A Look Around Tenerife

Finally -- I can show you what this place looks like in daylight!

Yesterday was our only full day in Tenerife, so we had to make the most of it. I managed to fit in a long photo walk, a swim in the pool, some reading, a massage and a trip into town -- all fun or relaxing activities, it's true. I'm certainly not complaining.

That's the coastline, above, down the hill from our hotel, with the island of La Gomera just barely visible on the horizon. You can see the scrubby native vegetation, just as Barbara Kingsolver so memorably described it in the essay I mentioned yesterday.

But first things first -- breakfast and a surprise (to us) wedding! Dave and I walked to the Atlantico restaurant, which is where our breakfasts are served. We chose a table on the terrace overlooking a small green lawn, and saw that a marquee had been set up below with rows of chairs. I saw the marigolds tumbling from the urns and thought, "This must be a Hindu event." (I saw similar marigolds everywhere when I went to India years ago.)

In very short order, people were showing up dressed in colorful oranges and yellows, the bride and groom sat at the front of the group, and the ceremony began. All of us in the restaurant watched from the terrace above. You just never know what you're going to see, do you?

From there I took a car down to the tiny beach that serves both our hotel and the nearby Ritz-Carlton. (As you can see, I wore the Eastbourne dashiki!) I explored the beach area itself and then decided to walk back. The cliffs and hills are quite steep and there were steps to climb, but it was good exercise and offered some panoramic views.

I saw this dinosaurish-looking flower vine growing up a hillside. The blossoms were huge and stiff or waxy-looking. I thought: "What the heck are those?" Thank goodness for my plant-identifying app, which tells me it's a vine called Cup of Gold, or Solandra maxima, a type of nightshade.

I also passed this ravine containing a little memorial. Intrigued, I got out my zoom lens...

It looks like a memorial for someone who died in 1963 at the age of 20. Surely it's not a grave -- it seems to be on solid rock. Perhaps the scene of a tragic event? Anyway, very curious that the marker is down there all on its own.

I crossed a beautiful shadowy golf course -- inadvertently intruding on the fairway and causing a golfer to scold me, not wrongly, for being in a "dangerous" place -- and eventually got back to the hotel. After all that exertion I was ready for that swim and massage afterwards!

Yesterday evening Dave and I wanted to get away from the resort, so we had a drink at the bar in the Ritz and then took a taxi into the nearest town, Playa San Juan. We found a waterfront restaurant where we ran into two students from our school in London! What are the odds?! We chatted with them and their father, marveling that our paths should cross so far from home.

We had fish soup and I had seafood (shrimp and fish) on skewers, while Dave had pasta with clams. That's Dave above, outside the restaurant after we ate, wearing the new pink shirt he bought so he'd have something fresh to wear.

Back to London today!