Have I mentioned the dogs?
Las Vegas is built on slopes overlooking two ravines. Other villages and farms cling to the mountainsides all around us. Everyone, apparently, has at least one dog. Nobody takes them for walks. They're never allowed inside. And nobody, as far as we can tell, ever tries to curb their barking. Sound travels a
long way in mountains. You get the picture.
There are individual dogs who will bark constantly for
well over an hour at a time. They sound frantic. It’s like the people we see in public sometimes who
talk so much, so fast and so non-stop that Karen will mutter, “Take a breath!” But it’s never just one dog, it’s
almost always a chorus. Sort of like The
Sound of Music, except howling and yapping instead of yodeling across the
valleys.
It’s a good thing Shelley Boyes isn’t here. She’d be
reduced to a gibbering lunatic.
The saving grace is that most of the time we’re inside
because the air is too cool outside, or it’s raining, or both. I still need
music sometimes to drown out the doggy chorus even when we’re inside. (This
year, I have my entire library with me, transferred to a portable hard drive
about the size of a wallet.)
Speaking of rain and temperatures, Karen read this
morning that it will be 15C and rainy in London ON today (Tuesday)! That’s what
it’s going to be here tomorrow.
Are we having a good time yet? Actually, we are.
On Sunday, we set out to walk up the side of the
Caldera de Marteles – up the mountain we can see from our terrace, off to the
right. We walked through the village and along small, but surprisingly heavily
trafficked, semi-rural roads, then onto a single-track paved road that went
straight up into the hills. The dwellings got fewer and further between, and
finally we were on a rocky, rutted track switching up the mountain. The air was
a good temperature for walking, about 14C. We had been promised sun and cloud
but that was beginning to look like a familiar lie. We could see clouds and
mist hanging on the mountain tops not that far ahead of us. The sun? It was elsewhere.
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| Mist on the mountain |
The hills are very green. It’s hard to believe that if
you drive 30 or 40 minutes south and east of here to Maspalomas, you hit
essentially desert. They say Gran Canaria is like a mini-continent because
there are so many different topographies and climates. At this time of year,
the green in the hills is studded with pinks, whites and creams of almond and broom
blossoms, which are out everywhere now, and purples, reds and yellows of clover
and other unidentified wildflowers. The landscapes are probably more
colourful this year because of all the rain.
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| Almond tree and cactus |
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| Up the mountain |
At one point, as we looked back, we spotted a herd of
sheep, harried by dogs, coming down the mountain along another track,
bells clanging. Sound carries a long way in mountains. You can see up here,
literally, for miles and miles and miles. We were so high that we looked
back at one point and realized we could see all of Las Palmas, right out to the point,
the so-called Isleta, at the north end, laid out in the sun. (It’s
always sunny where we’re not!) Las Palmas is about 25 kilometers away as the
crow flies.
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| The Almond Girl |
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| Karen, broom bush, Las Vegas |
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| Las Vegas |
This being Sunday, we were not alone on the path.
Sunday is family day for Spaniards, and we walked by, or sometimes briefly with,
a number of family groups, sometimes large extended families out for a ramble. They
always say, ‘Hola’ or ‘Buena’ as they pass. Those who passed us heading down may
have come all the way from the trail head at the other end, about nine
kilometers away. We were on one of the groomed and guide-posted walking trails
maintained by the municipality. The recommended itinerary is to walk from the other end to
Las Vegas, which would make it all
downhill. Sweet!
We, however, were out for serious exercise and got it.
Despite the temperature dropping a couple of degrees as we climbed and the
clouds lowered, Karen had to shed a couple of layers, and I was damp from exertion.
We walked for about an hour uphill, sometimes climbing
steeply, until we came to a place where the road wound away into pine-forested
hills. We could have been somewhere in northern Ontario or BC. If we'd walked
much further, it looked like we’d be walking in the clouds. The sky was pretty solidly overcast by now, with
mist coming down lower than when we’d set out. We began to wonder if we’d make
it back before the rain came.
We turned back at this point and walked down by the
same route. Walking down was definitely easier and faster, but we did have to
be careful of our footing. It’s easy to slip on the loose stones and grit when
you’re walking down at such a steep angle. We both did slip a couple of times, but
caught ourselves.
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| Heading down |
We were only out for about an hour and 45 minutes, but
it felt like a pretty good workout. I rewarded myself with a beer, and lunch,
and spent what was left of the afternoon processing pictures.
Yesterday, Monday, we had sun on the terrace briefly
in the morning, but then the clouds came in again. We could see it was sunny – or
sunnier – on the coast (we can see
the coast from our terrace), so decided we’d walk the beach promenade at
Maspalomas today.
The walkway extends from San Agustin, where we’d had
lunch with Caitlin and Bob the week before, to the Dunes Reserve at Playa del
Ingles – over four kilometers. It’s easy walking on a paved path, with one
detour onto streets to get around some renovation work. The sea is off to the
left walking this direction. At first you’re at beach level, but at the Playa del Ingles end, you’re well above it, with sweeping
vistas of the ocean and the point at Maspalomas.
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| Playa del Ingles in the distance |
The path is lined with hotels and holiday apartments.
Once again, we were struck by how quiet and civilized it was at the San Agustin
end, where you’re mostly passing owner-occupied casitas hidden behind privacy fences with locked gates. And how
awful it is at the Playa del Ingles end where it’s tacky hotels with
flabby, wrinkly northerners lolling around pools out front, or sunning on
lounges on their balconies. One little hotel we passed, quite nicely kept, had
astro turf lawns in front of the units, one with a neat pile of drying dog
shit on it. Lovely! Others looked more tasteful and cozy with climbing roses and
camellias – no doubt horrendously expensive.
All along the Playa del Ingles stretch, you’re
approached every five hundred meters or so by hucksters, usually offering “free
maps,” actually advertising for tours.
An African woman in a traditional brightly-coloured
dress was offering, I think, custom hair styling. She was holding a card with
pictures of different corn-braid dos. Her scruffier-looking associates, dressed in jeans and t-shirts, were lounging on park benches nearby. Presumably
they were the stylists, presently without customers.
She must have been desperate because she approached me.
Maybe she was hoping I would persuade Karen to have her hair braided? (The
horror!) She said, ‘Excuse me, where are you from?’ I muttered, ‘Canada,’ and
went to walk past her. She stuck out her hand for me to shake and said, ‘How do
you do?’ I felt badly. It seems rude to refuse to shake somebody’s hand – which
is of course exactly why they use this tactic – but I really did not want to
engage with the woman. When we were walking back, 45 minutes later, she was still
out trying to drum up custom. She glanced at me and, maybe it’s just my imagination,
but I thought her expression changed to one of distaste.
We saw one artiste selling his wares, a middle-aged man
with the most god-awful monochrome paintings (or something) of tourist scenes.
Caitlin and Bob would say they were for the chav market. (Chav: a classist term
in Britain for working-class folk with more money than taste. According to
middle-class folk.)
The other thing you see is “performance artists,”
dressed in sometimes bizarre costumes, holding a pose, hoping punters will throw coins
in their baskets. You see them everywhere in Europe, of course, and in North
America too. But here, some are laughable no-hopers. One fellow we
passed was wearing what appeared to be a native American costume of fake
buckskins, carrying a tomahawk – and wearing a Guy Fawkes/Anonymous mask. Huh? He was
standing on a park bench, but made no pretense of staying still, which is
what these “artists” are supposed to do.
In fairness, we did see a couple who had taken much
greater pains. One was wearing a wildly creative and elaborate wizard costume
and had an ingenious piece of apparatus, an s-shaped steel rod with a long tail and a
little platform at the short end that made it look, at a glance, as if he was hovering in
mid-air. His staff disguised part of the apparatus, the rest went under his
costume. He didn’t seem to be doing any brisker a business than the Guy Fawkes
Indian, though. The other guy who had made an effort wore an equally impressive macraméed
King Neptune costume and carried a trident. Who gives these people money, I
wonder?
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| Playa del Ingles: closer than we really wanted to be |
When you get to the real build-up in Playa del Ingles,
it becomes a horror show of restaurants, bars, tacky tourist shops and mid-rise
hotels. At one point, we passed a little restaurant with a dance floor and a
fellow singing some cheesy 1970s song to a recorded accompaniment. People were
dancing. We didn’t dawdle. We walked to the centre, then turned and started
back.
It wasn’t that long a walk, maybe seven or eight
kilometers altogether, but we were walking for almost two hours and, perhaps because
it was all on paved paths, I was feeling quite foot-sore by the time we got
back to the car. We had thought of stopping and having a drink, but decided it
was better to get on the road before the traffic built up around the airport in
the late afternoon. It was about four o'clock.
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