Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

First, the good news: Garachico is lovely and our hotel, the San Roque equally so. This quaint old town has only partially succumbed to the rigours of tourism. Quite how it has managed to avoid bartering its soul for first pesetas and latterly euros is a mystery to me, but it has. There are a few tacky souvenir shops and some restaurants whose wares I suspect wouldn’t win Gordon Ramsey’s approval, but, other than that, the town has retained its charm.

Part of that charm is the views of the rugged coast, where the breakers come crashing in with a force that commands respect. The former harbour was destroyed by a volcanic eruption and is now a collection of rock pools and tidally fed swimming pools. They provide a great spot to stand and watching the seething ocean, as it forces its along the ruts and crevices of what was once a thriving commercial harbour.

The bad news is that I’ve seen more of Garachico than has Sarah. She’s been laid up in bed, suffering from an ongoing dose of what is probably food-poisoning, an intestinal souvenir of the lovely Playa de las Américanas. Well, all of the other tacky beach resort clichés were accounted for there, so why not also the dodgy meal that leaves you feeling as if you’re tied to the toilet by an elastic rope?

I wouldn’t say she’s suffering from a bad case of the runs, but if you need the toilet in order to pee for a couple of minutes, it’s best to book early to avoid disappointment.

My bowels are thankfully not in uproar, so I took Eloïse for a tour of the town this afternoon, including an ice-cream, while Sarah tried to sleep it off in the room.

The room, by the way, is stunning. It’s huge, there’s a jacuzzi bath in the bedroom and a separate shower in bathroom, if you can call it a bathroom, given that there isn’t actually a bath in there. I’ll call it the shitting room, since that has been its chief purpose since we took up residence.

The staff creep into your room, the moment your back’s turned, tidy the room, replace towels and arrange your things. It sounds as if it could be annoying, but it’s not. They’re extremely attentive here and the dinner, as experienced yesterday evening, was excellent.

Room service was inevitable this evening, as Sarah doesn’t feel well enough to go to a restaurant. Even if she did, there’s little chance she’d find anything she fancied eating.

Tomorrow, we move on to La Orotava, which isn’t very far from here, so Sarah should be able to make the journey, even if she’s still not feeling well. Let’s hope her nether regions are back to normal by then, though.

With a tear in our eye, we left Playa de las Américas behind us, hit the autopista and headed for the small town of Los Gigantes, situated on the west coast of the island.

Los Gigantes is situated along a stretch of dramatic coastline with towering volcanic cliffs. This picturesque town didn’t stand a chance against the tourists and, naturally, it’s rife with commercialism.

Having said that, the town hasn’t entirely sold its soul. For all of its commercialism, it’s still quite an appealing place and the upper terraces are very dramatically situated, offering unspoilt views of the harbour.

Along the main street, leading down to the harbour, one can sign up with any number of companies to take a boat-trip out along the coast to see dolphins. Sightings 100% guaranteed. Well! We signed up and shipped out in the early afternoon.

As it turned out, the sea was uncharacteristically choppy and the dolphins had thought better of it.

As we made our way along the coast, we were regularly doused with a blast of briny water as the boat bore down onto the roiling waves. We watched and smiled as our fellow passengers were mercilessly drenched, and they grinned back as the same happened to us. It was actually very funny, even if it sounds miserable.

Toward the end of the trip, Sarah hinged herself half over the side of the boat before heaving the contents of her stomach into the water. The previous night, she had also been up, doing the multicoloured yawn after a plate of dodgy meat ravioli at a less than salubrious establishment in Playa de las Américas. It was bad timing for her that the boat-trip was to be the next afternoon, enabling her to score double puke points.

In the end, we saw only one dolphin, swimming by the netted pools of a fish farm. It was just too windy and rough, we were told.

After something approximating lunch at something approximating an Austrian café (the waitress was at least stern and glowered at me), we drove the long and winding road — and I do mean winding — up and then down to Garachico. There were some great panoramic views on the way, as the temperature first plummeted as we gained in altitude and then rose again, as we descended towards the sea.

Poor old Sarah also suffers from car-sickness, so I had to slow to a crawl on the roads to avoid a vomitus hat-trick. This time, she managed to keep the contents of her stomach on the inside, but it was little consolation for how she felt.

After lunch at a local restaurant in the Teide Parque Nacionale, we headed for La Playa de las

Américas. This relatively long drive saw us leave under a blue sky and traverse lava fields into forested land. The sky turned grey, the fog rolled in and the temperature dropped once more.

The drive was basically one extremely long descent. It would have been fantastic on a bike, requiring a single kick of the pedals to for a ride lasting the better part of an hour, I imagine.

As we descended towards the coast, grey skies quickly made way for blue once more. The temperature rose en route from 5°C to 20.5°C, thereby adapting to our too general expectations.

As we neared the hotel, the scale of the south of the island’s concessions to tourism became

abundantly clear. Restaurants advertising authentic cuisine from every corner of the earth sprang into view, the olive complexion of the locals gave way to the lobster and beetroot hues the northern European tourist, and the evidence of unbridled hotel construction was all around us.

This part of Tenerife is the reason most people come to the island: sand, sea, sangria and sex. You can keep the sangria.

The touristic south exists in stark contrast to the relatively unspoilt and tourist-deprived north. In Santa Cruz and La Laguna, we found very few people who could speak English. Whilst this made menus tricky, it was fun for me to practise my Spanish.

In the south, however, the waitress is only slightly more likely to speak Spanish than the customer. There are a lot of expats here.

At check-in in our hotel, we were treated to a glass of champagne each; which, in effect, meant that Sarah got two glasses. Eloïse was given crayons and something to colour. Clearly, this place was orientated towards families and wanted to foster that feeling of being on holiday, right from the start. No complaints here.

The woman who checked us in turned out to be Dutch, although her complexion and heavily Spanish-accented Dutch had me thinking she was a Spaniard who had spent some time in the

Netherlands. Not so. She told me that, after seven years in Spain, she now struggles even when calling her mother on the phone.

Eloïse’s first day on the beach was certainly her favourite to date. She beamed from ear to

ear as she ran across the sand, dipping in and out of the chilly sea as the waves lapped at her legs.

Further up the beach, oily, obese women with pedulous tits rose from their beach towels and prised themselves into altogether overoptimistic swimwear. Their gigantic breasts heaved and sagged like slabs of sausage meat wrapped in polythene.

After our fun at the beach, we went in search of food. There’s certainly no shortage of places to eat, but the trick was in finding one whose ambience suggested the slightest chance of a decent meal. You can’t just go on a full dining-room, because most of the customers are eating there for the first time. Restaurants in areas like this, saturated with tourists, don’t have to care about receiving repeat custom.

An Italian establishment eventually received our blessing and served surprisingly good food.

Ironically, possibly the hardest type of restaurant to find around these parts is an authentic Spanish eatery. Mongolian barbecue? No problem. Decent tapas? Good luck.

Most of the restaurants along the seafront advertise that they sprechen Deutsch. Others hang out the Swedish or Norwegian flag to indicate the owner’s nationality and the type of cuisine served. And, of course, there’s no shortage of places offering a good old English fry-up, with or without a TV set serving images of 22 grown men trying to kick a ball into a net and kissing each other.

I hadn’t been to Spain since 1988, if I remember correctly, and this part of Tenerife is strongly reminiscent of my memories of the Costa del Sol: garish signs, uninspired architecture, tacky decor, mediocre food and thousands upon thousands of budding skin cancer victims.

Basically, this kind of place caters to people who would rather stay at home. To them, a holiday abroad is a begrudged necessity for the sake of good weather. All the bad food and warm beer you can get down your neck, but now served at the edge of a sandy beach, under a radiant orb. A home from home.

In spite of my sneering, we enjoyed our stay in this tacky resort. Eloïse has never had so much fun on the beach. We bought her a bucket and spade and she built a multitude of sand castles. We found starfish in the water, as well as other kinds of fish, and picked up shells along the shore.

On top of that, our hotel’s breakfast spread was truly fabulous, which always helps, and more than made up for the toe-curling evening piano-bar crooning that had us cringing in our room. One of the waiters took a real shine to Lucas and chatted with him at every opportunity. “¿ Luca, que pasa, Luca?” he asked with a big grin. Lucas always laughed back at him.

Lucas, too, enjoyed what was his first experience.of the beach. He crawled around and dug in the sand, occasionally planting his face in it and no doubt eating some. He seemed to love it.

Every third person in the southern resort area seems to be a Swede or a Norwegian. It’s amazing just how many of them there are. Scandinavia must be half-empty at this time of year. Imagine how many of them there’d be if there weren’t some kind of slowdown-turndown-credit-crunch-crisis thing going on.

If La Laguna had been chilly at times, our journey out of town and into the

Teide Parque Nacionale was downright cold. The car’s digital thermometer dropped rapidly as we headed up into the hills and, before long, it was reading just a couple of degrees above zero: a lot colder than back home in Amsterdam.

We pulled into the vistors’ centre and watched a short film about Teide, the volcano that gives the national park its name.

As we left the vistors’ centre and continued onward, it started to snow and we soon found ourselves driving through a considerable flurry. Snow isn’t something I’d expected to run into in the Canary Islands, but travel has a way of surprising you and that, of course, is one of the things that make it so much fun in the first place.

Our hotel, the Paradores, is situated in the middle of the national park and the only one located inside its boundaries. It’s a friendly place, large, but with simple rooms and a nice atmosphere.

After checking in, we continued along the road to the small town of Vilaflor, where we enjoyed our best meal yet at the lovely Restaurante Casa Pana. I had the local speciality, cabra (goat), and it was delicious, as were the salted black Canarian potatoes, boiled in their skin. I should also mention the mouth-watering desserts and piping hot fresh bread.

Back at the hotel, we went on a short hike into the Roques de Garcia, but the sun was setting and it was very cold, so we turned back after just half an hour.

Unfortunately, we didn’t bring any clothing suitable for the kind of temperature we encountered here. On our first day in the national park, it was just 1 or 2°C at about 2,200 m above sea level.

On our second day in the park, we were up early to beat the crowds. We downed a speedy breakfast and headed for the car, where we first had to scrape the frost off the windscreen before we could be on our way.

With visibility restored, we drove the short distance to the foot of Teide, where we paid the €25 each (young children free) to take the cable car, the Teleférico del Teide, to just below the summit of the volcano, some 3,555m above sea level.

The cable car travels some 2,482 m, which includes a 1,199 m change in elevation. The journey takes eight minutes and the ascent was absolutely spectacular. We could see for miles, even out across the sea to the La Gomera, another island in the archipelago.

At the top of Teide, it was freezing cold, but the sun was shining and there was almost no wind, so it was fine. In fact, I had been colder the day before, outside the front door of the hotel, more than a kilometre lower, due to the wind and cloud cover.

We had got up early to beat the crowds, and had been successful in that endeavour, but within minutes of our arrival at the summit, the clouds started to roll in and obscure the view. After just twenty minutes or so, the spectacular views had all but disappeared.

When we arrived back at the foot of the volcano, the queue for cable car tickets was now quite long and the volcano was shrouded in layers of cloud. The ascending cable cars disappeared into the grey soup halfway up the volcano. I thought of all those people in the queue, about to pay €25 each to go to the top of Teide for the privilege of peering into the belly of a cloud.

Back at the hotel, we were allowed some time on the office computer to book the next stop on our travels, way down south in La Playa de las Américas.

With time for only a very quick lunch, we went on a guided tour of the Roques de Garcia. We were the only people on the tour with our guides, a couple of very chirpy girls from Santa Cruz. It was a nice tour, although Eloïse reached the end of her tether rather early on in the hike. I had to carry her on my shoulders for much of the walk.

Eloïse has been rather sleep-deprived, due to the late dinners that siesta has forced on us. Unfortunately, breakfast the next day doesn’t take siesta into account, so Eloïse has been getting a couple of hours’ less sleep than she’s used to. We’re doing what we can to minimise this problem.

On Saturday, we drove back to the visitors’ centre, a short drive through the lava fields, which had been completely invisible on the way in, because of the dense fog and falling snow. Those few kilometres provided some stunning views this time around.

From the visitors’ centre, we hiked some of the way along the La Forteleza route, but Eloïse’s little legs wouldn’t have been up to the full distance, so we turned back after about an hour, which, I suspect, was the better part of the hike, anyway.

As we completed the hike, the clouds were rolling in and the air was cooler. Teide stood in the distance, now partially obscured at lower altitude.

La Laguna does have great food after all. El Tonique, a charming establishment on Heraclio Sanchez, provides excellent food in delightful surroundings. I highly recommend it, although one has to get there as soon as it opens (20:00) in order to avoid the smoke, as the restaurant fills very quickly.

The food is excellent, though, and the service very friendly.