Saturday 4 February 2023
And so we come to the end of our winter hiking holiday in Tenerife. Highlights have been the super varied hikes, the astonishing vistas and some great food. Lowlights were cold, cold, cold accommodation and me getting a cold.
We left La Laguna and, having a few hours to kill, took the more circuitous route to the airport by driving back up along the spine of the island, through the caldera past El Teide, and then down through the dry mountain slopes to the southern coast. Plenty of people out exploring the volcano today, although it wasn’t going to be as kindly with the clouds as when we trekked past a few days ago. The southern mountain slopes are quite different from the areas we’ve been in: all pine, and all bone dry, with that lovely baked pine scent in the air. It even got up to almost 20C by the time we neared the coast.
We had lunch very randomly in San Isidro, an inland town where we picked a Columbian restaurant based on Google reviews entirely in Spanish (locals?). It really was incredibly local, the staff had less English than anyone we’ve met, the menu had no English translation, and we tucked into hearty and fairly delicious tamales and a plate of chicharron and beans with plantain and avocado. Yummy. The airport was only 10 minutes further down the road, and so well fed we waited for the plane home.
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