Canary thoughts

We arrived late at night and on turning the TV on the following (Saturday) morning I found that it had, as well as the obvious Spanish channels, Sky News and – somewhat bizarrely – BBC Wales! Sky News told me that the most important thing that had happened in the world was that a man who had faked his own death to defraud an insurance company had been found alive.

At breakfast there was basically a three-way choice: toast, croissants, etc., the German breakfast of bread with ham and cheese, and bacon and egg with British sausages. Many Brits were stolidly munching this last option with bottles of HP sauce on their tables. The sauce is available here – our supermarket sells it and we have a bottle – but it is used as an addition to stews, curries, sauces, ketchups and so on where a tamarind flavour is desirable. It is not consumed directly.

On leaving the dining room I saw a poster showing the grape varieties found in the Canaries. One is called bastardo negro. I don’t suppose it is discussed widely on British TV wine programmes.

A lazy day, recovering from the flight and late night. Our room overlooks the bay of Los Cristianos so we sit on the balcony reading. We don’t seek the sun, we are here for relaxation and recuperation, and the beach is black volcanic sand. There is a tide, unlike in the Mediterranean.

At dinner that night we try Canarian wine (Tágara white) and find it excellent. On leaving the restaurant I see Cabrales cheese labelled in English as ewe’s mild cheese. I assume that the translator has either a grudge or a perverted sense of humour as Cabrales is cheese for those who find Danish Blue rather bland and flavourless. But anything can happen with translation.

On Sunday Sky News told me that the most important thing that had happened in the world was that two men had had a fight and one of them had beaten the other. We went out to the town. Near our hotel there was a weekly market, almost all the stallholders being British. I bought a shirt, which was reasonable value for ten euros, no discount for buying two and prices apparently non-negotiable. Further into the town we found ourselves in holidaymaker hell with British touts and spivs everywhere approaching people rather aggressively. We walked along the main drag and bought some postcards. After consulting a calculator the shopkeeper informed me that ten postcards at thirty cents would cost me three euros. We had a beer while we wrote them, trying to avoid the smell of the Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding (€6.90) that the Dutch people at the next table had, after some discussion, decided to try.

On Monday Sky News told me that the most important thing that had happened in the world was that someone had decided not to become manager of England’s football team. We went to the neighbouring island of La Gomera. After forty minutes on a trimaran that stormed across the intervening strait (which reaches a depth of 2,800 metres if I remember aright) at 35 knots we joined our bus for a fascinating tour. La Gomera is a world heritage site being a geological stripling of a mere 600,000 years. Since it was formed there have been no more volcanic eruptions, which has left it with some extraordinary mountain shapes and the laurisilva, the laurel wood that is unique to the island. The valleys are wide and deep and the people of the islands developed a whistling language to aid communication across long distances. We stopped for lunch, a simple but pleasant meat stew and a very simple and unpleasant bottle of (non-Canarian) red wine. After lunch we had a demonstration of Gomeran whistling in various languages. The whistling is not a language code in itself but uses whistling to reinforce the original language, so una botella de vino tinto sounds different in whistling from a bottle of red wine or eine Flasche Rotwein. One waitress left the room while the other took one woman’s glasses and gave them to someone else. When the first waitress returned, the other told here in whistling what she had done and who had the glasses, which were duly restored to their owner. Whistling, inevitably banned under Franco, is now taught in all Gomeran schools and may itself become a World Heritage next year. Gomera has a population of about 20,000. After the Civil War Franco forbade emigration from the Canaries so life there stagnated and was preserved but now movement is free and the population is falling and ageing as young people move out. Columbus visited La Gomera three times and lived there for a time.

Tuesday was a day of rest with lunch at the poolside in the company of a beautiful turtle dove and a number of people displaying vast amounts of flesh that really would have been better left covered up. Interestingly, the men working on a building site for an extension to the hotel were wearing shirts though they were presumably local and/or Moroccans and accustomed to the sun. I didn’t bother with Sky News. On leaving dinner I saw the Cabrales cheese again and realised that it was supposed to be labelled as ewe’s milk cheese. But, as I have said, anything can happen with translation.

On Wednesday we went to Teide, the highest mountain in Spain. It is a volcano and the inside of its crater is a weird desert where films are made, the beginning of Star Wars for example and One Million Years BC. There are outcrops of shiny black obsidian and it is forbidden to remove any stones from the national park. This too is a World Heritage site. In the afternoon we saw a 1,000-year-old Drago tree and Los Gigantes, cliffs that reach 900 metres in height. On the way down we passed through pine woodland. Tenerife pines are extraordinary, with needles that can reach 32 cm in length. As the trade winds come in from the north east and rise over the mountainous land their moisture condenses on these trees and then drips down to the land and enters the underground system that provides the island with water. Each tree produces six to ten litres of water a day, which gives the island water to spare (and export) even though it rains for less than 100 hours a year in Tenerife.

On Thursday we awoke to the sound of rain. It didn’t last long but put an end to our half-hearted intention of going to Santa Cruz de Tenerife (the capital of the island) by service bus, there being no tours due to lack of demand. The Canary Islands were discovered by the Romans, who found wild dogs there and named the islands after them. Later they wee populated by people called Guanches, who seem to have been Berbers from North Africa. They lived a primitive life in caves and didn’t survive the Spanish occupation. But somehow I can’t believe that being conquered by the English in the early fifteenth century would have ensured their future happiness with full liberty under Magna Carta and human rights as free subjects of His Majesty.

Friday was our last day. We didn’t do much. The taxi collected us at the hotel and we flew back to Barcelona in the evening.

The Canaries are of course famous for bananas. We learnt in fact that Canarian bananas can’t be exported (except to the Peninsula of course) because of EU regulations. We were told that they are too small, which they are; small they may be though but perfectly formed they are too, and it is not their curvature that is the problem. In fact I suspect that EU banana-growing (France grows them too in Guyana) is being phased out in favour of Caribbean ones to support underdeveloped countries. The Canarian industry is converting itself to mangos, papayas and so on.

At lunch in La Gomera we found ourselves at as table with two German couples and a Yorkshireman. I was chatting to the perfectly pleasant Germans in a mixture of English and German when the Yorkshireman announced out of the blue that there are no waitresses in England. We all looked bemused, and he said it again in poor but perfectly comprehensible German. Jane said that there certainly were waitresses in Britain and I repeated in perfectly good German what the man had said. As we all looked puzzled and moved on to something else to talk about, he muttered something about political correctness, but by then he had lost his audience. A few minutes later he told us of the scandal that Muslims who lived in Britain didn’t speak English. We pointed out that many Brits had lived in Spain for years without bothering to learn Spanish; he agreed, which rather negated the point of his original statement. Then one of the Germans said that her son was a doctor. Immediately we were told that British doctors were unemployed because of competition from European doctors in the EU. Mercifully at that point it was time to go back to the bus!

What was really worrying about this man was that he was well educated, a retired teacher in fact, but unable to think. All his statements and opinions were taken from elsewhere ready formed. He may perhaps have thought of himself as an intelligent rationalist but in fact he believed without knowing every bit as much as any religious fundamentalist does.