Back to Dark and Rainy Bute

Another catch-up post. I’m starting to write this on Wednesday, February 22. Caitlin and Bob flew home to Glasgow yesterday, dark and early. But I need to go back to last Friday, the 17th, to pick up the story.

It was a lazy day for all of us. Caitlin and Bob were in full beach vacation mode. Karen and I had had a fairly strenuous walk the day before - I think Karen clocked 22,000 steps on her Fitbit that day - so we weren’t anxious to expend a lot of energy either. It was a lovely day, sunny and warm, one of the warmest so far, or felt it.

We all lazed the morning away. Except me, of course. I was slaving away at the computer, editing pictures while the others lounged in the sun on the terrace. Caitlin was determined to get into the water in one of the rock pools in Punta Mujeres, and I wanted to get in at least once before we left too. Neither Karen nor Bob wanted anything to do with this mad scheme, but offered to come down and sit at the bar and watch. So we all trooped down to the village just before noon. The bar, for some reason, was closed.

The tide was out. We spent some time figuring out which of the pools to dare. One off the town square was little more than a puddle of trapped water with fish swimming in it. A young couple was dabbling about, but you couldn’t swim. Caitlin went in one of the deeper pools open to the sea, I went in another a little further down. She got in and stayed in for a good five minutes, and got her face wet. I got in for maybe a minute – okay, less. The water was icy.

And that was about it for the day. The young people walked into Arrieta for lunch – or maybe they walked in for drinks later, I can’t remember. The days run together. The evenings we spent preparing and eating meals at home – Karen’s very good, mine abysmal - and sitting around afterwards sipping wine and scotch, getting to know Bob a little better. They seem to enjoy each other’s company, which is great to see. And they seemed to relax in our company, which was also lovely.

                                     

On the Saturday, we planned an afternoon outing to a vineyard. We chose El Grifo, the griffin, which is reckoned by most of the guides we read to be the best of them. It’s one of the oldest and most successful. The big vineyards are all in the Geria district, in the centre of the island, not far from Timanfaya National Park, the volcano park. It was a blustery day, so not much good for terrace sitting. Our Bute refugees had no problem tearing themselves away from the loungers.

The vineyard has a mildly interesting museum with antique wine-making equipment and displays illustrating how wine was made in times past. It’s housed in some of the original buildings. I don’t think I really learned much about the wine making, but some of the displays were visually interesting. I believe Manrique had a hand in designing the museum.  

We also went out to the nicely kept cactus garden, and to the edges of the vineyards. The vines mostly grow on slopes, with picon mulch – the fine black volcanic rock gravel that is found all over the island – and drystone wind-breaks built with volcanic rock. It makes for a stark vista, not at all what you expect of a vineyard. Some fields use the traditional semi-circular wind-breaks, others have long straight walls. In the background, are the cones of extinct volcanoes.

We paid 15€ per couple for entrance to the museum and a flight of six short glasses of wine to sample, along with some local cheese. After touring the museum and grounds, we sat on a protected outdoor patio and sipped the wines.

We already knew to avoid the sweeter whites, such as the Moscatel that Caitlin and Bob had bought in error at the supermercado. According to our initial research, sweet whites predominate in the Lanzarote wine industry, but Karen and I were able to select three whites that were all acceptably dry, including a premium version of the Malvasía Seco that we’d had twice at El Lago restaurant. We were surprised to discover they had some sparkling wines too, a white and a pink, both reasonably dry.

I have to say, none of the wine was very distinguished. It was all light and vaguely fruity - immediately forgettable. It’s nothing like as good value as the plonk Karen and I buy at Mercadona. The prices for the El Grifo wines were in the 6€ to 12€ range. We pay 1.99€ for the Rioja I use for my spritzers, and 1.85€ for Karen’s cava. The El Grifo wines are better, just not that much better.

                                          

After the vineyard, we drove over to Timanfaya to give Bob and Caitlin a taste of the landscape, and show them where the park is. They would drive up on their own and do the tour on the Monday, their last day. (We added Bob as a second driver on our rental car when he arrived.) They were suitably impressed by the stark vistas. Bob commented that he initially found the Lanzarotean landscapes barren, but had gradually come to see their beauty.

Did they go out on their own for dinner one of these nights? I can’t remember. I don’t think so.

Sunday, the plan was to go to the market at Teguise. We had no real idea what to expect, but it wasn’t what we found. We headed out about noon, with Bob driving – and driving very well given he was on the wrong side of the road and changing gears with his wrong hand after having driven only an automatic the last couple of years. He’s a confident guy. Teguise was a madhouse. We had to drive through and out the other side, practically to the edge of town, to find a parking lot, and paid 1.80€ for it. Other times we’ve visited Teguise, we’ve parked on the street or in a municipal lot in the centre, for free. And hardly anyone was about those other times. Today was quite different.

The market is vast. Practically every street and square is filled with booths, and hoards of shoppers, mostly tourists. We suggested splitting up when we got into the market area, which we did. Caitlin, we suspected, would want to seriously shop, whereas we only wanted to sight-see. But they agreed later when we met up that there was really nothing worth buying. As with the Playa Blanca market, there were a few genuine local hand crafts, but a lot of it was made-in-China junk – T-shirts, cheap fashion, sunglasses, hats. And there was an enormous amount of repetition, multiple booths selling exactly the same array of shoddy merchandise.

Karen and I tired of it almost immediately, but walked through much of the town just on the off chance we'd find some good stuff to look at. At one point, we ducked into the church in the main square to get away from the crowds. Its quite a nice little church, light-filled, not overly gaudy.

We also found an art exhibit a block or so out of the centre, away from the market madness. It was in an old convent, the Convento Santo Domingo, with an interesting altar piece preserved in one corner. The exhibit was of work by an art collective called Apresto, inspired by the writings of the Potuguese Nobel laureate, Jose Saramago.

Not a lot of it was to our taste, but there was one printmaker and painter I liked, Gloria Díaz, who does surrealistic pictures, often with macabre or vaguely religious themes. Another was a very good draftsman who drew and painted nothing but elephants. The other two did abstracts, one with lots of rich colour, some of which seemed to reference volcanoes, the other with a starker style, and teasingly representative compositions. One piece I thought definitely looked like a streetscape but I couldn’t really make out any detail. When we looked at a reproduction of the same painting in the  brochure, which we didn’t look at until we got home, you could immediately see it was a scene in a fin-de-siecle European train station with an arched glass roof.

We started looking for a place to eat at a little after one, but couldn’t find anything to our taste until we got back to the square where the Loris restaurant is. Caitlin was going to take Bob there, but Karen and I refused to return a third time. We ended up at the place across the street, which had a tapas selection for two, similar to the one at Loris – but not as good or as generous. That’s what Karen and I had. So we might as well have gone to Loris again.

La Bodeguita del Medio is another funky little place with cluttered decor, very similar to Loris, with a low-ceilinged upstairs dining area, a patio out front and a few tiny tables with stools on the ground floor. We sat at one just inside the door, the last available. The place is apparently run by an English woman who works the bar and cash register.

Caitlin and Bob came over and found us when they were finished at Loris. When we went to pay, we discovered the restaurant didn’t take credit cards, and we didn’t have enough cash. (I don’t think Caitlin and Bob brought any Euros, they just relied on plastic.) The English maitresse d’ told us where to find a bank machine and Karen and Caitlin left to find it. They didn’t return for almost half an hour.

On the way back to the car, we took the wrong road out of the centre and ended up passing a bizarre property we had noticed a few times when driving by it. It has been set up to look like a cemetary, but with very badly done plaster statues, old mannequins and little tableaus created with an incredible array of toys and knick-knacks. I took some pictures, naturally.

We drove from Teguise to Caleta de Famara, the little surfing town in the north west corner of the island. We wanted to show Caitlin and Bob. It was pretty much as we remembered, mostly deserted. There were a few learner surfers flailing about in the shallow waters. Down at the far end of the beach, though, the air was filled with the colourful chutes of about a dozen para sailers. We watched one guy scudding across the very choppy water, against the wind. When he got close to where the learner surfers were, a lifeguard started blowing his shrill whistle and waving him away. He turned and sailed back, even faster.

We got out of the car and took some pictures but didn’t linger long. We also wanted to show them one of the miradors above Haria, so headed back through Teguise and up the switch-backs to the top of the Famara massif. We stopped at the mirador at the restaurant. Caitlin and Bob were suitably impressed by the great views down the valley and over to the east coast and Punta Mujeres-Arrieta. Karen and I noticed how much greener the valley looked than when we had come here near the beginning of our visit.

I was navigating and told Bob to turn down the road between Haria and Trebayasco, which comes out at the LZ 1 near Arrieta. It was a road Karen and I had never gone down, so I didn’t realize it was very, very narrow - single track in places - with lots of hair-raising switch-backs. It didn’t seem to faze Bob.

And that was the end of the day’s activity. I made a pretty awful scratch meal and we sipped wine and scotch for the rest of the evening.

On the following day, the Monday, we had a lazy morning. (Except for me; I went for a run.) Bob and Caitlin were driving up to the volcano in the afternoon on their own. I think they set out a little after one. Karen and I hung around most of the rest of the afternoon and then walked into Arrieta to do a little shopping.

The plan for the evening, Caitlin and Bob’s last, was to dine out at El Amanecer, the number one ranked restaurant in Arrieta – that’s number one of only six, though. We drove over a bit before seven. They seated us in the terrace room at the back, right across from the washrooms and by a passageway, but it was the only table available. Like all the restaurants along this stretch, the terrace is right on the sea, but they had plastic curtains drawn so there wasn’t much view.

The décor is 1980s Spanish-clunky, the service good and friendly. It’s a very popular restaurant and there was a nice vibe in the place. It was humming. The food is good – not great, but good enough. It’s not really any better, or much different, than El Lago, which according to TripAdvisor users is only the second best restaurant in town. The servings were equally large and we ordered way too much again. I ordered a veal cutlet that came under-done, almost red. It’s not dangerous to eat it that way, but it’s not the way you expect or want an escalope of veal. Bob’s was cooked properly.

Caitlin and Bob were leaving very early the next morning. The rest of the evening back at the hacienda was taken up with packing and setting alarms. Caitlin appeared to be coming down with the cold Bob had been battling most of the time he was here.

We were up at 4:45 a.m., alarms pinging and dinging all over the house. I think most of our many devices were set to go off. We’d all gone to bed relatively early so it wasn’t too terrible. I had time to eat, quickly. Bob, a shower-holic, had time to shower, and Caitlin to apply makeup. Then it was in the car, in the dark, and down the almost deserted highway to Arrecife and the airport. We didn’t even park, just pushed them out the door at the entrance to the terminal. Their flight was at 7:20 and we got them there a little after six.

Karen and I at one point had talked of going to Fuerteventura this day, thinking we’d at least be sure of getting the early start we needed. Luckily, we’d abandoned the idea, realizing how weary we’d be from early rising. We did find the energy to drive back into Arrecife after lunch, though, for a little sightseeing. It had been forecast to rain, but been mostly sunny at Punta Mujeres, so we thought we were safe.

          

We first got stuck in some narrow one-way streets near the centre of Arrecife, just at the pre-lunch rush-hour. High-school students, released for siesta, were wandering nonchalantly out into the clogged roadways at one point. We did finally find the front and parked near the end of it, at Playa del Reducto.

Just as we set off to walk along the front, clouds rolled in. Before we got very far, it started to spit, then shower. We took cover briefly under the overhang of a building. The rain let up a little, and we walked on. It was starting to spit again when we spotted a post office. Bob had asked us to mail a postcard to his little boys that he’d hastily scrawled that morning, so we went in to buy a stamp for it. This took almost 20 minutes. The two open wickets were both dealing with apparently very complex postal issues. A vending machine to dispense stamps would have been a good idea. In its absence, we had to wait our turn, to buy one stamp.

When we came out, the clouds had rolled away and the sun was shining. We walked on, past preparations for the Carnavale, which begins next week, and is apparently a very big thing in Lanzarote. They were erecting stages and lighting and tented booths. We walked out along a causeway to the Castillo de San Gabriel, a small, picturesque fortification against sea raiders, built in the late 16th century. It houses an historical museum, but we didn’t go in.

Our next destination was Charco de San Ginés, a fishing community built around a lagoon - which they call a lake, even though it’s connected to the sea and has salt water in it. We stopped first at the dim, not very interesting church, then walked on to the lake. It’s quite pretty, dotted with colourful fishing boats. The buildings around it look to date mostly from sixties and seventies, though.

I’m sure Arrecife was a source of great frustration for César Manrique, the island’s one-man cultural conservancy movement. The place is an architectural disaster, with nondescript 60s-through-90s buildings all along the front – shops, restaurants, hotels. It otherwise could have been quite pretty.

By the time I’d finished photographing the lagoon, we were running out of steam and walked directly back to the car. We stopped at the Mercadona for a small shop on the way home and were back before six. Karen made dinner and we watched some Netflix in the evening.

Yesterday, Wednesday, we did absolutely nothing. Well, we walked into Arrieta to mail Bob’s postcard and buy a few items at the supermercado. In the evening, I trounced Karen at Scrabble and we watched more Netflix, including the firt episode of the second season of Broadchurch.

Today? Who knows. Maybe we’ll go for that walk up Monte Corona this afternoon…  

Birhday Girl

This is a catch-up post, and doesn’t even completely catch me up. I’m writing the last of it on Monday, February 20th. It covers the period from February 13th to 17th.

Caitlin’s second full day on Lanzarote, Monday, was a lazy one. It started with a freakish, unforecast rain shower in the morning, but cleared before noon and stayed mostly sunny and mild the rest of the way. The breeze was still quite brisk, though, a remnant of the weather we’d had the last couple of days.

In the late morning, Caitlin lay on the terrace and read. We lazed around until after lunch, then finally roused ourselves and went for a walk into Arrieta to show her the beach and do a little shopping at the supermercado. The sun shone, we had to shed layers of clothing. Caitlin was pleased with the views over the sea and the boats – and the sun.

Playa Garita at Arrieta will do nicely as a place she and Bob can walk to and not have to worry about drinking and driving. The beach is sandy, not big, but quite pleasant. It’s a little rough, as we saw while we were there. Waves were breaking right near the shore. Two northern European women were standing in shallow water with their backs to the sea. A big wave came in and knocked them flat. Another pale-skinned fellow was trying to boogie board but missed the wave and was pummeled by it instead.

There is a very popular restaurant right on the beach, and a couple of little snack bars. There are also quite a few restaurants along Calle Garita, the town’s main drag, which leads to the beach. One of them is the top-rated establishment in town, El Amanecer, where we thought we’d probably take Caitlin for dinner for her birthday.

We noticed again the oddly-designed, vaguely alpine-looking two-storey house on the edge of town. It’s completely out of keeping with the rest of the architecture on the island, yet it’s pictured in our Eyewitness guide to the Canary Islands. What I hadn’t noticed before, because I hadn’t walked right down to it, is the little triangle of yellow sand beach in front of the house. There’s a rock wall out in the water, so it’s like a little pool with a sandy beach. One fellow was swimming, another couple sun bathing.

We walked back to our casita and Caitlin worked until dinner time, another great meal by Karen. And so ended the day.

Caitlin had another lazy morning on her birthday, Tuesday, rising late, lounging on the terrace in the sun. There was still a little work stuff to distract her – blips in the final stages of pushing the exhibition catalogue through the publishing process.

In the early afternoon, we drove to Teguise to visit the Palacio Spinola, which we understood was a kind of stately home, furnished as it would have been in its heyday in the 18th century. Caitlin was naturally interested.

There was some confusion, however, because Palacio Spinola was also listed as the site of the Timple Museum, a museum devoted to Canarian folk music and, specifically, the timple (TIM-play), a five-string ukulele-size guitar that is the national instrument. The confusion was explained when we got there. The museum had changed four years ago, the attendant explained, when they took out the 18th century furnishings and moved in the Timple displays. This was disappointing, but it was still an 18th century mansion, and it only cost 3€ each to enter, so in we went.

It’s a very atmospheric building, with high cathedral ceilings, white plaster walls with weathered wood framing showing through. There’s an interesting chapel nook, with carved wood decorations, and a surprisingly small and plain, but tranquil, inner courtyard. The music displays were mildly interesting, a few rooms with glass cases, usually with one instrument per case. Most were timples, quite a few of them made in Teguise. The town was apparently a centre for instrument making, which is why the museum is here. On an earlier visit to the city, Karen and I had stumbled on a workshop with a guy making instruments. There were also examples of guitar-like instruments from other parts of the world: ukuleles, balalaikas and so on.

We probably only spent 30 minutes in the place. I was disappointed there was no opportunity to have hands on with a Timple, or hear it played. There is a small performance space in the museum, but nothing was scheduled while we were there. A video was playing with a band featuring a Timple player, and we had heard a little trio playing in the market in Playa Blanca the week before. It appears the instrument often takes a lead role, with the player picking the strings rather than strumming.

The museum also includes a timple-making workshop, with half-built instruments lying on tables, and printed panels showing the process of making them. But nobody was working when we visited – and perhaps nobody ever does. All in all, it was a bit of a dead loss, although the building interior was interesting.

It was a lovely day and we wandered around the streets, poking into shops. Many were closed for lunch and siesta but some were still open. We popped into the Cabra Cabra Galeria de Arte, the atelier of a British artist, Dominic Murray, who lives in Lanzarote. He specializes in photo-realistic portraits of goats, usually with bright pastel backgrounds. They’re amusing. Each goat is named and looks quite distinct and full of personality. They eat goats here, so I can’t imagine what the locals must think of his anthropomorphizing their livestock.

Caitlin’s other birthday request was a drink at a seaside bar. We took her to Costa Teguise, the nearest of the planned resort towns to Punta Mujeres. Even she, who has a higher tolerance for this kind of place than we do, was almost immediately turning up her nose and saying, “This really isn’t our kind of place, is it?” It’s all big hotels and tacky shops and bars catering to tourists. We passed one little snack bar with a sandwich board out front, festooned with a union jack, advertising “bangers and mash” and Cornish pasties. We turned around almost immediately, got back in the car and drove to Arrieta, where we sat in the very Spanish restaurant at the beach. The ladies sipped cava.

We drove back to the bungalow afterwards. It was past five by this time. We had a brief rest and then set out down the road on foot, to El Lago, the big restaurant on the sea road in the next little community. It’s less than a kilometer away. El Lago is highly rated by Trip Advisor, but it’s not really a special-night-out restaurant. The food was fine and the portions surprisingly generous, and we didn’t have to drive anywhere. We had a bottle of the El Grifo Malvasía Seco, a crisp, fruity wine grown here on the island. (We would would visit the vineyard a couple of days later.)

And so ended Caitlin’s thirty-second birthday.

                     

The next day was national BOB BAINES Day in Lanzarote. (He told me to say that.) Bob was arriving just before noon to spend six days with us. So the early morning was given over to primping (i.e. Caitlin.) We set out about 10:15. The day was partly cloudy and cooler. It did not promise well for Bob’s first day on the island – a repeat of the inhospitable welcome Caitlin had received.

We did a shop at the Mercadona near the airport on the way and were at the terminal in plenty of time to meet Bob. He appeared, looking surprisingly chipper for a guy who’d had to get up at 4 o’clock to make his flight. He’d flown Ryanair from Stansted, near London, after spending a few days in Essex with his little boys over their spring school break.

In the afternoon, Karen and I went off on our own in the car to do a walk on Monte Corona, the ancient volcano that dominates this end of the island and created the vast badlands just north of us. We didn’t end up doing the walk. We couldn’t find the start point for it. It had turned cooler in any case and was threatening rain. So we drove a meandering route that took us eventually up to Guinate where there is a terrific mirador with views out over the west coast to the southern end of Isla Graciosa.

We noodled around on small roads at the north end of the island, around Ye and up to the Mirador del Rio, then decided to drive back to Haria and sit in a bar with a drink to finish the afternoon. Which we did. We sat at the bar at the end of Plaza León y Castillo. It had started spitting rain by this time, but they had big umbrellas up that covered the tables.

When we first sat down, a couple of English tourists were asking the waiter where they could get a taxi. He pointed to where the cabs usually parked across the street and told them – in Spanish, which I don’t think they understood very well – that he didn’t know when another cab might come, but maybe not for a half an hour. Why didn’t they sit down and have a drink while they waited? They looked annoyed but did sit. Karen and I sat and read our devices, but it was hard to concentrate. A local man was pacing around the edge of the outdoor seating area, talking in a loud braying voice to the waiter, who mostly ignored him.

We stopped on the way home to take pictures in the beautiful afternoon light after the rain showers. Too many pictures undoubtedly. 

And then when we got back to the bungalow, there was more great light on the water.

Karen made a very nice dinner that evening and we whiled away the first evening with Bob, nattering and drinking wine.

The plan the next day was for Karen and I to go off and leave the two lovebirds to have a day on their own to decompress and enjoy the sun and warmth, which were forecast to return (and did), and the sea. We would drive to the south end of the island, to Playa Blanca, and catch the ferry to Fuerteventura, the next island to the south of us. Our Lanzarote: Car Tours and Walks book includes a chapter on a day trip to Fuerteventura with driving and walking routes.

But as Robby Burns said, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” And ours did.

We still don’t know where Miss Tom-Tom, our GPS system, was taking us, but it wasn’t directly to the ferry terminal in Playa Blanca. There was panic and confusion in the car when she told us to ignore the turn for Playa Blanca and continue towards Yaiza. First, we decided – I decided – to ignore her and drive to Playa Blanca anyway, which we started to do. Karen, uncharacteristically, thought we should follow Miss Tom-Tom, arguing that if I was wrong – I think she meant to imply it was more than likely I was wrong – we would miss the 11 o’clock ferry, about the latest we could take and still fit in our agenda. So we turned around and went back to the Tom-Tom route. We eventually got back to it, after a couple of wrong turns, but it became clear it was nonsensical, taking us away from the seacoast. It was now too late to have any chance of making the 11 o’clock sailing, so we gave up the plan.

As a footnote, later research showed I was not wrong. The ferry terminal is in the harbour in Playa Blanca, not far from where we went the week before for the market at the marina. Exactly where I thought it was.

We decided instead to do a walk along the coast from Playa Quemada, just north of Playa Blanca, to Playa del Carmen, the other huge resort town in the south end of the island. We drove to the start point and found the path along the top of the cliffs. A stiff breeze was blowing off the water, which was probably a good thing as the sky was cloudless and the sun intense. We were both slathered with sun block.

The views out over the water to Fuerteventura and back to the hills above the Rubicón Plain were wonderful. At one point I saw a herd of cows straggling across the lower slopes of one of the mountains, ant-like in the distance.

There were lots of other people out walking, which is not surprising. The path is reasonably well groomed, there isn’t much in the way of ups and downs, and this part of the island is heavily populated with northern European tourists who like to walk.

About 45 minutes out from Playa Quemada, we came to Playa Calero, an attractive little resort town. There’s a marina with a promenade beside it and hotels and houses on the streets above. The promenade is lined with nice-looking restaurants and bars. There is none of the tackiness or overcrowding of Playa Blanca or Costa Teguise. The first hotel we came to had its own tiny private beach, and what appeared to be its own water desalinization system. Karen had read that many hotels and farms here have desalinization plants.

We found a supermercado and bought rolls, cheese, ham and drinks and sat on a park bench in the shade on the promenade to eat our picnic. It reminded me of picnics Karen and I used to have when we were first travelling in Europe in the 1970s. I have a photo of Karen, looking impossibly young - my child bride, except she's in her late 20s here – sitting on a park bench somewhere in Greece (Rhodes? Crete?), with an open bottle of wine sitting beside her. The dress is one, I believe, that she made herself.

After lunch, we walked on to Playa del Carmen, climbing up out of Playa Calero and back to the cliff. This part of the walk is not as wild as the first, and there were more people on the path. We several times encountered a garrulous, overweight German man of about our age, wearing no shirt. He was a writer apparently – this much we gleaned from a bit of overheard conversation – and seemed to be accosting single women along the path to converse intensely about poetry and philosophy, but in a very jovial way. When he separated from one of his new friends, he came striding along past where we were sitting and said loudly to us, “Wonderful day!” An interesting fellow, but the no-shirt thing was a very bad idea.

We didn’t actually go into Playa del Carmen because it would have meant climbing a steep staircase in the rocks, and Karen’s knees were in delicate condition by this time. I went up the steps to see if I could see around the next point and down into the town, but there was another rocky promontory after that one, blocking the view. So I turned back to where Karen was waiting and we retraced our steps.

Just past Puerto Calero, we split up again. Karen stuck to the lower path along the edge of the cliff, while I walked up to a track further back from the coast to see if I could get some good shots of the mountains off to the west of us. There were some nice views but never quite the unobstructed vista I wanted.

It was a little before four when we got back to the car, so we decided to go driving over to the other side of the island. We headed for a little town called El Golfo, which we didn’t know much about, except that it was where a walk along the coastline of the Timanfaya National Park started. It was a walk we’d considered doing earlier when Fuerteventura fell through, but our book was adamant it required stout shoes and Karen only had sandals with her.

El Golfo has that end-of-the-road-coastal-town feel to it, like Tofino on Vancouver Island or Provincetown in Cape Cod – kind of sleepy and peaceful, with holiday makers but not enough of them to make if feel overrun or hectic. The landscapes are incredible – jagged, twisted black lava rock right down to the water, almost unrelieved by vegetation, with waves dashing up on them. And in the other direction, dead volcano cones.

We drove back to Punta Mujeres by the LZ 2. As we pulled on to our road, we noticed Caitlin and Bob walking off – with the only house key – to have a drink in Arrieta. In fairness, we had told them we would probably get the ferry from Fuerteventura at 6 p.m. which would have got us back to Punta Mujeres after seven. And it wasn’t even six at this point.

                                        

They came back a little after seven. We walked up into the village to see if we could find a likely looking restaurant open, but found none. So we went back to El Lago, where Bob and Caitlin treated us to a very nice meal, complete with the same El Grifo Malvasía Seco wine and the lovely warm bread with creamy red and green mojo sauces. Huge portions again, much wasted food.