Advertisement
We have lived in Tenerife for over three years now and thought it was about time to make a visit to the neighbouring island of La Gomera. Retirement is looking after us well.
We chose this day to celebrate two recent important personal occasions.
As we know little about the island, we decided to make our first visit on board an organised coach tour. What a great idea that was too.
We were picked up from a hotel in Los Cristianos for the short coach ride to the port of Los Cristianos and our Fred Olsen Fastcat Catamaran to the port of San Sebastian, La Gomera leaving at 9.00am. The journey was just fifty minutes. We have been waiting to travel on this boat for almost a decade, so it was a great moving moment for us.
Upon our arrival, along with the other roughly thirty people on this tour, we re-boarded the coach and headed towards the National Park high up in the mountains.
Several stops were made along the way so that we could get good photos of the views along the way. La Gomera is very picturesque place, full of serenity, beauty, history
and peacefulness. It’s like you could feel it in the air.
At one stop, we made a walk through Garajonay Plateau base area that floods when it rains a lot. There is a walking area that took us further down into the national park for those that wanted to do so. We were underneath a canopy of trees in a forest reminiscent of a semi tropical jungle. Here there was a park area with some very unique items in a children’s play area. One had a wooden horse and two characters - Gara and Jonay - who are part of the history of this island. There was also a childrens zip wire. We decided that just for today, we were going to be big kids and started a trend for a lot of the others on the coach.
We continued on through the beautiful scenery of the country to a restaurant that had been set up for our typical Canarian lunch. The food and drink was excellent. It was even better when you consider, that they had five coaches in all at the same time. A well-oiled machine.
After lunch, we had a display of the ´Silbo´
whistling language that is very unique to La Gomera. This was really interesting and was made extra special as it was tailored to the group in the restaurant. This technique was used to communicate with next door neighbours who normally reside on an adjacent mountain.
The Silbo Gomero is a whistling language used from immemorial times on the island of La Gomera to communicate over long distances. It is not a series of pre-set codes that allows the expression of limited content, but an articulate language, unconventional, where you can exchange an unlimited range of messages, reproducing by whistling the characteristic sounds of a spoken language.
From lunch, we continued on the winding mountain roads back to San Sebastian, again stopping at various views and interesting locations along the way.
Once in San Sebastian, we had just over an hour to ourselves before boarding the catamaran for the sailing back to Tenerife. We had a good chance to investigate the town.
A really great day out that we will definitely be doing again later this year.
Watch this space for another imminent travel blog entry. We have decided to visit another adjacent Canarian Island, Lanzarote,
very soon now.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.257s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 12; qc: 45; dbt: 0.1123s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Christine
non-member comment
Your Trip
Looks like you had a great time . A good day out! Loved the photos the views look amazing.