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.
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