Travel Bites – Canary Islands

Airport lounges are all the same. You can tell who’s been where, or where they’re going, just by looking at them.

There’s the four person family; cheap package deal, self-catering, going to or coming from one of the islands of Gran Canaria. Probably Tenerife.

The Canary Islands are barren and unsightly. I’ve walked on almost all of them. There isn’t a desert, there’s no woodland to speak of, they’re simply bubbles of dried volcanic rock. Unfortunately, the tourists arrived before nature had the opportunity to make these places lush and verdant on their own. I wonder what would’ve become of them had they remained untouched.

Were you to go there, you’d understand that they’re consumer vaccuums running on capitalism: tourists arrive, pay for a square metre of space on one of the island’s many beaches, bake themselves for a while in the hot sun, then they get up and walk around. The shops are like an unending airport duty free section, with greasy Spanish men pushing cameras into unwilling hands, charged with the task of selling these already-obsolete goods.

I say drop the camera that’s pushed into your hand. Drop the whole island into the sea. Let its inhabitants sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, but compliment them for their dilligent attempts at cockroaching through existence all of this time.

If you look up, there’ll be an almost endless series of hotels perched upon dubious foundations around every mountain in sight. Roads snake around them and slowly upwards, straining tour buses. Were there anything else to see, perhaps I’d take issue with it. But, there isn’t anything else to see. No ancient civilisations. Very little history. Just sun, audibly crackling tourists and inhabitants whose skin has leathered, tough and brown.

The beer is cheap. The cheap beer is bad. The best beer is imported, but still bad. The restaurants try to be exotic, perhaps to make up for the lack of natural scenery, putting all kinds of strange seafood dishes on the menu; buttered baby squid, swordfish. You’d just like a steak, not a meatless rabbit.

Sewers are open in places; a sharp contrast to the beautiful and long, loose dresses of the darkening tourists that pass them, their hands covering their wrinkled noses. I’d rather keep my sacred pale skin; an umbrella perhaps, but that would defeat the point of coming here.

Here, where there is only sun, sand and a cosmopolitan mixture of “home”.

Cicadas shake marraccas at night. Hotel pools are still. The noise of the filter, coupled with the cicadas, makes it peaceful.

Climb a mountain and escape the din of the city and its night-life. Look behind where the hotels are. There’s nothing. Not even desert. An endless quarry of hard volcano, unfinished roads and unfinished hotels. People live around the coasts; sand is a luxury that you can charge money for. A handful of Euros per square metre. Sell the beach. Sell the sea. Sell the herd of dolphins beneath the waves. Grow crops indoors, plant vines in potholes and wish you lived anywhere else.

Anywhere that has something more…