Tag Archives: travel

Lanzarote 2022: four awesome beaches

Costa Teguise

We went to Lanzarote in October last year, mainly for a pilgrimage around the César Manrique sites but I love to swim in the sea and Lanzarote was amazing for that. There were four beaches we tried which were easily available since we had a hire car – but one was a very straightforward walk from our Costa Teguise digs.

I am very short sighted, so for a while I have been using goggles with lenses in – when I’m sea swimming alone, this is literally the only way of ever finding my clothes again. My eyes are -12 and the strongest lenses available are -8, but this is easily enough to make a huge difference. Goggles like this are easily available, including on Amazon.

My main concern with the goggles is just not getting lost or losing my glasses, but in Lanzarote there was an unexpected benefit in that you could also immediately see the amazing sea life. There were tropical fish everywhere we swam, immediately available to see in all of the beaches, right around the swimmers legs. It seemed a lot of people were oblivious, just getting on with usual beach/sea horseplay and not looking below the water. But every beach also had its share of snorkelers around the rock formations checking out the variety of stripy and bright flashed tropical fish. Perhaps next time I’m headed to a similar location, I’ll be packing an optical snorkel mask – not something I knew existed but also cheaply available on Amazon!

I also have very fair skin and I hate sun cream so almost all of the times we were taking our tops off on beaches were late in the day – 5pm and onwards – so pretty successful in avoiding sunburn while swimming.

Playa del Caleton Blanco

The first beach was the first day. After check in we just drove for a bit to see what we could see, and Playa del Caleton Blanco was in the north east of the island. There are informal car parks on one side of the main road, and on the other, a mix of volcanic rock and dazzling white bays. There’s any number. It’s a completely wild place with no shops or toilets, and as we came there late in the day there were only a handful of other people there. There were any number of bays to choose from, all shallow, calm and gentle. It was a struggle to get to waist depth, but plenty enough water to dunk your hair in and as soon as you looked under the waves there were fish to see.

Playa Caleton Blanco
Playa Caleton Blanco
Playa Caleton Blanco

Playa Famara

Again late in a day after visiting cultural sites, we made our way to Playa Famara, on the north coast under the cliffs that are home to the Mirador view points including the Manrique resort one.

This beach is famous for surfing, and there is a little sort of shanty town here full of surfers, and space to park your camper van. The vibe here is very different. There’s at least a mile of sandy beach with parking and a small supermarket at one end. The days we were there there were red flags flying, but it didn’t stop a small army of surfers, so we went in the sea too. Swimming is tricky here, it’s more one of those beaches for jumping up and down in enormous waves. But the sea and the wind are warm so I was happy to jump in the surf for hours. I didn’t really put my head down into the sea to see the sea life as I was too happy just bobbing around.

Playa Famara
Playa Famara
Playa Famara
Playa Famara
Playa Famara
Playa Famara

Playa de Papagayo

Our itinerary had taken us south in the island, and although this was still a drive away, nowhere is really far on Lanzarote. This looked good from googling, but on arrival it was slightly offputting. There is parking but it is a long way away from paved roads. You have to follow bone shaking rough roads for a few kilometers, and the only indication you were on the right track is that there were a lot of people doing the same. As we were again late in the day for a typical beach trip, most of the people were leaving but there were quite a few in the same direction as us. At one point we passed through what felt like a toll booth – I think if you choose a more normal time, you have to pay, but in the early evening everything was shut up and we just drove through. If there is a charge, I think it’s an astonishingly reasonable €3 a day

The unmetalled roads led to a busy car park followed by a path up to a headland, what turned out to be a series of headlands with bays and beaches down steep paths in each one. There were miles of this beginning to be visible, with different sorts of beaches. The further ones seemed to have fewer people and bigger waves. At the top of the cliff there’s a small and busy restaurant with outdoor tables. We didn’t eat, but it smelled good.

From the headland looking down into the beach I had huge waves of feeling how fortunate I was. This struck me as a world class, tourist brochure cover beach. Golden sand, luscious waves, lots of swimmers. I think this would be an amazing place to stay and watch a sunset.

We walked the headlands a bit for photos then went down to swim. This beach had a strong slope so it got deep quite quickly, and you could easily be swimming out of your depth just a few metres from the shore. Again there were a lot of fish to see with snorkelers above them highlighting where everything was.

Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo
Playa Papagayo

Playa del Jablillo

The final beach was one closest to our accommodation – easily walkable. We’d walked around it after dark on our first night and not been super impressed. It’s right outside a noisy ziggurat hotel with some sort of pool entertainment and the noise from that (karaoke? bingo?!) wafted from the bar over the beach.

So it was a bit of surprise to read that despite the close encroachment of holidaymakers, this beach too is a magnet for tropical fish and snorkelers. There’s an artificial reef partially closing the bay which creates a safe place to swim but which has also made it a great home for the wildlife. One side of the bay to the other is just over 200m, most of it properly deep, which, it turns out, is a bit further than I can comfortably swim there and back.

In the peak of day you can hire sun loungers and parasols and presumably there’s some kind of drinks service, but by the time we got there this was closed for the day. There are still a few miles of beach front businesses nearby with all sorts of bar and food offers.

Playa Jablillo
Playa Jablillo
Costa Teguise
Costa Teguise
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Wanderlust

I had been feeling the urge to travel even before the pandemic. I did manage a wonderful escape last summer to Normandy and Brittany to a very different sort of holiday. Having got away there was much less pressure to Do Stuff as most places were still closed, so I had 10 days at the beach swimming in the sea every day and then spending the whole day reading, drinking coffee and thinking about what to cook. I’ll happily do that again and again!

It does presently feel that this year will be a write-off for any sort of travel. The school Easter and May weeks of holiday fall before the current timetable even for overnight stays with family. The summer holidays are the next big thing – have booked choir week in Gloucester but really only thinking at this stage it’s 50/50 whether that can possibly run, what with my choir having its fair share of vulnerable members, singing being rather suspect anyway in terms of filling the air with particles and whether the cathedral will be ready to reopen to visitors.

An American friend has floated the idea of coming to stay with me for all of August, and that’s theoretically fine – not least since it should prompt me, after 15 years in my house – to finally and properly sort out a spare bed. He can also stay on here by himself again theoretically to feed and drug cats and chickens while I’m away singing in Gloucester. But the amounts of theory here – travel from America being OK by August?? And is that it for me for travel this summer?!

So October would be next and mentally that’s very-lightly pencilled in as time for the promised and delayed trip with nephew to Paris. The Eurostar tickets were booked with Nectar points for last August and now I have vouchers which are valid until the end of 2021, again with a few assumptions, not least that Eurostar survives until the end of 2021!

Then winter? Last year’s ODL Hogmanay didn’t happen and I would very much like to do that again. Maybe a Christmas trip away to a Swedish log cabin the snow…

I’ve been feeling a long time that I haven’t travelled as much as I would like. Like returning to a favourite restaurant where the decision is always between eating what you always have and know you like or branching out to something new which might become a favourite or might not be as good as the tried and tested, travel is always a decision between returning the old favourite of France or getting further afield. I feel I really should branch out beyond Europe as even in my most distant travel I’ve never really left the EU. (Well, technically once when I had a weekend in Prague in 1999, and of course much more distressingly now that all of the UK has left).

I’d toyed with the idea of visiting my American friend in California and possibly then driving north from SF up the western coast towards Oregon and Washington to wave at a Canadian friend just over the water. I’d be looking at several thousand pounds just for the fights and one way car hire so it would be a holiday that would need some saving for! The last time I spent anything like that on a holiday it got me 6 weeks camping on a road trip around France and Switzerland. And I really want to do that again too!

When I’ve had conversations with better travelled friends about widening my horizons, I’ve asked for recommendations. Where in the world gives the best travel? Where would you go back to? Latin America comes up a lot as the most interesting place to visit and I’d be down for that.

I’ve not been independently to Germany since 2008 when I had a long weekend in Munich. So many parts of Germany I’ve never even seen. I’m quite tempted to go and see the north east coast. I’ve not been to Berlin since 1999 on my year abroad. I hear they’ve finished it now? It was awash with cranes when I was last there. Even the parts of the Rhine where we go on school trips are amazing and I would be super happy to go back there with adult friends too, maybe even wander around the castles we deem too boring for Y7.

We were planning an Easter trip to Vienna in 2020 that fortunately as it turned out never quite got as far as booking anything before the impending lockdown became more concrete. Would certainly be happy to reheat that plan again.

Maybe the Fernweh is more serious than that and I need to take steps into much more substantial foreign experience. Maybe it’s almost time to reconsider working abroad? There are plenty of posts for teachers in overseas schools around the world. But is that a young person’s game? Once you’re settled with mortgage and menagerie is there still the chance to take a long term post somewhere else?

School trip(s) to Germany

Next week I head off with school to the Rheinland in the valley of the Loreley, to a town that has seen both flooding (Hochwasser) and heatwave (Hitzewelle) in the last few weeks. I’m looking forward to it immensely and it’s hard to remember I have a full week’s worth of teaching to get through first.

I have always found German harder than French. Although I love the language very much, speaking German accurately and getting the ton of inflected endings anywhere near correct is a bit of a challenge. In class, when people ask me for a French phrase I can almost always do it off the top of my head, checking later in the dictionary to see if my instinct was right. In German I just don’t have anything like the range of language immediately to mind.

Part of this is just that I have not been to Germany nearly as often as France. If (and it’s a big if) you count my six months on my year abroad in Magdeburg as a single trip, you can count my trips over there more or less on the fingers of a single hand.

I was fortunate enough to do two school trips to Germany with school. (Interestingly, never did a French trip with school and as a family we only ever went once.) I was on exchange with a boy in Nürnberg in 1992 or 1993. I have only dim recollections now of most of my school years and the people in them, but can still remember my Austauschpartner’s name. I was probably rude and sullen during the trip and spent a lot of it learning my lines for the Crucible. He spent a lot of time playing on his computer. The exchange was the first time I had been on a plane, and it messed with my ears something chronic. The first stop on arrival was the loo, where I encountered for the first time German inspection platforms, continental hot/cold swivel taps, and where it took me aaaages to figure out how to turn on the water or flush the toilet, and I didn’t anything like the language skills to ask for help. The only food I can remember was a very exciting night when we all sat round some sort of table top stove called a Raclette and grilled our own cheese. On the return trip, we all went to the cinema to see Jurassic Park, newly released, and I found it more than a little scary and had to have time shortly (spoiler alert) after the lawyer got eaten.

The following year school took a drama trip to Germany. We learned a play about a disastrous mediaeval crusade of children, performed it in school, then the entire company got on a bus, drove to Germany, had a bit of a stay in a hotel somewhere and performed the play again to a German audience, whose thoughts on the show are lost in the mists of time. I don’t remember where in Germany this was, and the most memorable bit of the whole trip was the very exciting purchase of a six foot inflatable dinosaur. Somewhere in the house I still have the very simple, and now quite rusty, beer bottle opener we bought over there. Why on earth did I need that at 15? It was long before I learned to like beer.

A family friend helped us organise another semi-exchange during my sixth form years when I went, alone this time, to stay with a family with a daughter my age in the Ruhrgebiet, in response to my concern that my German was far below my French and my fear for my A Level result. Although we cast it as an exchange, it was pretty clear from the get-go that my Partnerin was not going to be unduly concerned if she didn’t get to come back to the UK.

During my university years I spent half of my year abroad at the Otto von Guericke Universität Magdeburg, where I wasted rather too much of my time doing internet stuff in English in the computer lab rather than making any real effort to improve my German. I beat Civilisation II on my laptop in my room whilst drinking home made margheritas in preference to socialising with the other foreign students on my corridor. (If Germany was a bust, my year abroad time in Paris was, however, awesome.)

Here’s a couple of photos to show what Magdeburg was like in 1999, ten years into what many appeared to consider West German occupation of the former glorious Socialist East Germany:

breiterweg

This is Breiter Weg (wide street) – which had been Karl Marx Allee until very recently.

hoteltheater

This was the Hotel am Theater. I’ve no idea why it was in this state.

After 1999, I didn’t go to Germany again for nearly a decade, when an opportunity presented itself to leave P at home and go on a weekend for like-minded gentleman in the beautiful city of Munich. I stayed in a gay B&B thanks to EBAB and had a fantastic time. Photos here. This was in the period when I tweeted and when my blog archived my tweets, so my days are documented. 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8. There are also subsequent posts on Lederhosen (I tried some on in C&A, but didn’t buy, which I now regret) and travelling my sleeper train – my plans and my experience.

My final day there I spent at Dachau concentration camp, which was a really moving experience that I have never really managed to process or write about.

And really, that’s it.

I really need to spend more time in Germany.

Perhaps next summer, WWOOF Deutschland?

Non fic stories

Most of what I read for pleasure is fiction, and almost all of that, for almost all of the time I have been an independent reader, has been detective stories of one sort or another.

But in the last few years, I have started to branch out a bit into reading non-fiction for pleasure. And there’s a sort of new genre I have come across – or at least new to me – of a weird sort of travelogue / nonfic hybrid. Nonfic authors essentially writing stories that happen to be true, but have the readability of fiction. And maybe also footnotes.

The first I really bumped into were Mary Roach. I can’t now remember why I started reading her, but her books are brilliant, about all sorts of unsavoury subjects. There’s Stiff, about cadavers (which I also talked about for Pod Delusion here) Bonk, about sex and Spook about scientific investigations into the afterlife – one I didn’t enjoy quite so much. In all of these, Roach travels about the globe, meets people and then writes about the journey and the discussions.

I suppose the king of all of this genre is probably Bill Bryson. For some reason I have resisted reading almost anything by him, although I did dip into A short history of almost everything on honeymoon and did rather enjoy Notes from a Small Island, in which Bryson travels around Britain, meets people and then writes about the journey and the discussions.

Then the latest discovery is Jon Ronson, of whom I had previously not heard, but someone (probably Kayray) tweeted about his book The Psychopath Test, and I, being for some reason at a low resistance (ie tired, under the influence) popped over to Amazon and bought it. Most weeks there are a scary flood of parcels coming through the letter box of things I only dimly remember buying. And there are now two versions of Mt Toberead – the Kindle version and the print version…

Whilst on holiday, a brief moment of time away from our wonderful hosts while he wired his new sound system and she showed P around the garden and got him to take cuttings, left me alone in my room with my book for a few hours. So far, so good, and so I turned to Jon Ronson. And finished it in two sittings – three hours then and a few more on the return ferry from France.

It’s a book in which Jon Ronson travels around the world, meets people including psychopaths and mental health professionals, and then writes about the journey and the discussions. It’s fascinating and worrying, takes in the corporate world, Scientologists and Broadmoor. And eminently readable. So, at the end of the book, when the Kindle automatically suggested I might like also to read the Men Who Stare At Goats, I added that to the mountain.