The long weekend -- Canary Islands, pt I

I apologize for the length of time I go between posting on this very blog.  I'll do my best to post more often, which will hopefully correspond with more interesting things happening in my life.

Either way, Billie and I realized that even though the winter chill that settles over the Iberian peninsula would be considered a warm spring day, possibly shorts weather, for hearty Midwestern stock such as my family, we had spent enough time in Spain to feel that we deserved a respite from the temperature.  We looked at a few different destinations, but in terms of weather, there was only one real candidate -- the Canary Islands.  Located off of Africa's west coast, the seven islands are closer to Mali than Madrid, and the weather there is always nice.  We had flights to the 640 square-mile large island of Fuerteventura, which is the second-furthest north.  We decided to avoid making too many plans and instead decided to improvise once we arrived, assuming that the combination of depressed economy, low season, and wildcat air traffic controller strike would allow us to get good prices on everything.

We landed after a two and a half hour flight from Valencia, and quickly hit the bathrooms to change into shorts and t-shirts.  Then it was off to find a rental car, which we were able to do for a very reasonable price.  About ten minutes after landing, we were in the car and on the road towards our first destination, the northern coastal city of Corralejo.  The highway ran through the flat gravelly interior, until the gravel abruptly ended and sand dunes began.  It was an interesting difference, and I'd never seen a highway running straight through sand dunes before.  We pulled off to get a better sense of the sand and coast, then continued on.  The landscape on Fuerteventura is pretty desolate once you leave the coast, and it is easy to see why it was the poorest part of Spain for centuries -- the island didn't even have running water or electricity until the 1970s.  But once Franco opened up the islands to tourism, the building boom began, which is how Corralejo came into being.  We had no interest in staying at a resort with sunburned English retirees, so we found an apartment that rented for 30E a night in a complex of holiday apartments and booked one.

the sand dunes near Corralejo

Corralejo didn't have much going on, and the nearby beaches were infested with aging German nudists with a deficiency in modesty, so we hopped in the car (so much better than buses when you aren't in a big city or going between two distant places) and drove around.  Corralejo's redeeming factor were the two restaurants we found via our Lonely Planet guidebook -- a delicious Italian restaurant that offered actual Italian-tasting food (the owner was from Bologna) and an interesting and tasty Spanish restaurant, where we were served by the Andalucian chef's Austrian wife. 

After Corralejo we headed to the other end of the island, to the small city of Morro de Jable.  We found a good hotel/apartment with a terrace overlooking the town and coast, and found an excellent parking spot right across the street from the hotel:

The town and nearby lighthouse were decent, but the best part of this side of the island, and my favorite part of the entire trip, was the trip across the mountains.   This tip of the island is bisected by a large mountain range, and Morro Jable is still a ways away from the crossing.  The road to get across the mountains is an unpaved, switchbacking snakepath full of potholes, blind curves, and washed-out stretches, and all we had was our tiny VW Polo, which we'd been told not to take off road.  So we set out one morning and did just that, and after about an hour of harrowing/exhilirating turns that took us up into the mountains, yet still with good views of a small portion of the coast, we finally reached the point we could cross over to the other side of the mountains.  I had no idea what was waiting for us -- this was what we saw when we eclipsed the hill:

Beautiful untouched beaches stretching out to the horizon, with huge azure waves washing into them, flanked by imposing mountains.  It was a pretty surreal sight, and we couldn't decide whether to continue taking in the incredible view from on high, or to head down and get to the beach. We hung out for a few minutes and then went down to the water. I won't lie and say we had the entire coast to ourselves, but there weren't more than 15 people on the entire beach that we could see, so we definitely felt like we'd discovered some long-lost tropical treasure.

After enjoying the beach, we went to the tiny local restaurant, almost surely the only one in the group of little hut-like houses assembled on the side of the mountain -- a little village only accessible by the road we'd come in on, which makes me think that during heavy rain or winds, they are completely cut off from the rest of the island.  I tried the papas arrugadas con mojo picon, which my friend Oscar had told me is the typical food of the islands.  It was just potatoes with a hot sauce, but it was pretty good nonetheless.  We headed back to Morro Jable glad we'd taken the long drive up through the mountains.


Our next destination was the interior city of Betancuria.  It wasn't very exciting, but it was cool to see some actual color and vegetation instead of the drab beige and grey of the majority of the island's natural coverage.  We walked around for a half hour or so and then left.

Eventually we decided to take a ferry across to the island closest to Fuerteventura, called Lanzarote.  Only a 15 minute ride away, we headed back up to the North, got our tickets, returned the car, and hit the boat.