My Driving Experience in Tenerife

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Before we planed our trip to Tenerife we had made lots and lots of inquiries regarding the places we should see but especially the roads as we intended to rent a car and I was supposed to be the driver.

From the images on Google Earth the roads looked ok, mountains, curves, steep slopes but still ok.
I felt confident and ready to prove my skills. What the hell, I had been driving 3,000 km in Crete! (for those who don’t know, in Crete roads are narrow, I mean very narrow, you have to guess the direction as sometimes the crosswitches, if they are, indicate the same place in 2 opposite directions, the drivers can stop their cars in the middle of the road for a chat…).

So, the first day in Tenerife was excellent (if I omit the fact that I lost an hour trying to understand the role of all the buttons on the board and trying to figure out why can I not use the high beam - to check it, I mean - if the engine was not started). Yes, honorable court, I confess, I’m a woman! And generally speaking, women and technique are two notions that rarely go together.

Anyway, we started our adventure in Tenerife.
Well, the roads were not exactly as shown… What I want to say is that driving on some of them is similar to climbing the roof of a house with the difference that on the roof you’d be alone, while on those roads you meet each kilometer a bus full of Japanese tourists taking pictures, coming from the opposite direction. The good thing is that the drivers desperately use the horn so you’d know that out from the corner something huge will appear, in which case there is nothing you can do but pull out on the right (staring at the chasm out there) and stop… praying that your car will still have all its pieces together and undamaged.

Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit… after the first hundreds of km I got used and relaxed. Biiiiiig mistake! Because I came over a super winding and super steep slope and the car engine just died there. The car simply wouldn’t want to go up, in it’s stuborness it wanted to go only back down! Well, I said to myself, either me or you, let’s see who's the boss here! Obviously it wasn't me…
After I had managed to move the car and nervously attacked the next curve on the left, I had a 3rd degree encounter with another car…
Thanks God, nothing serious happened except the fact that I lost part of the outside mirror (which we eventually managed to fix), and had a small exchange of paint with the other car. The funny thing was that a police car appeared, the policeman looked at us, we expected him to stop but he just passed near us.

That was experience no. 1 and took place on the road to Masca, coming from San Juan, Buenavista.
All right, I admit I’m not the best driver in the world and I had already told you, I’m guilty of being woman but ask whoever you want about this road and he’ll tell you: don’t do it! Don’t do it from that direction. If you want to see Masca, which MUST be seen, take the opposite direction and you’ll have the most part of the road going down not up.

Experience no. 2 took place in Orotava. It happened one night, around 11 o’clock when we missed the main road, got lost and found ourselves rambling somewhere in town on very narrow and steep streets… These 2 words: “narrow” and “steep” haunted me during my whole stay in Tenerife and even now give me shivers…

So… steep street… engine dies again… the car becomes a mule who doesn’t want to move forward… but only backward… I feel helpless and like crying… Eventually I manage to move… the smell of burnt rubber and metal asbestos is horrible. It’s a wonder the car is still functioning. I’m trembling… I lit a cigarette and try to relax. The worst has gone, thanks God!
The pessimist would say: it can’t be worse. The optimist says: well, it can. Let me tell you something: now I believe the optimist… Because no longer after we had left that bloody street we entered another one, even steeper and of course, the engine chosed to die again. The street was so steep that for seconds I couldn’t keep the car stoped using both breaks. A row of cars stoped behind me horning and waiting for me to start, which was impossible this time. I was a mess. There was nothing I could do but tell my friend: get down and ask somebody to help me because we’ll never leave this place… which he did…

These are only memories now...
If you ask me: would you go there again? I'd say: YES. Why? Because I have a debt to pay, I have to take my revenge...

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