The journey to Tenerife from Senegal was so tiring - we travelled through the night to save on accommodation, but with a 3 hour layover in Gran Canaria, it was pretty exhausting having zero sleep. I forget sometimes that I'm not 25 and therefore not able to bounce back from exhaustion as quickly. It was wonderful to see Gaz's Dad wandering down the Arrivals hall to find us.
The initial few days in Tenerife were spent high up on Mount Teide on Gaz's dad's farm. It's a beautiful place that his dad has poured his life into, building, planting and harvesting by hand; simply spending every day outside working the land and developing the property. It's a home from home for us, so being there was good - a familiar place and a chance to reset.
The weather was generally not great in the first week or so - the island was having a bad winter with lots of rain and very cool temperatures, which was a challenge as we don't have any warm weather clothes with us, so I was sat under blankets for a lot of the time. But it soon warmed up to 23-26C and stayed that way for the rest of our time in Tenerife.
Gaz's dad lives on the North side of the island, and from the old main road, you basically turn right and drive 2km up the mountain. It's incredibly steep in parts - I've stalled a hire car up there before and scared myself to the point that I still don't drive that bit. To get some exercise and some fresh air, we decided to walk down to the coast from the farm. I knew this was ambitious, but was happy to give it a go. So we set off with a small bottle of water.
Just walking down the mountain was a challenge in itself because of how steep it was. By the time we reached the main road, my toes were burning from being at the front of my trainers all the time, and my legs were shaky. Who walks 2km downhill? Noone ever lol. So with the main road being downhill but less steep, we carried on with a plan of stopping for coffee in the first cafe we encountered. We forgot that on Sundays, not a lot is open and sure enough it took another 2km to come across a place that was open. We sat and had a cuppa and agreed that we'd done enough for one day. Garry called his dad and soon enough we were being driven back up the mountain. My legs complained for 3 days afterwards!! lol
We know this island so well. Gaz has been coming here since he was a child and over the course of our relationship, I've probably been here 10 times, so it's very familiar to us. You'd think then, that we'd find it a bit samey, but no. This island is a beautiful place, from exploring it's mountains, visiting Mount Teide and the caldera, the small villages and towns, the abundance of beautiful and varied coastline including some beautiful beaches and warm waters, it's a lovely place to spend time in the sun. A lot of people will only know Tenerife from a package holiday , in which case it will just feel like England in the sun to them, but that's because they haven't seen and experienced this Spanish
island outside of the touristy resorts. Even to us, Tenerife still offers up surprises - I looked at Google Maps and it said there was a green goddess sculpture about 30 minutes from the farm so we went to find it and sure enough, by the side of the road, in a quiet community, in the middle of a well planted public garden was a huge botanical sculpture. It was so impressive. Beautiful. And just wandering the streets of the capital Santa Cruz, we came across a wonderful botanical garden square that we spent a while wandering around. It shows that if you go where you have always gone and don't take the time to try new places, or even just to look up and look around you, you can miss so much and can even develop an idea of a place that is simply limited or worse, plain wrong.
Being a short flight from home (UK), we were fortunate enough to have friends and family visit us during our few weeks on the island. We booked an apartment in the small village of Poris De Abona on the South of the island, and spent a week with good friends swimming, exploring and eating good food (and of course tackling a foot long sausage), and then a few days with my parents who came to visit us as well. By the time we said goodbye to my Mum and Dad, we felt well and truly topped up with love from home.
We had hired a car while my parents were here and took the opportunity to head into the mountains to go to the Observatory for a tour. We well and truly got our geek on for a couple of hours, learning about the Sun and how the observatory on Tenerife is so important to the field of Astrophysics. It was really good to do something different for the day. Whilst this day was more about Gaz, I have to say I really enjoyed the tour and the beautiful landscapes we saw on the way back down.
A few days later, we were able to meet up with another set of friends who were on the island buying a place. We didn't have the car any longer, so we hopped on the bus and made our way to Costa Adeje. It is so straight forward to use the buses on this island. They are clean, modern and cheap and even have USB charging ports by the seats and free wifi! And using buses allows you to drink copious amounts of alcohol without having a nominated driver! The evening ended with two people wandering in the dark to our apartment after having successfully navigated the streets of Costa Adeje, the bus station, happy, tipsy and content warmly reflecting on our bus adventure to catch up with friends and me having fluked a hole in one on Crazy Golf (true story folks!).
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