Part One: Barraquito

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tenerife! The local time is 17:25 and the temperature is 27 degrees Celsius. We wish you a very pleasant stay and we thank you for flying our airline!

Because of a big decision in my best friend’s life, the one of relocating to Tenerife with his wife, it felt only right to join them on their first steps in this new stage of life and fly with them there for a short trip.

Getting there was fairly easy, and after a six hour flight that somehow felt like a three hour one, we landed on Tenerife South Airport (TFS) and we started to look around, looking for a way to get to the accommodation we already got in the Golf del Sur (yeah, that’s how the Spanish say “South”), then we went to eat something to eat. I got a good mix of local and imported food, gobbling some really nice meatballs, some grilled Canarian goat cheese and garlic bread topped with some more Canarian cheese. If you ever wondered, pretty much all milk and milk-based products in Tenerife are made of goat milk, because they’re pretty much the only beings that can thrive eating the plants that grow in the sub-tropical climate of the arid lands of Tenerife.

The following day, after a beautiful late sunrise (it’s still winter in terms of positioning towards the sun!), we went for a walk around our accommodation, seeing the seashore, the marina and drinking a nice barraquito in the garden of a golf resort. If you’re a fan of golfing, you’re in luck, the area is basically one huge golf court surrounded by hotels, pubs, restaurants and shops.

And I’m going to talk a bit about the barraquito. The local coffee drink, it’s been served since the early 20th century. It looks like a layered coffee, it’s strong and terribly sweet, and I was told by Tonio (more about him in a future post) that if you’re asked “con o sin” (“with or without”), you should always say “con”. They’re asking if you want it with alcohol. Licor 43 is a really nice alcohol of 31 degrees, made out of a secretly-held mix of 43 different ingredients. The layers of a barraquito are normally: coffee, Licor 43, frothed milk, condensed milk and usually lemon peel and cinnamon are added to garnish.

The local buildings show a blend of architectural influences, mixing the Mediterranean light colours with British housing (henlo terraced housing) either with individual or community pools. While doing our walk, we saw a lot of nice cozy homes, with a lot of beautiful vegetation and we were intrigued that only a few of them were marked with “VV”, the official local licence which allows a property to be leased for touristic activities (Airbnb licence), which led us to believe that many of the owners actually live there.

To be honest, it’s a very cool place to spend your retirement years and that was seen in the amount of old British people roaming or golfing in the area. Cool.

Being fairly close to the airport, we noticed in our walk was the big amount of planes landing, pretty much one every five minutes or so. I think the air traffic tower can’t keep up with more on such a small airport, or there would have been more.

Looking at the sky and the mountains around, the Calima was visiting, thankfully not in full force, but bringing enough sand deposits from Sahara, limiting partially the visibility towards the heights of the Teide. Did you ever see semi-transparent fog, but light-brown-ish? Yeah, that’s how a shit-ton of sand being blasted through the air looks like. Thankfully, the wind calmed down over the next days.

After seeing some of the boardwalk of the Golf del Sur, we went back to the airport to pick another friend up and then go to meet with some other friends. We visited Playa des Américas (the Beach of the Americas), the place where Columbus (which is fucking named Colon here, I shit you not) started his trips towards India and accidentally discovering McDonalds. It’s nice, but it got really rocky shores and we didn’t take a bath and walked some more towards Adeje for a nice mojito (or three) and something to eat.

Part Two: Santa Cruz de Tenerife

After another 8AM sunrise enjoyed on the accommodation terrace, we gathered for some crepes and another barraquito (duh) in one of the terraces on the boardwalk and then we put our butts into the bus towards the capital city, Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

After a nice bus ride that took about an hour or so, with some really nice landscapes, we arrived at the Intercambiador and we disembarked. Looked for something to eat and we walked around in circles for 40 minutes for a fancy restaurant, but we were shit out of luck, as it was the Feast day of the Virgen de Candelaria, patron saint of the Canarias. So almost everything, and I mean really almost everything was closed. Malls, shops, restaurants, takeaways, almost everything.

After about an hour and a half we managed to find a restaurant that was opened, but their menu app did not load properly, only two of the three things that we ordered to eat were brought to the table. Moreover, I almost got mushroom poisoning, because my friend didn’t know about my intolerance to shrooms.

So after this funny episode, we decided to go and see the stuff that didn’t need to be open, visiting the Castillo de San Juan Bautista, a circular fortress from the 17th century and the Auditorio de Tenerife Adán Martin. Because of the holiday, the boardwalk was filled with carnival rides and vending vans, and the place looked really nice, even though they were mostly preparing to open up for business. We then strayed a bit on the streets, discovered a really nice cafe in an old area of the city, visited the Plaza de España and then roam aimlessly on the streets, until the end of the day, when we took the bus back to Golf del Sur.

Part Three: Teide

You already know the drill by now, morning, 24 degrees Celsius, but it’s still winter, 8AM sunrise, all the deal. Right? Right. But wrong.

Woke up at 6:30AM, finished packing a backpack with food and water and went to wait for the bus to take us on a trip to Teide. When the bus finally arrived, we met Tonio, who was our guide for the day. Born in Madrid, he came once to Tenerife 30 years ago and never left. After the stuff I’ve seen these days I can understand why.

We took a small detour to some other villages and resorts to pick up some more tourists, and we used this time to look at the nice landscapes, tourist resorts, towns and villages and pretty roads of Tenerife. Nah, jk, we slept like logs most of the time. At some point we left the sandy and sunny lands of the cities, time at which we woke up and started to pay attention more on the window.

We had the luck to be here at the start of February, which meant we got to see a really nice sight, a lot of trees filled with white flowers, and our guide mentioned that they were almond trees.

We made a stop in the small town of Villaflor, one very pretty, but almost deserted town where we took a small snack and enjoyed a couple of barraquitos.

As we went up, we entered the Parque Nacional del Teide (which means “National Park of Teide” if you had only two classes of Spanish in the sixth grade), where we could see an immense forest of Canarian Pines. We learned that parts of the forest burn every few years and they take up to 25 years to regenerate. Even though they burn, due to the way they have adapted to the arid climate of Tenerife, they don’t burn completely and regenerate over time. You could see this on their bark with was tar-like black with some cracks. Life always finds a way.

Another particularity of these forest is the way the land looks. Because the island is volcanic, there’s not a lot of soil for plants to grow and the land between the trees looks like it’s littered with the volcanic rocks of all sizes and shapes. It looks very alien, but it’s just a small preview of the lands that will unfold after.

The tour bus advances through the sinusoidal road that gets us closer to Teide and we slowly gain a lot of elevation. The forest thins and the entire vegetation that’s left is composed of small shrubbery that somehow finds enough water in the aid and rocks to survive. Even these will start to become more rare as we get closer to the Teide Base Camp, situated at 2500 meters. That’s higher than the highest peak in Romania, so that’s something!

At the basecamp, the bus stops, drops us off and we wait in the queue for the cable car that’s getting us up to the next level. The cable car has 2 carriages and each of them can carry up to 44 persons, but it takes only about 35 passengers, to account for the driver (it’s not automated), luggages, tents and fat Americans. It leaves every about every ten minutes and it takes about 8 minutes to reach its destination, up at about 3600 meters.

Because of the very high altitude, the human body acts different, and people without experience or a good circulatory system might have issues at the top. Knowing that I’m a fat ass ("gordito guapo"), I was thinking that I might experience issues. And guess what? I actually did. The moment the doors of the cable car opened and I was exposed to the low pressure of the altitude, my hands went cold. I thought it was just cold so I didn’t think too much of it and started to look around. Took some photos and some panoramas, but my hands started to hurt a bit and I felt I was losing control of my hands muscles, while my pulse started to go north of 140bpm. That’s drum n bass levels. So I took the decision of going back to the basecamp before my situation aggravated, about 25 minutes of the hour and a half I was supposed to stay there and walk the various paths there. Some of the paths lead to the crater’s peak, but you need proper gear, health and experience to get there, and you also need a pass from the government.

Back down, I felt better immediately so I decided to stay there and wait for the rest of the group, took some more photos and had a really nice chat with our guide, Tonio, about the Canarian Islands, the Teide volcano, Tenerife life and what to do there.

Once the group got together again, we went on our way back home, making two more stops, to see the Roques de Garcia who used to appear on the 1000 peseta banknote before Spain switched to the Euro, and then a Mirador (viewpoint) of the Pico Viejo volcano and the lava floes that it sent out during its last eruption, back in 1798.

We then enjoyed the ride back through the forest and then home, where we went to eat, and of course, enjoy another barraquito.

On the evening, we went to eat some local food and drink which was good, but I was so hungry, I forgot to photograph it.

In the end, I’d like to extend once more my thanks to Tonio, our guide for all the info he shared with us, for being very fun, entertaining and informative guide. Next time I’m visiting Teide, I’m going to email the tour company to book me a ticket for a ride that he’s guiding.

Part Four: Lizards!

The last two days were fairly normal, without any noteworthy visits or long trips anywhere, so we just stood around Golf del Sur, ate like there’s no tomorrow, enjoyed a metric ton of barraquitos, walked up and down the boardwalks of the area, enjoying the sun, the wonderful weather and the company of great friends.

We admired the local fauna, which is mostly lizards, cats, convertible cars and sometimes seagulls.

In conclusion, it’s a really nice spot, touristic, but not very busy, with good food, a lot of foreigners, where English is spoken everywhere, but with a local language that makes you want to practice what you already learned from the Colombian and Argentinian telenovelas.

As a friend told me last week, six weeks is not enough to experience the vast and rich experience a small but packed place like Tenerife, so along with my friends moving there, the sunny days and the sunny faces of the people there make me want to return as soon as possible. Even now, while being in the airplane on my way back home, I’m making mental notes on booking the next tickets and about the things I want to do when I get back.

Teide by night, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, some museums, catamaran ride, water slides park, animal park, northern coast of the island.

And the most important reason to return is not about the places you visit, is the people at the end of the rainbow.

Gallery