Day 3 dawned. It was light around 8am and then the sun came over the mountain at 9. I'd made a half hearted effort to figure out the buses the night before but had by no means got it pinned. We had heard that the Anaga Mountains were the place to go, in the far north east of the island. We had read up about a 10k walk from Cruz del Carmen to Punta del Hidalgo, so that's what we aimed to do.
I was still messing about looking at bus times and still felt unsure about which ones we should get to where and the morning was wearing on. Dammit. Why hadn't we taken an adult on holiday with us? I once read that being cautious is manipulation and throwing caution to the wind is desperate manipulation. We went for desperate manipulation and ran out the door to get a bus we were late for from an uncertain bus-stop to an unknown destination. We didn't know how much it would cost. The Gods were looking kindly on us. Our bus was late to the bus-stop and therefore on time for us. We hopped on and away we went, first to Laguna, which has a sizable bus station - and then onwards to Cruz del Carmen, high up in the mountains.
The Anaga mountains are densely forested and I had already imagined semi-tropical trees and tropical birds. I had certainly painted in sun-shine. It was a bit disappointing then when we set off down the trail from Cruz del Carmen on a dark, wet, muddy trail under dense tree cover. The first mile or so we were watching our feet because it was steep and slippy and quite dark. The path was generally clearly marked but then at one point, maybe 2 miles in, it spat us out onto a road with no indication of where to go next. We ran down a road and back up the road and got pretty shouty with each other. In some ways it was heartening to see some of the walkers we had passed on the way come out on to the road and be similarly puzzled. We asked a local and it was evident right away that that wasn't going to help, as he pointed down the road and rattled away at us in thick Spanish. Out of politeness we stayed for the full lecture but other than he thought we should run down the road we had got not a jot of it. Eventually we ran back down the road we'd already run down, but this time, high up on a lamp-post, we say the yellow trail markings we had been following up until now. It looked like a trail just up to someone's house and I was stiffening up, (always anticipating dogs, I can't help it) on approach - but we met a nice farmer lady who pointed the way for 'el sendero' which I was pretty sure meant the path. Not long after this things started to open out.
A spoon tree!
Teide in the distance.
Chinamada.
From Chinamada onwards things got really spectacular. There were long views of the mountains and down to the coasts. The running was on narrow trails with heady drop-offs but you'd have to be very clumsy or very unlucky to fall off the trail. In most places, thick banks of cacti would have stopped you rolling far.
Peter got his first whiff of butterflies and he was off into the thickest undergrowth. I stood accused of "always wanting to hurry on". I couldn't see a problem with my running on a bit given he can easily catch me up. When I returned to say I'd 'seen a yellow one' he was furious. The butterflies had the upper-hand and no mistake. They could breeze through and in seconds be 100 feet out from the cliff and 300 feet above the ground and there was nothing to be done about it.
In time we could see the sea again and the Punta revealed himself. To my shame I don't know anything about Punta del Hidalgo. By the time I got there all I was interested in was the bus back home.
The sun baked down on our foolish British heads. I for one wasn't going to waste a good holiday by wearing sunscreen or hydrating adequately. Also, we were both quite fat and it seemed like a nice idea to go easy on the sports bars. Despite it being only 10K however and ostensibly being downhill all the way, it was quite rough going and quite a lot of down and up and maybe 4/5ths of the way in I was beginning to feel quite wobbly.
I got a stern lecture from Buchanan who said I should eat and drink and not be so stupid, so I stood in a little rocky enclave and ate a Stoats Bar and drank the warm, plasticky contents of the soft-flask I'd been carrying on my back.
All along the way there had been lizards, but they were flighty. You would hear a scutter and then maybe see a tail disappear into the undergrowth. As I drank my warm water and ate my Stoats Bar, however, two lizards came out from hiding and approached me - cautiously, but not timidly. One of them fixed my eyes in its own yellow gaze. I don't know if you can tame a lizard but these ones seemed tame. Maybe they got fed there by resting walkers. They didn't get any of my Stoats bar anyway.
By the time we got to the end of the trail I was ready for a bus back home. There was no question I'd got too much sun and I was tired. We jogged through town, tracking the bus-stops and found a bar which sold us a plate of chips and two ice-cold Clara de Limons. The bus came. We got home. We had had a successful day and were pleased with ourselves.
But over the course of the night I started to feel worse and worse and worse. I had cooked a dinner the night before and we had finished it off this evening. It was nothing challenging. Vegetables and rice. Peter went off to sleep and I lay and felt sicker and sicker and sicker. It was like there was a building tension in my gut and I was by turns freezing and boiling. About 3am maybe I started to be sick. My undigested rice and vegetable tea came up looking not unlike a stuffed pepper in the sink. I wasn't even drunk. Damn it's hard to be sick when you're sober. All your muscles are still tense. It was a slow nasty process of drinking more and then feeling more and more sick until I was ready to puke. I was freezing. The floors were hard tile. At last I got to the bottom of my stomach and it seemed worth trying to sleep. Uneasy dozing with the bin from the bathroom beside my bed. Then getting up to be sick again. We repeated this scene a few times. Then it seemed worth the risk of downing a couple of paracetamols. I had to keep these down so no being sick for half an hour or so....Eventually I got a few hours sleep. But the next day I was ill. Pathetic. I ate half an apple and then had a sleep, and later had half a grapefruit and then more sleep. Peter went out on his own all day and looked for butterflies in the wastelands around town. I got up for 20 minutes to look at the internet but it was too hard and I had to lie down again. I definitely had a fever, being boiling sometimes and freezing at others. I stayed in bed until the following morning....
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