Blogs from Canary Islands, Spain, Europe

Late at night and ready for bed.Arrived from Fuerteventura on the Armas ferry at about 21.45 and headed for the hotel Santa Catlina. Threw my bags in the room and went out to eat. Got back at 00.30 and will head to bed as the ferry leaves for Huelva in the morning at 08.00!!... read more

So as I said in the last blog, Maddy wanted to do the update for this one as she was so excited about going, so read on and enjoy... Okay, so the alarm goes off at 7.15 and we snooze it a couple of times, you would have though that after my excitement the previous day and night that I would be up and ready to go out the door!! Once we are up, Sam realized what the time was and decided that we had no time for breakfast, this made me sad as I didn’t want to become hungry and grumpy. We waited at reception for our 8.40 pick up which didn’t happen until 9. It took about an hour and 15 mins to get to Loro Parque in our fully air-conditioned (cold) coach. The ... read more

So here I am, tethered to my iPhone's 3G connection at 11:50pm (thankfully the time in tenerife is the same as back home in the UK) deciding what to right in a travel, blog, I think I may already be nearing my 50mb limit, so I may have to make a mosey to receptiom over the next few days to make these uploads, the joy of modern technology :) We arrived at Tenerife's south airport yesterday afternoon and were comfortably in our room by 3:30ish... Yesterday was a long one for both me and Maddy, considering we had been awake since the early hours of the morning, the 4:30 alarm to get ourselves to Bristol was not to welcome... We checked-in, in the amazing looking reception of the Marylanza and once we were in the room, ... read more

Our next stop was Tenerife. We decided to go for a whale watch. Imagine our surprise when we learned that the "whales" were actually dolphins. Feel compelled to call BS on that one. Anyway, we boarded a catamaran with a bunch of other lazy tourists and were taken out to sea to watch for these whale/dolphins. The sea was blue, the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and there was free wine. This was excellent. Our expert guide was able to find a number of dolphins for us to look at. It's so neat they'll swim lazily alongside the boat and they're like gently undulating monoliths. They looked so fat and funny I just wanted to poke them. This is not allowed unfortunately. I kept wanting to stand up on the rails to better see ... read more

I have a lot to recount! It's hard to get internet at sea (they charge 100 E for 3 hours) so I'm going to try to remember 10 days of adventure now. I went on a cruise with my beloved boyfriend (it's official now! yay to me for not fearing committment) Vince to the islands of Lanzarote, Tenerife, Madeira, and finally to Malaga. We started in Barcelona. It was hard to focus on the sights with Vince there but I did my best! Lanzarote was perhaps my favorite island. It's a vast expanse of volcanic rock that's more reminiscent of another planet than anything here on earth. Jagged pieces of igneous rock cover the earth in sheets and piles. It is the island with the most recent volcanic activity and thus has not reached a developed ... read more

La Palma exploded into being with the enthusiasm typical of volcanic islands, creating a teardrop shape and an impressive height for a diminutive base. Unlike some of the other Canary Islands it hasn’t experienced a similar explosion of package tourism. The Canary Islands didn’t feature very highly on my travel list but they should have done. Having spent the past six months on the islands, I am eating snobbish-traveller humble pie. La Palma is a place I’ve visited several times (home as it is to wonderful landscapes and my even more wonderful mum;-) but I’ve been lucky enough to call it home for a good chunk of 2011. La Palma is a walking island. Whether you consider yourself a walker or not is entirely irrelevant. With volcanic craters and mountain ridges, pine forests and lava flow, ... read more