Spain

Onwards and Eastwards

OG

31 Jan 2016 • 4 min read

BabyPaw is starting to laugh at my jokes. Not such a bad kid after all.

Dear reader,

Our third island - Tenerife - and it's different yet again! This one's like New York City compared to La Palma. There's traffic, malls, tourists! It's nice though, to have a bit of a change and be back in civilization again. Maybe I'm a city girl at heart...

When we left La Palma, Transportation insisted on seeing the telescopes so instead of driving down the ravines and through the tunnel we went up and down the giant mountain with a quick stop at the top to see some clouds and shiny domes. Let me illustrate:

Same crater we saw the previous day but from the other side. And about to be filled like a pot of soup with big fluffy clouds seeping in.

Pretty neat - the blue in the background? That's the ocean. And then the sky, obviously. But at the bottom, that's the ocean.

A lot of different countries have their telescopes here and they look for all different kinds of stuff. And they take it seriously: you're not allowed to have any lights that point upwards on the island at night so the whole place looks really dark.

We got there just in time too. As soon as we got back into our car and started driving down the other side of the mountain, towards Santa Cruz and the airport, it began raining cats and dogs and you couldn't see further than the next curve thanks to the thick clouds and fog. Crazy after the beautiful sunshine that we'd just left behind at the peak.

Now Tenerife is the largest of the islands and probably most like Mallorca in terms of tourists and the stuff on offer. It doesn't look much like Mallorca though because it's really green - more bananas, surprise, surprise - and in the middle of it all there's a HUGE volcano. It's actually the largest mountain in all of Spain. Not bad for such a small island.

See that mountain in the back? That's the Teide. The two gentlemen in front don't seem to care for the view.

A restaurant with a play-area. My kinda place.

Our place is really close to the water so we can watch the waves smash against the rocks and see the sun go down. Very pretty. Also, there's a ruin of a big house under us that Transportation insists on calling a castle but I'm going to say uhm, no.

If there aren't any ghosts living in that house my name is Rubblefutz Bumblebee.

We ambled a bit around town yesterday and ended up at this weird aquatic park which looked closed but an old-fashioned cafe near by sold us tickets anyway.

This water park was hard to find and quite a few years past its prime. Creepy. Also, fun!

Today we spent the morning at the science museum before doing yet more sight-seeing in La Orovata, a nicely preserved town where mostly rich people lived way back in the 1600s.

The house of balconies. Seriously, that's what it's called.

It even has balconies inside. It didn't get its name by accident...

The second floor is preserved just the way it used to look with the original furniture and everything. Except those freaky dolls, I hope they didn't live there hundreds of years ago already.

Hope you've had a good January and here's hello to February! (Carnaval is just around the corner. Literally. There are decorations going up everywhere already. Heaven.)

SmallPaw