Desire for real
(Listen to the music while reading blog post.)
Black magic and the rain
I have an everything but magical relationship with rain. Last year I spent one month on Madeira island, it started raining thirty times a day. Then I spent two months on the Azores that is soooo green because of… yes, the rain. It was raining like never before. In summer I went up North to Lofoten where once I was trapped in my tent because the heavy rain didn’t stop for four consecutive days.
OK then, I thought, f.ck the rain, I’m gonna go South this time, heading to the Canary Islands, there is constant sunshine. Hallelujah.
I already took the point out of the joke, right?! On my second day spent here it started raining and now it might be raining again. Although I swear I don’t do black magic to get some rain. Oh, wait! This rain-attracting feature of mine could be pretty useful, isn’t it? There hides a heavy business potential in it. In the deep. I already visualized a logo with a small figure who always has a lovely, smiley, giant thunderstorm over its head. Would be charming.
Canary Islands and Cape Verde
‘Why Tenerife?!’ some of you could ask me with raised eyebrows. How the hell the nomad Meli found herself in the very middle of a tourist paradise of which the most we usually know is that tons of British retired tourists come here escaping the depressive winter to sip some nice cocktails meanwhile get the colour of a lobster.
To be honest, this is all I knew about these islands first and that’s the reason it always remained outside of my focus as The Place I Just Don’t Want To Visit.
And then a female blogger raised my attention saying she was quite skeptical too, but the islands surprised her much finally. And now there are cheap plane tickets available with Canary destinations. From Hungary to Lanzarote you can get low cost tickets for about 30-40 EUR, to Tenerife for a bit more.
The reason I finally decided to visit the islands was the idea of an island-hopping. It came to my mind to link the ‘OMG-very-touristy-Canaries’ with the ‘who-knows-anything-about-Cape-Verde’, trying to show something about the first that differs from the mainstream and trying to present the second with a fresh start.
First impressions
It doesn’t matter that I’ve been traveling for a while, I still make a lot of mistakes (and will always do). Now the biggest is that I try to compare this journey with the previous one. This is totally insane and pointless, just leads to frustration.
I arrived in Tenerife island and the things I wanted to avoid just shouted into my face loudly. The bald spots, the tourist hordes, the way too crowded beaches. The fake smiles inviting everybody to a horror price drink, the infinite beach chair forests, the plastic dolls watching the pedestrians from the same-size-same-look balconies. The palms, the tidy mini-golf courses, the five-star hotels where you are restricted to enter if you wear blue jeans.
Tired of all this fake world, I managed to find a shabby spot with a half-dead palm in Los Cristianos and sat down into the volcanic dirt. It felt so good.
I just watched the waves and was thinking about what the hell I was doing there. Then I started to compare this with my last journey in Norway and it was a complete disaster. I couldn’t help doing it though.
Finally I stopped whining, took a deep breath and decided to stay in my orbit. There must be something else here that is natural and real.
I hope I’ll have a chance to show it to you, I somehow didn’t feel like taking photos of the touristic area, this is why the post lacks the pictures this time.
Short break
And now a short break: in the next three weeks I won’t have my laptop with me so no blog posts and pics are coming. But hopefully I return with fresh posts at the beginning of November, that time after my journey at Cape Verde.
Until then have lovely days, my dears and don’t forget to smile a lot!!!!
