by Joe Cawley
The door reopened and the lady stepped outside, pulling it almost closed behind her. She took the apple pie and her mouth briefly curled into a twitch of appreciation. ‘Gracias,’ she murmured, then slid back inside and shut the door.
I stared at the wood panel for a moment and listened to the chain being reinstated. It was a breakthrough, but I was still none the wiser. Poco a poco, I thought. Little by little.
But it was not to be. Several nights later, Joy and I lay in bed listening to the scraping of furniture on the floor above, and then they were gone.
Flushed with the semi-success of my conversation with our now ex-neighbour, I wanted to plug myself deeper into Canarian culture, but not just there in the village. I needed to venture out, to get to the heart of Tenerife. I wanted not just to see the real Tenerife but to feel it, be in it, experience it with Canarian eyes. There was only one thing for it – I would tour the island’s less-visited towns and villages the local way, by bus.
Joy had no such yearning. ‘Spend all day on a bus? I’d rather eat my own eyeball,’ was her response to my invitation. I took that as a no.
I wanted to see if I could circumnavigate the whole island in a clockwise direction, covering all 213 miles of coastline, or as much of it as physically possible, using nothing but the unfortunately named TITSA public bus service. I’d take in the tourist areas of the south, the local black-sand seaside towns of the west, the high mountains of the interior, the timeless agricultural villages of the north, the hidden hamlets of the northeast, and the windy plains of the east. Surely with so many environments and different landscapes I would find the real Tenerife – real scenery, real Tenerifians, real life.
My plan was to get off wherever took my fancy, take random detours and get up close and personal with Canarians going about their daily lives away from the contrived commerciality of twenty-first-century tourism. I would speak nothing but Spanish, order only what the person next to me was eating and mimic the mannerisms of authentic islanders that I came across. In short, I would be Canarian for a day.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My journey into Canarian integration started at Costa Adeje bus station, located inland, next to the cement-slab architecture of the Magma Convention Centre at the back end of Playa de las Américas. Why anybody would position a bus station in one of the least pedestrian-friendly places in Costa Adeje was beyond me, but this is just one of dozens of WTF(!) traffic marvels on the island, as those who have lived in Tenerife for any length of time will know very well. Others include pedestrian zones on roundabout exits, motorway signs that compel speeds of 120, 80 and 60 kilometres per hour all within the space of thirty yards, and pedestrian lights that are entirely out of sync with the potentially fatal ebb and flow of road traffic.
I scoured the station for the number 473 from Las Américas to Los Gigantes, which departed on the half hour throughout the day. While its Canarian passengers slouched unconcernedly on benches as they waited, a dozen or so Brits had already formed a neat line underneath the 473 sign. In light of my determination to become more Canarian, I flopped against a billboard and tried to act as disinterested as possible.
By 7.50 those in line were checking their watches and exchanging expressions of exasperation. The Canarians and I milled some more. Several minutes later the big green bus swung into place, verbally confirmed by each Brit in the queue, as though not acknowledging its arrival would have been impolite in some way.
‘It’s here now.’
‘Here it is.’
‘About bloody time!’
The foreigners clambered aboard bearing bus maps, walking sticks and bush hats. The locals waited patiently behind them, calmly resigned in the knowledge that foreigners always, without fail, insert their Bono cards into the ticket machine every which way but the right one.
The driver’s muttering grew more agitated with each explanation. The foreigners stared at him with the kind of bewilderment seen on the faces of children when first introduced to algebra. I was determined not to do the same. Like every good Canarian, I resisted the urge to smile or thank the driver, even when he snatched my ticket and reinserted it in the machine the right way round. I blushed. A fall at the first hurdle!
Eventually we were up and running. Once the high-rise hotels and reams of bars had become mere flecks in the rear-view mirror, the 473 passed through a succession of black-sand seaside resorts on the west coast favoured by Canarian beachgoers, including Playa San Juan, Alcalá and Playa de la Arena.
Los Gigantes also had a pleasant little beach that made a peaceful spot for a lethargic afternoon. Though it would have been even more peaceful if it wasn’t situated at the foot of a sheer 300-foot cliff that occasionally let loose a shower of rocks and dust on unsuspecting beachgoers.
For me, this north-western town merely served as a transit point for my next leg. As I stepped off the 473 and onto the 325 destined for Puerto de la Cruz on the north coast, I was feeling quite pleased with myself. I’d managed not to do the British thing and acknowledge the driver with a cheery ‘Thank you’ as I got off.
The 325 wound its way inland and up into the mountains, past clusters of wild cacti, their prickly fruit throbbing red at the side of the road like hitchhikers with sore thumbs. Soon, the on-board chatter subsided as I, like the other novice TITSA travellers, realised that scenic though these mountain roads were, they weren’t wide enough to accommodate two large vehicles side-by-side. There was a communal intake of breath every five minutes as our bus driver miraculously slotted the number 325 between an oncoming lorry and the alarming precipice beneath us.
Twenty minutes later and the landscape had changed again. Solitary pine trees poked above yellow broom as we entered the mountain town of Santiago del Teide. The bus pulled over beside a tiny white church midway along the tree-lined main street. Several people in tight Gore-Tex T-shirts and trousers alighted, presumably to swap to the 355, which would take them over the peak to our left, then corkscrew down to Masca, Tenerife’s Shangri-La, a remote and traditional village that clings to the slopes and from where a three-hour walk to the ocean beckons the hardiest.
With the bus stationary, two old boys shuffled to the front and joined the driver on the pavement. All three sucked furiously on self-rolled cigarettes before flicking the butts into the road and getting back on.
I guess we would have moved off straight away had their conversation come to an end. But it hadn’t. The remaining passengers stared at the duo as they continued to talk and cackle with the seated driver for a further five minutes.
The bus creaked and groaned as it climbed for another twenty minutes. The driver seemed to be having a personal battle with it now as it lurched with every gear change, the clutch squealing like a pig in a panic. Somehow he got it to crawl up the tight mountain road, slowing almost to a standstill the higher it got. At the summit, the whole bus rocked like a see-saw: the front end went down, the back end rose and we began our descent to the north coast.
A wall of cloud hung like a floppy fringe over the fishing village of Garachico hundreds of feet below. I’d been to Garachico before, on one of our rare days out with Joy, David and Faith in the early days of the Smugglers. It had been our first taste of the real Tenerife and that day had stuck in my mind as an oasis of happiness in a desert of stress.
Garachico is famous for two things. It’s home to the island’s most popular, and often most wave-bashed, rock pools, a series of swimming holes that nature has carved out of the craggy seafront. It’s also the only town on Tenerife that has been damaged by a volcanic eruption. So far.
Local legend has it that in 1706 a tyrannical Catholic priest who had become too big for his own cassock was cast out of the affluent town for abusing his position. Doing what, the history books don’t say. He was a Catholic priest. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Stomping away from the town, he stopped, turned and uttered the fateful words:
‘Garachico, pueblo rico,
Gastadero de dinero,
Mal risco te caiga encima!’
(Garachico, rich town,
Waster of wealth,
Let an evil rock fall on you!)
Conveniently for the priest, but not so much for the townsfolk, evil rocks did fall a few days later. One of Mount Teide’s volcanic offshoots had flared in anger, smothering the town and harbour in a river of molten lava. While the priest hid in a cave and gloated, much of Garachico was destroyed, and its trading prosperity abruptly came to an end.
As the bus neared the town of Icod de los Vinos, barren was replaced by bougainvillea, and the soft scents of lemon trees and lavender wafted through the open windows. Because it’s a public service, TITSA’s routes slice straight through the heart of towns such as this, giving passengers a view of the really ‘real’ Tenerife as locals buy meat from the tiny butchers’, lay out brooms and bird cages in front of dark, dusty hardware shops, or just chat in the shade of expansive laurel trees and jab gnarled walking sticks at those they either don’t recognise or don’t care for.
As the bus stopped in traffic, the green wooden shutters of one roadside house flew open beside me. I glanced into the dark interior. I was close enough to make out faded figures in framed black and white photographs grouped on a dark wooden dining table, close enough to make out the intricate needlework on its lace tablecloth, and close enough to see the indignant expression of an aged lady staring back at me from a worn armchair. We held each other’s gaze until the bus hissed and laboured forward.
Much like the house I was caught peering into, the town itself had done little to prettify itself. First impressions were unappealing, especially from inside the number 352, and yet every day the town sees hundreds of badly dressed tourists spilling from coaches and crowding into a particular leafy church plaza. The reason? To marvel at a thousand-year-old dragon tree that seeps blood.
Okay, maybe it’s not actual blood, and nor is it associated with any fire-breathing beasts for that matter. But the tree is revered. Its bright red sap is still used to treat a host of medical unpleasantries in the Canaries, including stomach problems and skin infections.
As if bleeding dragon trees weren’t enough, this ‘unremarkable’ town hides another remarkable secret – the Cueva del Viento. A labyrinth of volcanic tubes and caves snakes underground for over eleven miles, said to be the longest such complex in the world. Pretty big news if speleology rocks your world, and let’s face it, whose world doesn’t it rock, if we really dig deep?
In fact, for volcanologists, Tenerife is a veritable Disneyland. Mount Teide, which looms over Icod de los Vinos and is visible from many more distant parts of the island, kicks volcano ass in several ways. At over 12,000 feet above sea level, it’s Spain’s highest peak, but add to that the 13,000 feet of it underwater that you can’t see and it becomes the third largest volcano on the planet (the largest two are both in Hawaii).
If you happen to be a subscriber to the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior’s (IAVCEI) – a definite candidate for the planet’s most unsexy moniker – you would know that since the 1990s Mount Teide has been included in a global list of sixteen ‘decade volcanoes’. Not to provoke alarm where none is due (yet), but decade volcanoes are considered the most dangerous in the world. To be included in this roll of infamy, a volcano has to tick the following three boxes:
1. Has exhibited a huge, hazardous and destructive eruption in the past
2. Is in a populated area that could put tens of thousands of people at risk
3. Has had lots of recent volcanic and seismic activity
Naturally, being on the A-list of celebrity volcanoes, Mount Teide is now monitored by some of the most sophisticated equipment available. However, big beasts are unpredictable. The only thing that is certain is that it’s not a question of if Mount Teide will blow its top again, but when.
As I gazed through the window at the cone towering above Icod de los Vinos, a cloud formed above its peak. Or was it a cloud? I hoped it wouldn’t spoil a nice bus ride.
An hour and a half after leaving Los Gigantes, the bus driver pulled into Puerto de la Cruz, a one-time fishing village that became Tenerife’s old lady of tourism. This was the island’s first resort area and is still favoured by holidaymakers looking for less busyness and more refinement than they would find in the racy south.
The metamorphosis began in the early nineteenth century, when British steamships offloaded the first wave of tourists keen to partake of the archipelago’s healthy climate, as prescribed by stiff-collared doctors back home. Subsequent visitors to these northern shores included Agatha Christie and the Beatles.
Agatha Christie wasn’t in the best of spirits when she came to Tenerife in 1927, aged thirty-six. Her mother had recently died and the marriage to her first husband had failed. The island must have proved a suitable tonic. While here she managed to finish two pieces of writing – The Man from the Sea and The Mystery of the Blue Train.
The Beatles came for ten days of downtime in May 1963. Well, three of them came – Paul, George and Ringo. John chose to holiday in Barcelona with band manager Brian Epstein. They offered to perform at the oceanfront San Telmo Lido nightclub, but its owner, wary of General Franco’s disdain of all things liberal or cheery, declined. Instead, the trio went swimming… and that was nearly the end of the Beatles as we know them. Paul got caught in the notoriously strong currents off Martiánez Beach and was swept out to sea. Thankfully, the ocean returned him and, after stern words with George and Ringo for having ignored his frantic waves, the Beatles’ history continued.
Agatha Christie was also aware of the dangers of swimming off Martiánez Beach and wrote about it in her autobiography. She stated, rather dramatically, it must be said, ‘Masses of people had been drowned there. It was impossible to get into the sea and swim; that could only be done by one or two of the very strongest swimmers, and even one of those had been drowned the year before.’ Writers, eh? How they do exaggerate!
Anyways, back to my bus journey to Canarian integration… I was due to catch the half-hourly number 101 to Santa Cruz, nicknamed ‘the stopping bus’ for reasons that quickly became apparent. It set off with a full complement of passengers. And then stopped again almost before the doors had fully closed. It lurched forward a few hundred feet, then the doors hissed open again. And so it went on, this pattern continuing until we reached La Orotava, where the bus mysteriously emptied.
La Orotava is a city of two halves. The upper reaches comprise cobbled roads lined with ornate mansions parading white, yellow or burnt-amber facades. The lower half is given over to the more mundane – a profusion of shoe shops and insurance offices. If you ever stop in La Orotava, make sure you walk uphill – unless, of course, you’re seeking shiny leather footwear or are looking to provide financial peace of mind to those you leave behind.
The stopping bus continued – or rather ‘stopped’ – all the way north to the capital, Santa Cruz, via La Laguna, Tenerife’s second city and a moderately buzzy university town, part cobbled and historic but mostly jumbled and mercantile.
Santa Cruz terminus was exactly how bus stations should be – expansive, shiny and alive with frenzied to-ing and fro-ing – a warehouse of travel options. I had half an hour to kill before my next bus, the 264, which would take me to Almáciga, a remote village on the far side of the Anaga mountains at Tenerife’s northern tip. If the genuine Canaries were to be found anywhere, it was probably in an isolated community unsoiled by the grubby hands of tourism.
But first it was time to eat. Bus-station fodder worldwide always has a distinctive flavour. Perhaps it’s the subtle seasoning of diesel fumes, but my hot cheese and ham baguette didn’t disappoint.
There’s something else that’s a standard feature of bus stations worldwide. They’re frequented by curious characters not found in any other setting. And one of them was standing behind me in the queue as the 264 pulled in. I say ‘behind’, but the bearded vagrant stood that
close that I felt I was wearing him. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and as I shuffled a few inches further away, the breath followed.
I glanced left and right to see if anyone else was observing this strange behaviour, but other travellers milled around blissfully unbothered by this walking growth stuck to my back. I wanted to feel more Canarian, not have one attached to me.
Somewhat inevitably, my appendage followed me onto the bus and sat next to me, from where he spent the entire fifty-minute ride beaming at me like he’d just found a new wife. I tried to ignore him, Canarian style, but realised I hadn’t yet shaken the British in me and smiled back.
At San Andrés, a fishing village on the fringes of Santa Cruz, the bus turned into the hills, motoring higher and higher up a mountain road that scored the verdant slopes like a giant helter-skelter. At every death-defying curve (and there were plenty), our whistling driver hooted out a warning tune of symphonic grandeur to oncoming traffic, which was just as well, as this road too was hopelessly inadequate for two-directional encounters.
Then suddenly it went dark, and we emerged from a tunnel onto the north coastline. Near the frothing ocean below, clumps of white cottages lay like scattered sugar cubes on a green baize. The bus wound its way down to Almáciga, nothing more than a cluster of painted houses laced with narrow alleyways. The driver expertly reversed the big green bus into a wide footpath, turned off the engine, put his feet on the dashboard, and closed his eyes.
As my husband and I alighted, he lost interest in me and lolloped off inland, presumably to attach himself to some other lifeform. I walked down to the coastal road, where pavement blackboards offered fresh seafood and frosty refreshments at a trio of oceanfront cafes.
