Living in Tenerife: A World of Contrasts

Yesterday we headed west, well south west to be more accurate, to research a potential new walking route on Tenerife. Apart from nearly succumbing to the searing calima heat during the course of the day, we also crossed paths with three old Tenerife friends – irony, aesthetics and environmental awareness.

Irony
The journey to the starting point of the route would normally take about an hour and a half, passing through the lovely Santiago Valley before skirting the hills toward Guia de Isora.

Yesterday half an hour was added to the drive because the normally quiet road was full of lumbering trucks which were too big for the old road which linked Guia with Santiago del Teide. And here’s the irony – why were they on the road? Because they were transporting materials to and from the new ring road; a construction apparently designed to make circumnavigating the island easier.

Personally, I’ve never thought there was much of a problem using the road that’s already there (it’s a beautiful drive)…not until the new road’s trucks clogged it up, churning up the tarmac in the process. We’ve been told that despite Spain’s austerity measures, this new road will be completed – shame. I can only hope that the austerity measures stop some other projects in time to prevent the authorities covering the whole damn coast in tarmac and concrete.

Aesthetics
At one point during our walk yesterday we followed a path along the bottom of a picturesque barranco. Luminous dragonflies and bright yellow butterflies fluttered and zipped about our heads as we strolled past wild vines with only the sound of rushing water to break the silence. The running water wasn’t coming from a babbling brook, it was coming from steel pipes which ran through the barranco.

Most of the time these were hidden beneath the flora and fauna, but every so often they had to break cover to travel up the walls of the barranco. And when they did, they looked like this.

Maybe with a little bit of thought, they might have been placed in a way that was a bit more sympathetic to the landscape. Come on guys and girls, if you want the island to be attractive as a rural destination, look up aesthetic in the dictionary.

Environmental Awareness
We emerged from the barranco at a small, unremarkable modern hamlet. Unremarkable apart from one thing; its street lamps were solar powered.

I’ve never seen these before and was fascinated by them. Now I’ve googled them and discovered what I thought were speed traps on the TF5 motorway, might actually be solar powered lights. How about that?

It just tickles me that in the one area there are JCBs tearing up part of the landscape, steel water pipes spoiling parts of a beauty spot…and environmentally friendly street lamps.

Aaah Tenerife, you’re a confused little soul, but I love you really.

Does the Sun Ever Shine in the South of Tenerife?

I’ve come to the conclusion that the general perception that the sun always shines in the south of Tenerife whilst it’s always cloudy, cool and more than likely raining in the north of Tenerife is an urban myth put about by people who benefit by encouraging tourists to visit the south rather than the north.

As I live in the north, I’ve always known that it was at very least an exaggeration which is regularly fuelled by people who state a variation of the following.

“It’s always cloudy in the north of Tenerife.”

Then when you ask then how often they visit, they come out with something like ‘Oh, I was there for 10 minutes in 1981’.

Anyway, I’ve got very good reason to believe that the differences aren’t as great as everyone has been led to believe… and it’s this.

On Saturday, we left sunny Puerto de la Cruz with the testing objective of completing three walks in the south as research for our Real Tenerife Walking Guides.

When we got to our destination it was cloudy with some sunshine, but as the day went on the cloud became thicker, the temperature dropped to being slightly cool and there was even light rain. This was great for walking, but for taking photographs it was a disaster. There’s no real colour in parts of the arid southern hills, only variations of brown which the low cloud completely washed out. Photographing the landscape was like photographing a bucket of ditchwater.

A Rare Spell of Sunshine Just Before that Big Grey Carpet Descended

As a one off this means nada, but this was the fourth time I’d tried to get photographs in this particular area and each time it had been cloudy.

I remember specific instances exactly because we’re usually doing research for articles and good photographs are a must. A couple of years ago we wrote a series of ‘walking’ features for Living Tenerife Magazine and the one on the south was visually the weakest because the weather had been poor (cloudy) on every occasion we attempted to get some photographs. In fact the section about the Barranco del Infierno was nearly a non-starter as they almost closed the Barranco because of rain.

As we walked in a washed out landscape on Saturday I worked out that out of the last 10 big features we had written about the south of Tenerife which needed photos, I’d lucked out in photographic terms 9 times because the weather had let us down.

That’s quite a statistic

The thing is that I’d never dream of stating ‘the south of Tenerife is always cloudy’ because clearly I know that this simply isn’t the case; just as it isn’t the case with the north coast either. Generally speaking, sunshine is the normal state of affairs for both coasts with the south faring better overall. Sometimes you can just be unlucky with the weather – in my case, apparently 90% of the time when it comes to the south.

Incidentally, there are places on Tenerife which can be relied upon weather wise when I need to take photographs for web and magazine articles. Las Cañadas del Teide is pretty much a guarantee. Alcalá and the triad of Playa de la Arena; Puerto Santiago and Los Gigantes rarely let me down; the east coast is consistently bathed in sunshine and Santa Cruz almost always comes up with the sunny goods.

Cat’s Paradise on Tenerife

We live beside a cat sanctuary between Puerto de la Cruz and La Orotava and I’ve always thought that the cats around here were living in what must be as close to a cat’s paradise as you can get.

That was until we spotted this family whilst walking near La Caldera the other day.

This lot really do live in cat paradise and here’s visual evidence why…

…they live in the grounds of the trout farm in Aguamansa.

Fish on tap; talk about ‘feline’ contented.

Is Tenerife Dumbing Down…or Smartening Up?

The other night we were watching an episode of The West Wing where Jed Bartlet met up with his opposite number in the Republican Party, Governor Robert Ritchie.
Ritchie told Jed Bartlet he didn’t like him because he was a ‘superior sumbitch’ a reference to Bartlet being an elitist snob whereas Ritchie was an ordinary ‘good ol’ boy’. The fact that one had just been to a classical rendition of ‘Wars of the Roses’ and the other had been to an American football game seemed to highlight the gulf between the two. It was a discourse which made me think of Tenerife.

From a potential British holidaymaker’s point of view (and that’s an important distinction – for some British visitors, tourism on Tenerife means only them; every other nationality is invisible) Tenerife has long held an image of attracting ‘good ol’ boys’. People who like doing things like spending their time between lying on a beach, or beside their resort pool and chewing the fat in the local, usually British, bars. A statement I hear often is a variation of this:
“I’ve worked hard and I’ve come on holiday to relax, not to wander around old churches or immerse myself in local culture.”

You could call this immersing yourself in the local culture...not quite as dull as some would have you believe

I suspect these people consider themselves as ordinary folks. Sometimes I feel there’s an inference that people who actually enjoy doing other things than lying on a beach and knocking back the pints in a bar haven’t actually worked hard otherwise why would they want to ‘waste’ their time doing boring things like visiting museums/old towns/fiestas/going walking. Many have a Governor Ritchie attitude and their approach to being on holiday is that of ‘good ol’ boys’ doing what ‘ordinary’ people do and anyone who thinks different is a ‘superior sumbitch’ to be treated with suspicion.

What really gets my goat though is the idea that people who find it relaxing and mentally stimulating to stroll around a lovely old town or to join in with local fiestas don’t also  enjoy beach time or sinking a few jars in an inviting tasca.

I read a hilarious blog recently from a couple of gay Australians who spent their holiday drinking too much at night and singing bad karaoke (I Will Survive of course), lounging about on the island’s beaches as well as hiring a car and having adventures around the island; visiting Mount Teide, Puerto de la Cruz, Los Gigantes, Masca and Santa Cruz in the process.

These were exactly my sort of people. They knew how to have fun, but they were also really interested in discovering Tenerife and they loved what they found. When I read blogs from visitors of this ilk after ploughing through reams from people only interested in where they can get a pint for a euro, it reminds me that there are thousands of visitors to Tenerife who don’t fit the ‘beer and burger’ profile and that their numbers seem to be increasing each year. These are the people that Real Tenerife Island Drives and Going native in Tenerife are aimed at.

In ‘The West Wing’, when Ritchie claimed that he was one of the ordinary people because he was the one who’d gone to the football match rather than a classical concert, Jed Bartlet responded by pointing out that one of the football players Ritchie was watching had a degree and another played a classical instrument.

I don’t know what being ‘ordinary’ means, but I do know it doesn’t have to mean being dull and disinterested.

Tenerife’s had more than its fair share of Governor Ritchies for a long time; it’s good to see some more Jed Bartlets on the scene.

If you go down into the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…

It’s a good time of year to order conejo en salmorejo (rabbit in sauce) in Tenerife.

It’s hunting season at the moment and every weekend the forests are full of hairy arsed hunters (Clearly I don’t know if they actually are hairy-arsed, it’s just a phrase that seems to fit when you spot a gathering of them amongst the pines e.g. ‘Oh, look, there’s a group of hairy arsed hunters’) and their Canarian hunting dogs. Known as podencos, these wiry looking dogs with long snouts (perfect for rooting about in holes) have the appearance of Egyptian hounds. They generally seem to be good natured creatures; a bit on the silly side, which personally I like in a dog. Their hunting methods seem to involve a certain amount of chaotic running around in circles which appear to lack any sort of organisation, but as rabbit’s a mainstay of just about every traditional Canarian restaurant, they’re obviously successful at what they do.

The hunters hit the forests from early morning, somewhere about 6am (this is deduced from the fact that a pair of them were hollering at their dogs just outside our tent last weekend – cheers guys).  By 10.00am most of the hunting seems to be over; dogs are squeezed into cages on the backs of Toyota Pickups (far too many to a cage) and the HAHs lounge around the forest floor, drinking wine and no doubt chomping on their prize catches before laying down on the pine strewn floor for a snooze.
That’s usually when we stumble across them when walking in the forest around the La Caldera area. Although, you don’t have to wander far into the forest to spot them, the road to Mount Teide from Puerto is packed with hunters on a Sunday.

Last year our mate Bryan was with us when we emerged from a pine lined forest path to be faced by a posse of intimidating looking, unshaven HAHs all wearing the standard uniform – camouflaged fatigues.

“God, this could be a ‘Deliverance’ moment,” I mumbled out of the corner of my mouth. Bryan rubbed his hands together.
“Do you really think so?” He replied a bit too perkily.

As it happened, they were as nice as ninepence; the demented hunter look is obviously something that’s de rigueur for these guys.

Funnily enough Bryan’s due back for another visit tomorrow; smack bang in the middle of hunting season. I’m thinking that this is no coincidence.

It’s the Woody Woodpecker Show

When we were camping in the forest above Vilaflor last weekend, there was almost a complete absence of birds. I’ve noticed this in the past when walking in the forest around La Caldera; there’s much less bird activity than I’d find in one morning in my garden. So it was a pleasant surprise on the Sunday morning to wake up and find the pine trees around us absolutely teeming with great spotted woodpeckers. There must have been twenty of them. I’ve heard woodpeckers in the past, but until now, I’d never actually seen one in the wild. These ones were behaving exactly like you’d imagine woodpeckers would behave; perched on the sides of trees, tap, tap, tapping away at the trunk, their skull caps shining scarlet in the morning sun.

Great Spotted Woodpecker

It was simply another wonderful moment in a weekend that had already been jam packed with memorable moments.

Help…The Medio Ambiente Are Trying To Kill Me!

We have just had the most fantastic weekend camping out under the stars in the pine forest above Spain’s highest village, Vilaflor.

We were in an official campsite at Las Lajas, but here that means an area of forest given over for tents, not that there are any facilities as such, so it really was camping in its purest form.

On the Saturday night we were the only ‘happy campers’ on the site; so it was just us, the shooting stars…and whatever things lurked in the dark forest just outside of the glare of our lantern. It was a wonderful and soul cleansing experience and by Sunday morning I was ready to relinquish all the trappings of modern society and set up home in the forests, living off the land and whatever I could hunt. That was until Andy took a photo of me shortly after we woke and I saw that the reality didn’t quite match the romantic vision I had in my head. Hawkeye from ‘Last of the Mohicans’ I certainly was not; Rab C Nesbitt after a heavy night more like.

Anyhow, the main reason for our weekend in the wilds was to trek to the fantastical ‘Paisaje Lunar’, a surreal area in the heart of the forest which looks as though it could have been created by the hand of Salvador Dali. Various guide books put it at around a two to three hours walk from the starting point on the Vilaflor road.

One, or both of these, is a false friend

With a walking guide and stocked up with 2 litres of water we set off in search of the mountains of the moon. After an hour we came to a brand new signpost which pointed to a trail which deviated from the one suggested by our walking guide. We had a choice; stick to the guidebook which, although not perfect (an over reliance on GPS), has generally kept us on the right track on the past, or follow the shiny new official route.

We should have known better from past experience, but the immaculate signposts seduced us and we set off along the new trail. All along the route, little yellow and white markers kept us company. When paths crossed, there were signposts to point us in the right direction and nearly two hours after setting off, we arrived at an outcrop a couple of hundred feet above the most surreal and fantastically beautiful landscapes of the Paisaje Lunar.

Damn Right

We rested on a stone bench under an old pine for a few minutes and absorbed the spectacular view. However, being August, the temperatures must have been pushing the mid 30s and the pine forest hadn’t been dense enough to provide any shade, we’d drunk more water than we’d anticipated. It wasn’t a problem though, we still had enough to have lunch at the Paisaje Lunar and make it to the Madre del Agua campsite, 45 minutes down the valley where there was bound to be spring water standpipes.

The only problem was that, although the nice signposts pointed all the way to the ledge overlooking the Paisaje Lunar, once they got you there they stopped completely.

There was only one path leading from the stone bench, so we reckoned that it must be the way forward, even though it seemed to lead away from the moon landscape. Fifteen minutes later it still hadn’t curved back towards our destination and there were still no signs to say where it actually went. It was just after midday, the sun was beating down and we seemed to be travelling further away from the lunar landscape. It didn’t feel right.

“This is bollocks,” I suggested to Andy. “Something’s gone wrong; this isn’t the right path.”
“But it was the only path,” Andy had been here before. On nearly every new route we’ve tried to follow, we’ve taken a wrong turning at some point. This is usually because of crap directions, but on a rare occasion it’s because my internal navigation has let me down.
“I reckon we missed a path back at the viewpoint,” I turned back up the trail. Andy groaned behind me. It meant an additional 15-20 minutes hike and I still might be wrong.

We arrive back at the stone bench and I scoured the ground. It seemed as though there was almost a sheer drop to the Paisaje Lunar below us and unlikely that there was another way…and then I spotted it; a yellow and white cross on a rock, almost hidden by other rocks, and a light bulb went off in my head. For some obscure reason, the Medio Ambiente had clearly decided that they didn’t want people to follow the original route, so had tried to block it. I could see a faint path leading beyond the boulder and into the ravine and set off along it. Boulders had fallen, or been thrown, across the path making the going more dangerous and slippery, but we carefully eased our way downwards. Within five minutes we were standing below these fantastic rock formations.

At Last - enjoying Paisaje Lunar

It should have been one of those awe inspiring moments, but I was too furious to enjoy it and was in full flow ‘effing’ and ‘jeffing’ and cursing the gross irresponsible stupidity of the local Medio Ambiente.

What were they thinking off? At no level did it make any sense.

• Their new path which was supposed to take you to the Paisaje Lunar didn’t actually lead you there, but to a viewpoint overlooking them. Admittedly a spectacular view, but not exactly what it ‘said on the packet’.
• Once there, they left you with two choices. You could a) take the route you’d come; two hours before the chance of restocking water supplies, or b) you could follow the ‘unmarked’ route which, as it happened, emerged on a road in the middle of nowhere and would have involved two to three hours more walking before the opportunity to restock water supplies.
• The original route descended to the Paisaje Lunar and from there it was a relatively straightforward 45 minute walk to the Madre del Agua campsite; which was what we’d calculated when stocking up on water.

Had we continued on the ‘official’ Medio Ambiente route we wouldn’t have reached the rock formations themselves and what’s worse, and infinitely more dangerous, we’d have run out of water miles from anywhere.

The really stupid thing is that it’s possible to drive to the Madre del Agua campsite (if you’ve got the nerve and a 4×4). So it’s only those who make the effort to hike the whole route that are in danger.

I’ve joked in the past that official routes are somewhat vague, but this is the first time that I’ve encountered one which is downright irresponsibly dangerous.

All's well that ends well - rehydrating with a beer

A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing- The Defence (sort of)

My wife, Andy, has already posted a blog about this, but I felt I needed to tell my side of the story.

“We’re lost,” I could hear irritation creeping into her voice.
“No, we’re not,” I checked the compass against the map. “We’re definitely going in the right direction…trust me.”
“Maybe we should have followed those other people, they seemed to know what they were doing.”
Ouch! That hurt.
Thirty seconds later I was facing a vertical rock face in front of me and two sheer drops into abyssal ravines on either side.
“Hmmm, I don’t think this is the right path,” I mumbled, coming to the same conclusion that both Andy and Sue had reached twenty minutes earlier.

For the second time in two weeks we had ventured into the Anaga’s, this time to show our friend Sue, on holiday from the big smoke, the splendours of Tenerife’s most remote landscapes and a village with no roads. It was a folly. We’d walked the route to the very eastern tip of Tenerife once previously and had nearly expired that time due to misjudging water supplies and a barranco that never ended, but the scenery is stunning and we wanted Sue to see a Tenerife that very few visitors experience.

It all started pleasantly enough. The sound of Santana drifting up from Chamorga, a village at the end of Tenerife’s eastern road, added a suitably Latino soundtrack to the swathes of sugar cane and steep narrow terraces that lined the path, lending the countryside a South America aspect. The start of the trail was clearly signed and our directions seemed relatively straightforward…until we reached the first junction. Sure there was a sign, but it was completely rusted over and the barely legible name on it didn’t match the one on my map. However, the path we were on was the only decent one we’d seen, so we decided to continue onwards and upwards through the musty laurisilva forest.
Fifteen minutes later and an alarm bell went off in my head; we seemed to be heading away from the coast rather than towards it. However we always carry a compass, just for moments such as these. I lined up north with the compass printed on the map and set the reading to east, the direction we should have been travelling. The path we were on was heading in the opposite direction.
With much mumbling and grumbling and Andy and Sue behaving like a couple of ‘doubting Thomasinas’, muttering things like ‘this doesn’t look like a real path’, to which I retorted, under my breath of course, ‘this is the great outdoors my friends…it doesn’t have pavements’, we retraced our steps and took a much smaller path which led due east (the right way).

An hour and a half, having fought our way along numerous paths, all of which started promisingly and ended suddenly, we emerged at a clearing – right above the village where we’d started. An hour and a half of walking and we’d travelled a big fat zero miles in terms of distance.
There was only one thing for it. We abandoned the walk, returned to the car and drove to the troglodyte hamlet of Chinamada instead. My reputation as walking guide, tracker and expert map reader in tatters.

As navigator and map holder, I was held responsible for the debacle which I felt was a tad unfair for two, no three reasons:

• We were using an officially produced walking map. These are nearly always almost useless. Directions are more guidelines, the author clearly never having actually completed the walk.
• The route on the map clearly didn’t exist anymore, despite the map being less than two years old (see above).
• This is the killer. There was a compass on the map, but get this, the cardinal direction of the compass bearing which pointed to the top of the page was not the usual north, but east so, not having noticed this, my readings had been wrong from the off.

Needless to say, I was not the most popular person in the Anaga Mountains that day. Thank you very much map makers of Tenerife.

The Anaga Mountains – No Place For Wimps

Q: What’s the difference between walking in the Anaga Mountains and going fifteen rounds with Rocky Balboa?

A: There isn’t one!

My favourite place for walking on Tenerife is in the Anaga Mountains. The Anagas occupy a large chunk of the north east of Tenerife and are characterised by ancient ravines, forests and tiny villages perched in places that no sane person would consider suitable for setting up home. This is a landscape which kicks ass and it’s absolutely beautiful.
La Gomera is known for its great walking, but for me the Anagas can match anything that Tenerife’s neighbour has to offer and raise it some. The fact that they are about as far away from Tenerife’s southern tourist resorts as you can get means that they’re not as popular with visitors as they deserve to be, but it does mean that when you explore them, you feel like you are witnessing a way of life on Tenerife which hasn’t changed for centuries.
This week Andy and I were exploring an old merchant’s trail for a series about walking on the island which we’re doing for Living Tenerife magazine. It wasn’t a long walk; only about 3.5 kilometres each way, but as the route twisted and turned from the Anaga’s spine down to a village, Taganana, near the coast and back again, it did involve a steep descent and a lung testing ascent. There is no such thing as easy walking in the Anagas; their very design makes you work your proverbial socks off to enjoy their treasures. On the way down we passed a German couple who were on the way back up. They weren’t that far from the village and from their dress they obviously weren’t strangers to serious walking, but both had flushed faces and were panting quite heavily.
After a lunch break in Taganana, a picturesque village which is a non-touristy version of Masca, we made our return along Calle Portugal and discovered why the Germans were already ‘done in’ before they’d even started. Calle Portugal is a joke of a street. It isn’t a street; it’s a vertical cliff which just happens to have houses on it. I’m sure the locals need ropes and crampons to get in their front doors. There was one car parked on the cobbles; boulders had been piled against its back wheel to stop it toppling over – no joke. By the time we reached the end of the street, passing a group of Sherpas setting up base camp on the way, we were fully paid up members of the ‘beetroot face’ club and some centenarian thief had nicked my left knee and replaced it with his aged, worn out one. And that, my friends, was 0.1 kilometres completed.

I love walking in the Anagas; it’s always an experience which stays with me for days afterwards…every time I walk down steps, stand up, bend down, move…

Okay…What exactly do you mean by “We love walking”?

I’m getting wise. Not in a general sense, that would be far too much to expect, I mean in some specific little unimportant areas. In this case, the British and walking.

Returning from the south of the island last week, we stopped off at the quiet little hamlet of Punto de Abona to eat our bocadillos overlooking the pretty little beach. On opening the car door, I was nearly sent spinning into the sky like a wayward kite. The east coast has an almost constant breeze, but today it was stronger than normal.
“Maybe it’ll be more sheltered at the beach?” Andy suggested.
“No it isn’t,” before I had the chance to reply, an English voice beat me to it from the inside of a car parked next to us. “It’s like a sandstorm down there.”
The English couple in the car had the same idea as us, but had been forced by the wind to have their lunch inside their car.

We decided to do the same and got back inside the car and rolled down the windows. It turned out that the couple were staying in Puerto de la Cruz and were driving around the island stopping off at places which took their fancy. Good on them. We chatted for a moment about places on the island before the woman mentioned that they enjoyed walking. It was at this point that I made the mistake which I’ve made numerous times in the past; I assumed that when she said they liked walking, she meant they actually liked walking.
“Really?” As someone who loves exploring Tenerife on foot, and there are some fantastic places for walking on Tenerife, I’m always interested in hearing others’ views on where they’ve discovered. “Where have you walked?”
“Oh…” the woman thought for a second. “Along the promenade at Los Cristianos…”
She went on to name a couple of similar such ‘walks’.

My mother-in-law and late father-in-law were exactly the same. Gerry would regularly announce:
“Marge and I love walking; we walk everywhere.”
But take him out for a walk that lasted more than a kilometre, or involved going downhill or worse, uphill and the big man would raise an eyebrow and look down at me and say:
“Now why the fek would we be wanting to go up there?”

What they really meant, like lots of other people, was that they enjoyed a good stroll. Nothing wrong with that, but if you happen to be on holiday on Tenerife and mention to some stranger that you love walking, then proceed to list strolls along various town’s seafront don’t be surprised when they let out a scream – that’ll be me.