Schwann TravelBlog: Once in a Lifetime: Chapter 8 - Tenerife

Tenerife

Thursday 18th Day 12: Breakfast is overlooking the Las Palmas beach front, and what a wonderful sight. White beaches, palm trees and the winding promenade accompanying the natural sweep of the beach, plus lots of people in swimwear abound, but there isn’t time for too much sight seeing here because I need to get to Tenerife as quickly as possible, and this is why I’m taking the Fred Olsen jet-foil ferry, which makes the 4 hour crossing in one hour. Although it’s only 9.00 AM, the first ferry has already left at 8.00 AM and the next one is at 5.00 PM, so I elect to go by taxi from Las Palmas to another port, an hour’s drive away, where there is a jet-foil ferry at 2.00 PM. Agustin, my taxi driver, get him on +34-636-569-792 if ever you need a ride in Las Palmas, speaks a little English, so I learn something about the island while on the way, like it has lots of banana plantations. Having been late for all the ferries until now, I’m not too surprised when we get there at midday and I have to wait 2 hours in the blinding sun till we leave at 2.00 PM, but this eventually happens and I’m back on water, this time doing 45 knots. Tenerife soon appears on the horizon, and within no time we’ve landed at Santa Cruz, where my driver, Kevin, is waiting for me in a fancy Citroen van. Because England is about to play Switzerland, and he is English, the one hour plus trip from Santa Cruz to where I’m staying, down south, only takes 45 minutes., even if I do have to hang on a bit. Deposited safely at Paradise, situated on the mountain above Playa De Las Americas, I hang out on the giant patio and revel in being back in civilization. Miguel, and the management team at the Paradise resort, take me to a great restaurant next to a little fishing harbour at 9.00 PM. It's weird being with so many people after the limited company on the ship, so by the time I get back it's 2.00 AM. It's been an 18 hour day. Standing for a few minutes on the large balcony of the Paradise Club overlooking the coastline of Tenerife, I try to replay the last two weeks but find it hard to concentrate. Obviously, I'm done.

Friday 19th Day 13? Well, it isn’t Friday 13th because I’ve just had a wonderful day driving around Tenerife. I got as far north as Buenavista, over some of the scariest roads I’ve been on for a while. The pass I took was so steep that there were places that a larger car than my Citroen Picasso, say a Mercedes, would have had to reverse to get around the steeper switchbacks. There were spectacular drops where volcanic precipices plunged into deep blue sea. All in all I reckon I spent most of the day going ‘wow’ in the car. I type this now watching the sun going down at 9.25 PM and will shortly go down into the ‘village, which is more like Hollywood Boulevard, to post this off, and to see if I can hack into my website from an internet café. If I can, I promise some spectacular pictures shortly. I'm on the island, mon!

Saturday 19 th Day 14:

It's a new day and I'm currently surrounded by Spanish maids who have confined me to the couch while they do the room so of course I hooked up my sound and am blasting them a Good Hope Radio (Cape Town Radio station) mp3, which will sound suitably weird to them because it's got a Saturday night DJ going ballistic in English.

OK, they've just left and it occurs to me that I haven't debriefed you properly on the ship yet, so let me back up a few days and return to a state of floating grace. Two days ago, on Wednesday, Here are some thoughts on my fellow passengers and the crew of the Maersk Constantia. There were two guys, Jerry and Dennis, and one crone, Mavis Kennedy. No, she's not related. Now get this, Mavis has been ‘sailing' on this container ship for like over a month. She came down ‘from the north', thinking she was just going to ' hop on' another ship that would take her to the west coast of Canada. I don't think she really has much spatial awareness, as far as geography goes, because otherwise she'd have known that getting a ship from Cape Town to Vancouver is like looking for an international airport in the Kalahari. It doesn't exist! I subsequently find out that she's been ping-ponging backwards and forwards on various tramp steamers for longer than was polite to enquire. She reminded me of Jimmy Morrison's famous line; “Count me in on the journey, but don't expect me to stay”. In any event, she kept on coming up with such weird travel plans that I eventually 'advised' her to 'go home' by aeroplane. I mean no disrespect, but this lady is in her mid 80s and one would imagine that long periods of time locked up in your cabin in a totally male oriented environment would eventually become tiring. Did I mention that she is writing a book - Longhand? I saw her at it once. She had some Croxley A4 that she was scribbling on and though I immediately pulled out my binoculars to scan her text, (I was one deck up and she couldn't see me watching her), she just wrote; “it should be possible”, then closed down for the day, at least from writing on deck. I am happy to admit that she is weirder than me. I can't say that I found it conducive to hang out in the lounge with my laptop, though I constantly missioned with the cameras. Maybe this is because the view in the lounge is obscured by containers. Like I've already mentioned several times before, the view from my cabin is the best on board, and this is the way it was meant to be. Maybe the Captain thought I was a spy for the P&O line, their competition? He only said a few words to me the entire trip, apart from mealtimes, when it's not British to be impolite. I must however commend the first, second and third officers for their camaraderie and good cheer, so it was all good! Then there was Dennis and Jerry. I never went deep with them, but Dennis did come over to my cabin for ten minutes once, and has motivated me to hunt down Ian M. Banks at the Edinburgh Festival later in August. Apparently he lives nearby. Jerry, well, he had better eyes than a kid, spotting whales and other ships with alarming regularity. They are both in their late 70's, but in reasonably good condition, so Miss Kennedy is the only one who you don't see on Monkey Island.

Getting off the ship; one thing I forgot about waking up at the Hotel Concorde in Las Palmas is that I literally fell out of bed onto the marble floor, which was quite a shock, but also very funny. Now I'm lying on a couch staring out at the blue sky at Club Paradise on Tenerife and not inclined to do anything but note the mostly English crowd holidaying here, lots of pink bubbly flesh, farmer brown stomachs, hairy legs with an occasional has-been, or wanna-be, patched in for good measure. I did see several totally stunning girls around but then you always have to pay attention to notice interesting stuff so there's no change because wherever you go there you are. Though I was originally planning to cut my 17 MB tiff stills down to internet size and include them in a website update, it proved impossible to do this from my current location due to the firewall at the I-Net Café. Last night I unsuccessfully tried to run WS_FTP from the café's CD drive, but the owner told me to come back tonight and he'll release a port. Only thing is, don't know if I'm up to another hour making up the pages so it may have to wait till I get connected in Malaga.

1.30 PM Saturday. I head out of the apartment to find a small boat harbour, and a boat to take me to Los Gigantos, where a set of shear cliffs rises out of the water. That's something I'd like to do from the sea so I mission down to the harbour and after a few tries find a Finn who will charter me his 37 footer for four hours for 300 €. Compared to the 600 € and 500 € boats I'd seen, this one is a bargain. I tell him I'll be back after my wife and youngest daughter, Ariel, arrive here tomorrow by air. Romance and fun! I watch the sun set from my balcony. It's 9.00 PM .