On the cliffs

Sunday was another lazy day. For everybody apparently – there were no surfers out. We’re not sure if this is because the waves or tide weren’t right, or it just isn’t a day people surf. Maybe the surfers were all at church.

Sandra showed up and promised to bring us clean sheets the next day (i.e. Monday, but they didn’t actually arrive until Tuesday.) She was clearly here to prepare one or a couple of the other units for turn over. The couple in the place to the north of us had left, and another couple came in later. Sandra also had the maintenance guy there. He looked at the broken blackout blinds in our bathroom, but said he couldn’t fix them right away. Or ever?

Sandra asked me about the Internet, which at that point was working fine. So I guess they did read my emails, just didn’t bother responding. I was pretty sure they had because when we got home the night before, we’d found a card on the entrance table with a different router ID and key.

Both the “new” and the old routers were available with strong signals, which makes me wonder if the “new” one is in an adjacent unit, and was there all along. (We’re beginning to think the owner of this unit – Daniel presumably – owns a number along here.) In any case, when I tried connecting to the new router using the key provided, which was the same as the key for the “old” one, it said the key was incorrect.

I tried to explain this to Sandra, but it was clearly not her department and not anything she knows about or understands. “The owner,” she said, had left the card the day before. He would know about this. (Daniel hasn’t responded to my email on the subject – or any subject since we completed the rental arrangements.)

We finally headed out about 2, with the idea of doing a walk from our book that sounded manageable, even for the gimp: about 8 kilometers, with a moderate grade, through interesting volcanic landscapes. It wasn’t until we got into the car and looked at the map again that I realized it was way down the other end of the island, almost as far as we had gone the day before. It was too late for a long drive then a long walk, so we just drove to Arrieta and walked the cliffs south of town.

Arrieta: a different kind of chip wagon

Arrieta isn’t that much bigger than Punta Mujeres, but it has a different feel – a little more touristy. There seem to be more foreigners about. And more businesses are catering to foreginers. This is probably all because of the beach, a quite nice sandy beach. Punta Mujeres, for all its other charms, lacks a sandy beach. It being Sunday, the beach restaurant was packed, and there were people waiting for seats. It must be the best eatery for miles around. Or the only one.

                    

Arrieta: beach with Monte Corona

We walked down the beach, past a campground where we noticed a hang glider sitting out on the football pitch, and long cases lying nearby that we speculated were other hang gliders. At the end of the beach, the cliffs start. We first tried walking on the rocks below the cliffs at the water’s edge, but it was rough going, and it became clear this would not be a good place to be caught if the tide came in quickly. So we backtracked and walked up to the cliff near the highway (LZ 1).

By this point, the sky had almost completely clouded over and there was a stiff, cool breeze blowing. Quite a different day from the morning – and the one forecast.

There are a couple of bunker-like homesteads perched on the cliff above Arrieta beach, with no electricity running to them – or none by overhead lines like the ones that supply houses on the other side of the highway. I’m wondering if they’re occupied by off-the-grid survivalists, maybe squatters. The one property was clearly marked as private. It was flying a ragged flag that wasn’t the Spanish flag. Are there Canarian separatists? A sign at the end of the driveway said, ‘Closed – we have dogs.’ Which we could see and hear barking.

We walked first along a dirt track that runs well back from the cliff edge, near the LZ 1. At one point, I looked up and saw a bright-coloured glider hanging above the cliffs on the other side of the highway, then swooping down. Soon after, we cut in to a place where there was a little inlet with a tiny beach. Women were out picking winkles or mussels or something on the beach, while their menfolk fished from the cliffs above with very long poles.

There are a couple more, much bigger walled compounds here, and some interesting-looking old stoneworks – cisterns possibly - behind the one house. We walked out to the cliff edge and enjoyed wind-blown views south and back north towards Arrieta: very wild with waves crashing on the rocks below.

The water evidently splashes all the way up to the top here – we could feel spray in the air. In some cases, sea water has collected in little puddles in the rocks, where it evaporates, leaving salt. It looks at a glance like ice on top of the puddle.

We turned back and walked along the cliff edge, along the pathway we had been looking for in the first place, the one marked on our Lanzarote Tour & Trail Super-Durable Map.

For anyone planning a trip to Lanzarote, I would recommend both the map and our walking book, Lanzarote: Car Tours and Walks (according to the front cover, or Landscapes of Lanzarote: A Countryside Guide, according to the title page). The book is by Noel Rochford, the sixth edition, published last year. It’s a Sunflower Books guide, published in the UK, and cost a little over $20 CDN from Book Depository. The map was only $6.75 CDN from Amazon. Both have been invaluable.

And that was our day’s adventure. When we got back to Punta Mujeres, the sky was beginning to clear and  the sun was peeping through, but Monte Corona was still lost in the clouds, as it had been all day.

Another slow start on Monday morning. It was supposed to be mild, in the low 70s, but it was completely overcast when we got up at about 7:30 – which was not in the forecast.

We had to do another big grocery shop today and wanted to do it at one of the Mercadonas in Arrecife, so decided to combine it with sightseeng in the city. The obvious thing to see was the Museo Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo. It’s housed in an old fortress, the Castillo de San José, which was restored under the direction of the ubiquitous César Manrique, and opened as the MIAC in the 1970s – back at the hopeful beginnings of Spain’s new democracy.

First, we had a brief, frequently interrupted, Skype call with Caitlin – the Internet is very bad today - and then lunch. By the time we got away, it was almost two.

We had the GPS navigate, using a restaurant called Castillo de San Jose as the destination. I assumed this was the ecstatically-reviewed eatery at the gallery. Apparently not. We parked when the GPS told us we were within 100 meters of our destination, but then found we had to walk about a kilometer and a half to the castillo, through not-very-interesting streets around the commercial docks. Oh well. It was a nice day for a walk: sunny, breezy, mild.

MIAC is a very cool little gallery – emphasis on little. There are four small-ish rooms, with the restaurant, stairwells and outside areas providing additional exhibition space. The main room, a long arched stone-walled space that may have been an armoury when this was a fortress, accommodates about 16 large canvasses, suspended from rails attached to the sloping walls, and four or five floor sculptures. The rooms off it are much smaller. The fourth room, where temporary exhibits are mounted, is larger again, but not much.

The place has the trademark look of other Manrique restorations we’ve seen, the ones at Mirador del Río and the cactus garden: cut lava rock, contoured plaster walls, heavy earth-toned floor tiles, dark-stained wood accents and low benches and seats with moulded corners and edges, lots of windows and skylights. He was a designer who paid attention to every litte detail. Karen said the bathroom stall she was in had a picture window on the harbour. Weird.

The art is not exactly to our taste. The permanent collection focuses mainly on Spanish art of the early second half of the 20th century. But the museum provides a very good free audio guide, which makes even the works you don’t really like a little more interesting.

We both liked the temporary exhibit better: paintings by Gonzalo Chillida, a still-active artist who had been a friend and younger contemporary of Manrique’s. He does very subtle near-representational abstracts inspired by the landscapes and seascapes near his home by the Cantabrian Sea (the Atlantic) in northern Spain.

Gonzalo Chillida: Arenas series

The light-filled restaurant, another Manrique creation, is lovely. It’s on a semi-circular terrace a floor below the main exhibition spaces, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the inner harbour. From the terrace outside, or from inside, you can look down on a sculptural work by Jason deCaires Taylor, a British artist. It was originally commissioned for a place on the river in London, but was recast (in concrete) by the artist for this installation. It depicts four horsemen (of the apocolypse), out in the shallow waters of the harbour. The horses have oil well pumpjacks for heads. Two of the riders are dressed in business suits. Apparently it’s all about corporate greed (I think) – a perennially relevant theme.

Arrecife port district: old schooner in drydock

We went straight from the museum to the Mercadona and did a huge shop. Karen is getting spooked by the amount we’re spending on food and drink. Prices have gone up again signifiantly, she says, despite a more favourable exchange rate. But what are we to do – go without sparkling wine and Spanish beer?