Day 388: Teide National Park

Time to leave the city and head south! We took our leave of our host and his kids after giving them one last pat of Schnitzel. Caught a bus back to the airport where we picked up our hire car for the day - an unexciting but workable Ford Fiesta.

Drove southwest across to the larger part of the island heading for Teide - the volcano and national park that covers much of the centre of Tenerife. And yes, it's the volcano that has basically formed the island over the last few million years.

You can't drive to the top but we drove up to the crater rim in various spots, taking in viewpoints and enjoying the scenery - and filming of course, since this is the second WHS here.

There's a cable car that runs up to near the summit but sadly for us it was closed today due to high winds (I think it's a common occurrence), though we hadn't really planned on doing it anyway. Though that had the unfortunate down-side that basically every tourist was now doing the hike we wanted to do. It covered about 3km near some interesting rock formations, but given the high winds we turned back fairly soon anyway.

Very interesting landscapes though - lots of rocks and moonscapes, very alien. Apparently NASA, the ESA and Hollywood have all trained and worked out here since it's so similar to Mars and the Moon.

We kept heading westwards and stopped at a place known as the Black Lava flow, from the most recent eruption (1896). Quite cool to see how the road has just been cut directly through it!

Eventually we drove down out of the national park and eventually reached the western coast of Tenerife. Main spot of interest here is a cliff formation known as Los Gigantes - for reasons that should be obvious! They were indeed gigantic, though the best views are from boats and we didn't have time for that.

Instead we drove down to a little town on the southern coast called Las Galletas, where we'll be staying for the next five nights on a little sailing boat! Something a bit different.

We met our host and settled in - it's a bit cramped but comfortable enough. Small kitchen, though the toilets are in the marina building a couple of minutes walk away. Sort of like camping I guess.

Shandos set to organising things while I drove to the southern airport and dropped off the car since we didn't need it! Splurged and got a taxi back to the boat. I was expecting a tiny little town but it was busier than I thought with quite a few restaurants around. We ended up having a light dinner at a pizzeria with some bruschetta and a seafood pizza - very tasty.Read more