’t particularly inspiring. There are no grand old mansions, quaint cobbled streets or charming harbours; the beaches are immaculate, but that’s part of the problem. Sun beds and palm covered umbrellas lie in neat rows…it’s too regimented.

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with it. PDLA is looking clean and pristine and for many visitors it supplies exactly what they want from a holiday; it’s just that for me, apart from the coastline where the surfers hang out, it lacks character.

The coastal promenade, known as the geranium walk, is a pleasant way to see the resort, but at certain points there are packs of lurking timeshare touts waiting to prey on unsuspecting tourists like starving hyenas.

I don’t have a problem with timeshare touts, they’re friendly enough and everybody’s got to make a living, but it becomes tiring hearing ‘Hi mate, avin’ a good holiday?’ ‘Are you English?’ and the likes over and over again.

We were ignored by most; being dressed in long sleeved tops and trousers when everyone else was in shorts and T-shirts, the sun was shining and it was 22 degrees must have been a bit of a clue that we weren’t on holiday. Some didn’t pick up on that and we were stopped a couple of times with a ‘Hi, enjoying your holiday? Where are you guys staying?’

“We’re not on holiday, we live here,” I replied on both occasions.

Of course, they never believe that one, so their counter to this was a suspicious.

“Yeah, whereabouts do you live?” Clearly expecting that my face would turn red, I’d start stammering and then I’d admit I was lying.

“In Puerto,” I answered and in both instances the reaction to this was exactly the same.

“Where?”

One of them even asked if it was on the mainland. Both touts had been on the island a few years, but their knowledge of it outside of the place they worked and lived was virtually non-existent.

The second discourse happened as we were on our way to meet our friends and all the way to their hotel I chuntered on to Andy about how it never ceased to amaze me how many expats living in Tenerife didn’t seem to have much of a clue about the island at all.

We had a lovely time catching up with our friends and time sped by so quickly that we were caught by surprise when a young Canarian friend of theirs, who hails from Santa Cruz and who lived with our friends for a while in the UK, turned up to have dinner with them.

The woman with the big boobies

Irene introduced us and told us that earlier in the week he’d shown them around Santa Cruz and had taken them to see his favourite female, ‘the woman with the big boobies’ in a lovely park in the capital.

“Ah, Fecundidad,” Andy commented.

“What?” he replied.

“Fecundidad…” Andy repeated and then switched to English when he shrugged his shoulders. “…Fertility…in Parque García Sanabria.”

He shrugged again.

Our conversation about the island went from bad to worse as Dennis and Irene’s friend became more embarrassed when he couldn’t identify a picture of a flower on a postcard which Dennis asked him about (it was a strelitzia – the bird of paradise). As I watched him laugh nervously as Andy jokingly chided him for not knowing the island’s most famous flower, previous conversations with two Canarian friends popped into my head.

When we first started to research info about Tenerife, we used to ask them about phrases, or words which we were unable to translate. Their replies were invariably the same.

“I think I was ill the day they taught that at school,” one would reply.

“It was probably a sunny day when they taught that, I’d have gone swimming,” the other would offer as an excuse.

I realised then that it was unfair to level a lack of knowledge of the island at anyone irrespective of whether they were born here or moved here.

It’s our job to know as much as we can about Tenerife for Real Tenerife, Going Native in Tenerife and Living Tenerife. However, when I lived in Stockport  if you’d asked me a question about the town, the chances are I’d have given the same response as the lad from Santa Cruz; shrugged my shoulders.

On the other hand, living on Tenerife and not having heard of Puerto is an offence which is difficult to defend.

So do you or don’t you serve curried speckled tree frogs?

Yesterday I was in Playa de las Américas when I noticed this menu board.

Thank god for that - I was well and truly bored with sauted lizard spleen!

Now , I know exactly what sort of food we have here in Puerto de la Cruz, but I’ve always assumed that the sort of food dished up in many hostelries in PDLA would, if anything, be on the conservative side. This aint some rash assumption, it’s based on the experience of reading comments on travel advice sites like this one from a couple of days ago from an English lady who was looking for a suitable restaurant for her husband:

“He will not eat garlic or any type of spices, can anyone recommend any good quality PLAIN EATING ESTABLISHMENTS serving any type of meat or poultry which has just been grilled…”

What really tickled me was that she then went on to say:

“Please do not suggest Macdonalds we like the more refined restaurants…”

Oh, really? Sounds like it.

Anyway, this menu has had me doubting my original assumptions. Clearly if this establishment feels the need to advertise that they serve ‘normal’ food, everybody else must be dishing up much more exotic concoctions than I’d realized; maybe along the lines of those mentioned in my friend, Pamela’s ‘you are what you eat’ blog.

Oh, and if anyone knows what ‘normal’ food actually is, could you please send your answers on a postcard to…