Autopista With Vista

It’s still early morning in San Juan, and Zara and I have just finished our breakfast as a new day dawns at home and in Tenerife. I have finally overcome my fear of driving on the Island’s ubiquitous serpentine roads and am now a confident Woman with Wheels (see post Woman With Wheels).  

Mama says that she may as well make good use of her daughter's new status as family chauffeur and asks that I take her to the Lidl store in the nearby village of Puerto Santiago, it's just too cumbersome by bus. I happily promise but it will have to be tomorrow, because today is Exploration Day. My English niece still has another free day before she returns to her job as receptionist at the Blue Lagoon Hotel, and we accordingly make the most of this liberty by planning a day crammed with activity: We will drive northwards towards the capital city of Santa Cruz, and upon our return back towards San Juan we will drive along the coastline towards the enormous adjacent tourist resorts of Los Cristianos and Playa de las Americas. The resorts are only a thirty minute drive away from our breakfast table, but compared to the sleepy Canarian village that we have just awoken in, it may as well be on another planet.  Zara tells me that she wants to take me to her favourite beach in the Las Americas resort called, La Playa del Duque. And of course I happily oblige. It's not everyday that aunt and neice have the opportunity of spending a quality day together driving around a beautiful island paradise that we both call home.

But, before we can begin our exploration adventure there is the little business of driving to the Magistrates in Los Cristianos, El Juzgado to obtain for Zara some documentation required by the HR department at the Blue Lagoon hotel. I have never driven there before and am therefore clueless. Zara in turn has only the vaguest of ideas, so is unable to illuminate me further. Now, I am renting a car on this Island for the first time in my life, so I have already achieved an enormous goal. Learning to use a navigator to help get me where I want with my vehicle will be my second goal, but today I do not quite feel up to the challenge, so I decide to ask Mama. She will know, she always does. And I am not disappointed. She is still in the kitchen finishing breakfast, and after I approach her with my request for precise directions she proceeds to rattle off a series of verbal instructions which perplex me even more. So I ask Mama to simply draw me a map, and this is what we she presents me with:

Zara and I look at Mama's detailed driving instructions with astonishment. Who needs Google maps when you have a woman with this set of awesome map drawing skills? Mama tells us not to lose the map. She can share with one of her girlfriends from the Beach Club if one them need instructions on how to get to the same place. We promise to take great care of this precious document and look at one another and smile. And we gather our bags and phones, kiss Mama on either cheek Spanish style and we are on our way.  The journey to the magistrates is successfully navigated using this amazing piece of encrypted technology which we carefully put away for possible future reference as Mama requested, and after our visit is concluded we are free to begin our new day of exploration as Women With Wheels.

Tenerife is a mountainous island with the Teide Volcano rising majestically from its centre to an altitude of 3.7 kilometres above sea level and so making it the second highest peak in Europe after Mont Blanc in France. The Island's motorways skirt along the coastline and in doing so avoid this colossall giant. Our drive northwards is captivatingly beautiful with stunning scenery at every turn. Zara calls it an autopista with vista, a motorway with a view, which indeed it is. If we look right we are met with the deep blue Atlantic waters and if we look left, we have brightly coloured Canarian homes dotted along the mountainous landscape.  Life is good and we women are happy. I tell Zara that this is indeed food for the soul. How can you not feel happiness surrounded by such immense beauty, and my mind begins to explore this intriguing state of emotion. Happiness really is an abstract concept; it means different things to different people and is near impossible to quantify in any absolute or concrete manner. The greatest happiness comes not from material, but rather from immaterial things, such as the feeling created by a good moment with a person or a place. A moment such as now.

Place names successively pass us by in a blur as I press the accelerator and Zara immerses herself in a map of the Island she has brought along. To me, it is crammed with familiar towns and villages from my childhood, but staring out at Zara from the sheet of paper is a cascade of unintelligible names; Guimar, Tacoronte, Chio, Tegueste, Tamaimo. They don’t sound very Spanish, she points out looking up from the map. That’s because they are not, I reply. They are names derived from the ancient language spoken by the indigenous population, the Guanches, way before the arrival and conquest of the Canary Islands by the Spanish in the fifteenth-century. Who are the Guanches, Zara asks. And just as Uncle Fernando did with me when we drove up the winding mountain road to the cemetery to locate Papa’s grave (see post Columbus And The Missing Gravestone), I proceed to momentarily take my eyes of the road ahead of me, turn to Zara and pause to say, My dear, do you really not know who the Guanches are? Through your Grandma and my Mama, their blood flows in both our veins, so you really need to plug this critical knowledge gap. And before I realise it, a history class opens up for  Zara as we drive along this beautiful autopista with vista, motorway with a view.

Located on approximately latitude twenty-eight, the seven islands that make up the Canaries (Lanzarote, Fuerteventure, El Hierro, La Gomera, La Palma, Gran Canaria and Tenerife) bathe in the warm waters of the Atlantic Ocean and only sixty miles or ninety kilometres separate them from nearby Morocco. The conquest of the Islands by the Spanish crown, not an easy task considering the fierce resistance of the local aboriginal population, took place between the years 1402 and 1496 beginning with the Island of Lanzarote and ending with the Island of Tenerife, finally conquered after much bloodshed between the years 1494-1496. By the time of Tenerife's capitulation, four years had elapsed since Christopher Columbus's historical voyage from the neighbouring Island of La Gomera to new lands that would eventually be christened America. When the Spaniards arrived on the Islands in the early fourteen hundreds to begin their slow and steady conquest, they stumbled upon an aboriginal stone-aged people living a seemingly primitive life based on shepherding, fruit gathering, and very limited agriculture. They spoke an unfathomable language, lived in caves hewn out of the soft volcanic rock and worshipped heathen Gods. These people are today known as The Guanches.

To be continued....

Next post 6th October:  A Place Called Chinet

Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.