In which Sid and Doris take Shugi round a road with more gongoozlers than bends, which is saying something.
There is a road in the north-west of Tenerife – the Road To Masca – which has been mightily bigged up by those guide book writers in search of something else to fill the pages. It is, apparently, “one of the great Tenerife driving experiences”.
Our blog yesterday finished with your heroes still in El Hierro, waiting for their very last ferry. Everything went according to plan, and we landed into Los Cristianos. We include here a picture which is much nicer than the current view and was taken at approximately the same time as Doris’s sister was selling those dreaded timeshare apartments to Monty Python’s tourists.
Some speedy work on the western section of Tenerife’s version of the M25 took us up to Santiago de Tide and a strange but fascinating Hotel La Casona Del Patio which looked rather like a converted Japanese farmhouse. The Patio turned out to be the old threshing floor.
Like the M25, the circa-Tenerife motorway system is taking a while to complete and this north-western corner is the final frontier. The Not Quite The Greatest Tenerife Driving Experience Otherwise We Would Have Said So therefore started by driving through a staging site for the hardcore, and finished by having to insist to Mr Google that our selected road did, in fact, exist, and had not yet been dug up to form a new motorway junction.
In the absence of a motorway the little, bendy and undeniably cute road took us up to some fantastic views over a busy windless ocean with the Fred Olsen boats plying vigorously to and fro shipping the latest crop of tourists around, encapuslating the entire last week of our trip.
Masca itself has been rendered unlovable (sorry, I typed unlivable, but the spell checker is correct too) by the vast number of gongoozlers who drive their hire cars up here and then insist on queueing up to park as close as possible to the number-one-this-week-instagram-influencer-spot before returning to their beach. It goes without saying but I will say it anyway that Sid and Doris are not, of course, your mass tourist and lacking the benefit of an instagram account they carry on along a suddenly, shockingly empty road which is every bit as lovely as the bit they have just escaped from.
Down via a large and unexplained hole in a hill, which close up still appeared to be exactly that:
…into Garachio which used to be a bustling if somewhat ramshackle port before a massive lava flow made the harbour rather inaccessible.
The locals looked at their new lava-y assets and decided to look on the bright side and turn it into a tourist farm.
The super-clever set of pathways leading to sunbathing spots on all the rocks were sadly shut, so the Duo headed up the hill to a Mirador and (IGWSBIWSIA) an information board.
With Sid and Doris finally sated with three weeks of varied volcanic landscapes, Shugi is guided back to Tenerife South Airport and the rendezvous with his owner, who is fortunately so laid-back about trying to find any new damage that he misses the sound of Sid grounding the front spoiler into the kerb in the car park.
We finish with a final view of Mount Teide and the surrounding seas and islands, taken from the plane, as everyone does.
