TENERIFE: El Teide, the volcano on TENERIFE.

Tuesday 3 March.

We were up at 7 am for breakfast and got ready for the bus to Las Americas. Moira filled the flask and made sandwiches for lunch and we were on our way. It was the express bus we caught and now that we were both used to the route and nothing new to see we took out iPads with us and read as we travelled to Las Americas bus station.

We caught the same connection that took us to Arona last week for our walk from there. It was expensive costing €29 and we hoped that was a return ticket. We got good views of the mountains Conde, Imoque and Brezos us the bus climbed further up through the spread-out settlement of Ifonche to the next town of Vilaflor. A few people with day packs and hiking poles got of the bus there so there was obviously some hiking routes starting there. From Vilaflor we continued to climb on a winding zigzag road through first of all a dense pine forest. As we got higher the trees thinned out as the ground became more and more rocky and the vegetation got sparse. Next it change to a lava strewn desert with a few cacti but mostly rocky cliffs and jagged pillars of of rock as we passed into the crater of the original volcano. The peak of El Teide was a subsequent eruption many thousands of years ago that built up a secondary crater.

The bus stopped at the Parador, an expensive hotel and the El Teide National Park centre. There was a 10 minute break there while the driver had a rest after his hectic drive up the twisting narrow road. We had a walk about and had a good view of the peak of El Teide. There were a lot of cars parked along the road and lots of people climbing a set of tall jagged rocks, Roques de Garcia, further along the road. When the driver came back and we got going again we had a choice, either to get off at the cable car station or go to the terminus further along the road to the visitor's centre at El Portilla. We weren't sure what was at the visitor's centre and decide to get off at the cable car station and go to the top.

This was expensive as well, €52, but we couldn't travel all the way here and not go to the top. There was a queue for the cable car and we had to wait about half an hour before we were on the way up. I was bit worried coming down again because if there was a hold-up and as there was only one bus back, we had to catch it or get stranded. It took 6 minutes to get to the top cable station so now I wasn't too worried about getting down in time if there were 10 an hour. The car was very crowded and we were cramped in,so didn't get a good view as it climbed. There was window open in the car and the air blowing in was very cold and when we got off there was snow lying about. We had our fleeces on but put rain jackets on top, we also had long trousers on today. This was a wise move as we were now quite comfortable compared with some people in only shorts and t-shirts and open sandals with bare feet.

Before we got onto the cable car they sold us a pamphlet of walks at the top for €2. There were 3 walks from the cable car station. One in each direction to view points while the third went to the crater at the top. The numbers doing the walk to the crater was restricted for ecological reasons and to do it you had to obtain a permit; I didn't think we would have time to do that one anyway. We took firstly the one to the east, which went to the Mirador de La Fortaleza. It was a good path at first but became rough and rocky as it crossed the lava field. The people on the path weren't walkers, slow and clogging up the trail; we had to push past some of them. We were now at an altitude of 3500m and the air being very thin caused us to gasp for breath especially on any rises we encountered along the path. The view at the look-out point was obscured by the cloud that was lying below us. The sides of the mountain from here were covered in snow and contrasted strikingly with the black lava. Near the Mirador there was another path that came up from the road at the bottom. The sign said that it was a difficult descent estimated to take 4hours 30 minutes. I spoke to an English guy coming up but he said he had just walked down about 500 m before turning back up, he said it started as a nice gravel track gradually sloping down but soon became very rocky and steep where he turned back. We decided to investigate ourselves and walked down for about 10 minutes. It did get rougher and as the view wasn't particularly good we headed back up again. We met a young couple who had walked up from the bottom and they said it wasn't too difficult. When I examined the route description again I found that although it was very high altitude the climb, it started at 2348m to finish at 3555m, so was a climb of just over 1200m, a good Munro! Though the thin air would make it hard going.

Back on the track we made our way gain to the cable car station, Estacion Superior, and picked up the path to the western look-out point. This was a much better path, not so rocky but it did drop quite a bit as it zigzag to the Mirador Pico Viego, 3497 m. Here the view was a lot better and we could see building of the towns on the coast. A profile map pin-pointing spots of interest that allowed us to pick things out along the horizon. The high points on the island of La Palma were visible above the clouds in the distance but we couldn't see anything of La Gomera. The towns we could see we took to be Puerto de la Cruz, Santiago del Teide and Las Americas. Below was clearly the 800m in diameter crater of the Pico Viego and further behind the mountains around the outer edges of the original crater with Parador in front. Another route descended from here and crossed the summit of Pico Viego. After lots of photographs we made our way back to the cable car station.

There wasn't any queue for the cars going down so we decided to have our lunch sitting on the wall while soaking up the scenery. We sat beside a group of guys who told us they had just run up, it took them 2 hours and the distance was 8 km, they were having something to eat before running down again. They were from England and had come out for 3 days especially to do this run. They were training for a 6 day event running across the Sahara Desert. We got talking about long distance running and ultimately the Comrades which they want to do sometime. I told them about a lot of the ultra distance and mountain races I had done and we had a good chat. They were all, we guessed, to be in their 40's and it made we envious that I wasn't that age and able to take part in these marvellous endurance events.

After lunch we made our way down again. There had been a bit of a queue building up at the station but we got on the second car and soon at the bottom again. As we had about 90 minutes before the bus arrived we decided to walk to the Parador and catch it when it came through there. As we descended to the road there was a path clearly visible on the other side that crossed over a small rise in the general direction of the hotel. Sure enough when we crossed the road there was a signpost on the track pointing to the Parador. We followed it up and over the rise and then on the other side it seemed to be taking a route away from where we wanted to go; we followed it for about 10 minutes but it must have been taking a long loop. We had been walking for 30 minutes and the bus was arriving in 45 minutes, we decided to turn round and head back to the cable car station again. It was now fast going as we stretched our legs and picked up the pace. It still took another 30 minutes to get back and we were only relaxing on a seat for about 5 minutes when we saw the bus turn off the main road and come up the hill to where we were.

When the bus reached the Parador the driver had a 10 minute break again and quite a lot of people got on. I don't know where they all came from as there being only one bus each day, I would have thought only the ones that came on the bus this morning would be going back. There was another bus there that was heading for Puerto de la Cruz, a long queue was waiting to get on it and when it left there were people having to stand. It took an hour to get to Los Cristianos and we spent the time gazing out the window at the tremendous scenery. On the way up we were on the inside seats but now we made sure to get on the side with the best views. After the flat sandy looking surface of the old crater we started to drop through the rocky Alpine desert to the slopes covered in pine trees that got thicker and thicker as we dropped. Then after Vilaflor it was the mountain around Arona before reaching the coast at Los Cristianos. It was slow going to Las Americas as we were now in the rush hour traffic and we just missed the express bus when we eventually arrived at the terminus.

We didn't have long to wait when a normal 'slow' bus arrived and we were on our way home. We read our books on the iPads and the journey didn't seem to take so long. We missed the quizzes on the TV tonight, it was nearly 7pm when we got in. Moira heated up a pizza for dinner so it wasn't long before we were having our meal. We watched a couple of programmes from the Freeview recorder tonight. One was the about the life of the singer Nat 'King' Cole which was good and then Andrew Marr's 'History of Modern Britain'. This episode was about WW2 and was quite interesting.

It had been a hard day, probably partly due to the altitude and we were very tired. We got to bed at 9:45pm but there wasn't any reading tonight, we were soon sleeping.

EL TEIDE PHOTO ALBUM