Toad car!
Wow. I have never seen such a GREEN hire car! We had four hours to kill between the airport and the ferry, so there was time to drive to the top of Tenerife and back again. The top of the island is the volcano El Teide (which I have really struggled all week not to pronounce “tiede” so please correct me if I do!) and it is magnificently impressive. It is just about 4km high, and that for an island not much bigger than Surrey! Ben Nevis is a paltry 1300m by comparison. I wonder how many people come on holiday to Tenerife and never get up close and personal with the monster in the middle?
My lasting impressions are of tinder-dry pine forest, parched slopes covered in cactus, the even more barren dark fields of fresh lava (fresh meaning the last eruption in 1798) and the incongruity of snow scattered on the summit of a subtropical holiday island.
In the event we only just made the ferry to La Gomera in time – ridiculous unnecessary queues to collect our tickets in the ferry terminal, mixed in with all the other people actually trying to buy tickets. But we chugged across the sea in the dark to San Sebastian on La Gomera, then drove 30 minutes of mountain switchbacks in the dark to reach the Hermigua valley and our home for the week. Met by the owner’s fat chuckling father at the door, he indicated that we had just enough time to get to the restaurant down the road before it closed.
Tasca Telemaco – we had soft cheese and sticky pickled pimentos on bread to start and then a very nice veggie paella afterwards. Then bed.
El Teide and lava flows
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