As speed skaters, we spend more time at training camp than at home. Usually, when we are traveling with the team, we have to bring at least two suitcases and a bike. Therefore it was a weird feeling traveling to Tenerife with only one luggage to share. However, we both agreed that we would rather have a really good meal, than pay for an extra luggage. After shaking off the feeling of forgetting something during the flight, we soon realised that we would not miss anything. Since our only mission was to get some sun, relax and explore the island, we did brought only a minimum of clothes, some good hiking shoes, and a cycling bib in case we wanted to rent a bike. At last, we also brought swimming goggles (since we were only bringing essentials)
We stayed on the west coast of the island, in Puerto de la Cruz. We did not rent a car, so we needed to take two local busses to get there from the airport. We changed bus in Santa Cruz, a city we soon learned had lots of traffic. The bus central was crowded, with long queues outside every bus. We were lucky to get one of the last spots, but could have easily missed our plane on the way back if we would have been only a couple of places back in line.
Already the first day we got to experience the extremely local weather differences. With a lot of dark skies around the city, we thought we were only lucky to ave sun the whole day. However, throughout our stay, it seemed as it was always a bit unstable outside of the city, but still sunny in Puerto de la Cruz. After spending the first day in Puerto de la Cruz, we decided to rent a car to see more of the island. With Europcar just across the street we got a car for only 50 euros for the next three days. Way cheaper than renting a bike!
Our first (and favourite) adventure went to La Playa de Benijo, before hiking la Chamorga. This was close to a perfect day, and a perfect combination of the best beach we ever visited and the most exotic hike. To get there we had to drive through all the red lights Santa Cruz had to offer, before crossing the mountains back to the north-west coast. The drive took around one hour. On our last adventure in Tenerife, we decided to take another route that went through the jungle terrain in Parque Rural de Anaga. This is absolutely to be recommended, but there was way more tourists there than in Benijo. The beach there is a lava beach with black sand and was very popular for surfers, but not a lot of tourists. We spent several hours there before starting our hike. The hike took about 3 hours, with 14 km and 730 meters elevation gain towards La Chamorga. We took the trail along the coast on our way back to the car, but there was several danger signs for land slides on this path, and is not to be recommended. The view was however amazing from this trail and we got a beautiful sunset.
All of our expeditions did not turn out as good at this first one. For our second trip we wanted to return to the north of the island, still on the search for a good combination of a good beach and hike. We drove to Igueste where we planned to stay on the beach for a while before a run towards a "hidden beach" that we had seen on the map. We had downloaded the route on our Garmins, but due to the bad connection, we managed to take a wrong path. After a while, on a really small trail in the woods, we ended up on a local mans property, which he was not too excited about. We had to use all our vocabulary for sorry in Spanish, and tried asking for the direction. The trail we were coming from was "no camino para ti", he explained with a machete in his hand. So we had to continue away from our car, crossing our fingers that we would find another and better path home. Using a lot of time on our detour, when we finally got on the right path, we gave up on our hidden beach mission and returned to the car. In disappointment of our failed mission, we ended up with Milka cookies for dinner.
View over La Chamorga
The last trip we want to highlight is of course Teide. From the day we arrived, we had a dream to summit Teide from sea level, to get an elevation gain of 3 700 meters! However, we figured out a bit too late that one needs to apply to summit the last 200 hight meters up to two months in advance. This took the motivation away from us, but we still wanted to hike the furthest we could. So one afternoon we drove up to an altitude of 2000 meters and started from La Montana Blanca. The temperature was comfortable from the beginning, but as we got higher and later in the afternoon, it did get quite cold. As climbing up, we found that we forgot our head lights, and started to worry about the down hill as it got dark. As we got to the top of the Gondola, we met a col Spanish couple coming from the peak. They were quite desperate to get down, but the Gondola was already closed. We found the working staff of the gondola when we helped them knocking on the doors. The workers were clearly uncertain if they were allowed to bring us down with them on their way home, but after a while they agreed to let us join them. From the gondola we ran 2 km back to the car under the stars.
The rest of our days in Tenerife we spent on various beaches on the west coast. We decided not to visit the south of the island as it is more "touristy", and we were already so satisfied with the west. The only thing Kristian was missing was a surf board. After browsing through several small shops in different cities along the west coast, he had not found anything worth renting up until the last day. We had decided to spend our last day being lazy by the pool, but after lunch time we still felt the need to get out from the hotel. The plan was to go for a walk to the city center, maybe have a coffee and a swim in the ocean on our way back. However, the plans changed as we got down to the ocean and saw a surf board rental. This was on the same path as we walked every day for our morning croissant mission, but we had not spotted the place until now. Now that Kristian could check surfing off his list, we felt that we had done everything that we wanted to do and were ready to go home for camp.
