Tenerife ~ the "yang" of mother earth

  Tenerife, Spain and Canary Islands
Friday, November 11, 2005

Tenerife~ As the most famous of all the Canary Islands, this island provides a diverse landscape from a snowcapped mountain of Pico de Teide (noted as Spain's highest) to mile-long beaches of Playa de las Americas. It may only take a day to drive around this island, but it will require many days to see all its treasures. The southern beaches are a favorite destination for Europeans where they spend their days sunbathing under colorful umbrellas and their evenings dining and clubbing along the beach front promenade.

After driving primarily in first gear straight up hill for an hour, we arrived at El Teide National Park. This Park provided some of the most spectacular sights on the island.

At one of the local restaurants, not only were dogs and cats found wandering around, but did chickens, ducks and rabbits...eventual encores, we've sure. In Puerto de la Cruz, a well-stocked wine and tapas bar, Casa Miranda, provided a variety of cured hams and sausages, friendly waiters and great local wines.

Our crowning moment Tenerife was our day at the Piramides de Guimar where we spent an hour with Dr. Thor Heyerdahl, discussing his anthropology project on this island, as well as other locations around the world. The Piramides de Guimar represent a civilization that existed thousands of years prior to Spanish rule and resemble those that are found in other locations around the world such as Peru, Mexico, the South Pacific and Mesopotamia.

One pleasure was to spend time with the world-renown anthropologist, Dr. Heyerdahl, who has devoted his life's work in studying primitive watercraft and aboriginal navigation across oceans. In 1947, Heyerdahl and six others sailed an authentic, native-built balsa wood raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove his theory that pre-Inca Indians in South America may have been the first humans to inhabit the islands of the eastern Pacific. This voyage of the "Kon-Tiki" became the best selling book after the Bible, and still holds the world record of being translated into 67 different languages. With the support of Heyerdahl and his team, excavations on a group of step pyramids started on Tenerife in 1997.

Their discovery of an extensive cave under one of the pyramids has revealed that it was used as a native commune before the arrival of the Spaniards in the fifteenth century. In 1999, the Ethnographic Park of the Pyramids of Guimar opened to the public with a display of impressive exhibits with cultural traces from the Old to the New Worlds. The focal points of the park are full-size Peruvian-built replicas of papyrus reed boats, similar to "Ra II", the native raft used by Heyerdahl in 1970 on his voyage from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean island of Barbados.

What we loved about Tenerife:
1. Great weather day and evening with no biting bugs - we avoided the rainy periods that they had for three weeks prior to our arrival
2. Diverse landscape from green forests to arid dry deserts and always blue skies
3. Our hike through the Valley of Las Canadas at El Teide was magical and serene - "thank goodness, no cars"
4. As always, finding excellent Canarian dishes at a local tapas bar near our hotel, marinated olives and octopus, homegrown almonds, salt-soaked potatoes with Canary sauces and local wines
5. We loved this island!!! (sans the northern Europeans)

What we didn't care for on Tenerife:
1. Some claim that the brown cloud that hangs around the island is sand blown from Africa - may be some of it could be from the half million cars and trunks that are constantly buzzing around on the highways
2. Immigrants peddling anything and everything at your dinner table along the promenade in Los Cristanos - "no gracias means... NO and go away"
3. Many of the local restaurants cater to the "all-day" patrons - no fast food service here! "Did we look that American?"