Day 3 Friday Timeshare Touts

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Time seemed to slow down today, we woke early had a nice breakfast packed our bags and decided we would take a walk down Maspalomas to finally look at the beach and the sea. It seems strange but although we have been here two days already we still haven’t seen the sea and for me at least that was one of the main attractions of moving here.

The Hotel does run a courtesy bus but only a few times a day, so instead we decide to walk along the arroyo/storm drain and all goes well until we hit the main drag where we encounter the tourist hordes.

We are just feeling slightly dissatisfied with ourselves marvelling at the grounds of the Princess Hotel which seems exceedingly plush and lavish. Marvelling at how the other half live and wishing we were lottery millionaires, when we encounter one Gran Canarias other most annoying species, the time share tout.

Dee is pretty good at avoiding street vendors and hawkers but I’m terrible and always seem to get sucked into starting a conversation and being polite to them.

This one turns out to be called Wayne and amazingly enough is from Holderness Road in Hull, although he has lived in Grana Canaria for 8 years now. He’s very chatty and friendly but also annoyingly touchy. After wearing us down with his patter for ten minutes he announces that Dee may have won a laptop and attempts to bundle us into a taxi to claim our prize, luckily Dee resists his charms and we make our escape down to Maspalomas Beach and the Lighthouse.

Despite the fact that it is a lovely warm day, we are both rather non plussed with our surroundings, the sand is fairly golden and the sea is blue but it’s not as charming as we had hoped. Everywhere we look is jam packed with wrinkly walnut brown tourists, sporting beer guts and rather than being backed by beautiful dunes and deserted pine forests like the last beaches we visited in New Zealand, the sand here is backed by huge ugly swathes of concrete hotels and unattractive looking shops.

It’s mid day and feels much warmer than the 24 degrees the signs announce so we take refuge in some shade under a small palm tree and eat our packed lunch and then peruse one of the shopping centres. Maybe its due to our overexertion’s the day before but we have no desire to explore further so we decide to head for home and walk back to our hotel through an incongruous landscape of barren scrubland surrounded by chain link fences occasionally interspersed with derelict old building or gleaming new but for the most part horribly monolithic and rather ugly all inclusive gated hotel enclaves.

On our return to El Cardonal, Dee (who is feeling rather frazzled by the heat) decides to brave the sub zero temperatures of the hotel pool. The pool itself looks lovely but has been strangely empty since we arrived and now we know why. Despite the air temperature, the water is extremely cold. However Dee is used to swimming in frozen German lakes and so bravely takes a short dip whilst I watch from the safety of the warm and dry sun beds.

We retire to our bungalow and I venture to the hotel shop to find Dee some chocolate. Unfortunately apart from some overpriced milk and bread the only stock in the shop is some out of date Milky Ways and some bite sized Twix’s which cost 80 cents each! Chocolate craving hardly satisfied by the mini morsel, Dee nevertheless cooks us a nice meal of veggie burgers after she takes the tin to our mystery accordion playing neighbour and he opens the tin for her with a knife. We are still not sure where he hails from but its somewhere possibly in Eastern Europe, couple that with the fact he plays the accordion at strange hours and packs a mean knife hand perhaps he’s an escaped war criminal, we’ll have to sleep with one eye open.

I manage to bypass the lock and activate the TV with a screwdriver and we pass the rest of the evening before bed watching the X-factor in

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