El Caldera del Taburiente

Sunday 20 March 2005. We are on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. Having spent the morning wandering around the streets of Santa Cruz, we take a coach after lunch for an excursion to sites nearby.

El Caldera del Taburiente is the world's largest volcanic crater. Its circumference is almost 17 miles around and the crater reaches depths of 3500 feet. However it merely started life as a volcano and then the crater was enlarged greatly by the erosion of the much more modest original volcanic crater.

It is a national park, protecting the unique vegetation. The air is so clear here that an internationally famous astronomy station is on top of one of the mountains that ring the crater.

I find time to do a bit of scratching with the pencil. A pencil that I had had to borrow from the Purser's desk - I'd forgotten to bring one with me!

Steep gullies plunge down from the path, climbing equally as steeply on the other side of the path. I use the word steep with deliberation. We kept well away from the edge, as to slip down one of these would mean a long fall and a painful halt by banging into a tree or an even greater drop to the bottom!

Only rarely along our walk do the trees and bush clear to give breath-taking views of the crater. It is gob-smackingly impressive!

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La Palma

Sunday 20 March 2005. The good ship Carousel docks in Santa Cruz on the island of La Palma.

It's a beautiful day and we are booked on an excursion for the afternoon. So for the morning we will get off the ship and wander independantly around the town of Santa Cruz.

We have a little map of the town centre from the ship and follow other passengers as they seem to know where they are going. Mind you, people have followed us in the past, making the same mistake...

However in this case we arrive safely into Santa Cruz. There's a full size galleon standing on the dockside. Not in the sea but on the dockside. It makes more sense when it is pointed out to us that it is made of concrete!

Santa Cruz is a gorgeous town. Extremely pretty, with streets and narrow alleys requiring houses with very narrow ends that widen as they get further from the junction. Houses are rendered and painted in bright colours and there is plenty of public seating provided.

The statue of a group of musicians takes pride of place in this little square with a view between the houses out to the Atlantic Ocean. It's Sunday and we presume the locals must all be in church - this being a mainly Catholic community.

In fact it's not just any Sunday, but it's Palm Sunday and we hear music and singing approaching us down the hillside of the street. The locals are parading, waving long palm fronds in a smiling procession that is delightful to watch pass by.

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Mediterranean Explorer Cruise on Island Star, 2007

Saturday 25 August 2007. We are joining the cruise ship Island Star for their Mediterranean Explorer cruise. Eagle-eyed readers will perhaps spot that we did this exact same cruise in 2006. Ah yes - but this time we'll do different excursions!

We drove off to Manchester Airport and left the hire car (as mine was having dents removed) and Fran suggested checking in the bags before dropping the key off at the hire desk. So we parked in the hire car drop off place and checked our luggage and ourselves on the plane and we then found that the hire car desk was back outside in the car park instead of in the check-in area... Warning bells rang, but thankfully only in my head. "You realise we've just checked two suitcases onto an aeroplane and now we are walking back to the car park?" I said, picturing large uniformed people with guns wondering why we were taking this course of action. Either thankfully or worryingly the security didn't notice this...

Skip forward to Palma, Majorca. We got a coach from the airport to the ship and checked into our cabin on Deck 6 without any worries that we might decide to to anything faintly suspicious on the dockside. Then it was out onto the Pool Deck to grab something to eat and have a look at Palma.

We spent the rest of the afternoon lazing about, watching boat sail in and out of the harbour and watching planes flying down the mountain range and into the airport, adding to the compliment of passengers aboard the Island Star. Flights were delayed. Therefore so were we. We ate in the Beachcomber Restaurant which was the self-service eatery onboard. It was starting to go dark once we got back to the open deck.

The magnificent cathedral is way across the bay, but I was playing with my telephoto lens, resting the camera on top of my camera bag on the ship's rail to steady it for a quite long exposure.

The drool-worthy yacht apparently belonged to the King of Spain. We were sitting at the blunt end of the ship or "aft" as the ship's officers prefer to call it. There's a grill restaurant there and also people can take out meals from the main Beachcomber Restaurant, to sit and eat al fresco on the deck. This is our only glimpse of a port after dark. All other nights during the holiday we will be at sea before it goes dark.

Back on the main Pool Deck they were starting to think about their Welcome Aboard Party. We decided we'd have a listen to the band and join in the fun!

By the time we joined the party there was already a full compliment so we stood by the rail on the upper deck above the pool and along with a few score of others, swayed, danced, and waved from there! The band were quite good but the blokes doing the mixing didn't quite understand that voices were supposed to be heard over the instruments and the guitarist may as well have packed up and gone home. He may have been a bit uncertain of his prowess - when there was any sort of guitar solo it was played by the bass player, high up on the neck of his 5-string bass. Once this was done with and one or two people had fallen over each other, we were divided into two teams - port and starboard - and had a singing contest to see if starboard (that's us!) could remember more words to 1970s hits than the port side could remember to 1980s hits! By now we were at sea and the terrible caterwauling didn't disturb any sensitive Spanish ears... After YMCA we gave up and staggered down to our cabin... I mean... how do you top that???

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Colourful Coasts (Canary Isles) on Thomson Celebration, 4-11 April 2014

This is a series of articles covering our trip around the Canary Islands on the Thomson Celebration cruise ship. Once more meeting up with our friends, Tomas and Maris who sing as 2 Intense onboard the ship, we will be taking it easy on this trip, with far more independent trips ashore than excursions.

Click each of the photos below to view the associated articles and photographs.

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Sketches of Foreign Parts 2

I am, I must confess, a little tardy with this follow-up entry. The first in this series was published in December 2013... But hey! Better late than never! Oh and the "foreign" bit only applies if you do not live in any of the countries depicted... There are several places depicted where I'd quite like to live come to think of it!

El Caldera de Taburiente on the island of La Palma, on of the Canary Islands. The caldera is a massive crater, 17 miles (28km) in diameter. (Disconcertingly another guide on a later visit said it was 17 miles around... One of them was out by a factor of 3.142...) It is said to have been eroded out rather than being a volcanic crater. It reaches depths of 3500 feet (724m). I drew this in 2005 on our second cruise and had borrowed the pencil off the Receptionist onboard! One of the very few sketches I've drawn with a normal pencil rather than my propelling pencil.

This is a bit of a weird one. In 2007 we called at Valencia on the old Island Star cruise ship and we took a trip that included a visit to the Sagunto caves. You are taken through the caves on a boat and it is too dark to take photos and flash would blind the boatman leading to bumped heads on overhanging rock or greater disaster. I bought some postcards of the caves (some of which hilariously show boatmen covering their eyes...) and drew this from one of them after we had got home.

I remember we heard a really disturbing echoing boom whilst we were underground on the boat. "What was that?" gasped a young girl.
"Orcs!" I whispered kindly.

This was also done from a photo of Taormina in Sicily when I was trying to get over my reluctance to draw people. Well, not so much reluctance because I don't want to - it's more reluctance because I am hideously bad at drawing lifelike figures... This did help a little and a friend who is also an artist praised it saying that as a quick impression of a place and atmosphere it had some merit. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to produce photographically correct portraits though!

Santa Margherita in Italy, drawn on site. One of the ones I am most proud of - it stands up to the photo quite well. An old chap who was looking over my shoulder called his grandson over and the lad, who was probably around twelve or thirteen, took one look and went "Whoaaaagh!!!" in admiration. A quite satisfying moment, I must thrash myself with a rusty chain...

We took my Mum on a cruise in 2008 and called at Villefranche - one of my favourite spots on the south coast of France. I drew this whilst Fran took Mum around the small market. There comes an age where old people should have reins like you can get for toddlers... We lost her twice that holiday, having to go hairing after her once having spotted her wandering off in the opposite direction and once when she had taken it into her head to hide behind the back of a market stall to try something on...

Mahon on Menorca is a lovely place and the approach from a cruise ship is just gorgeously picturesque with lots of whitewashed houses facing the long inlet that you sail up. This was a very steep hill with a set of steps cutting the corner. An interesting exercise as far as perspective goes. Electricity was distributed by passing a cable across the street. It would have cleared a small lorry - not sure about a large one...

And lastly for this entry this is from the same visit to Mahon and done from the ship's rail once we were back onboard. Mahon is one of those wonderful places where you step off the ship and are immediately in the town. A long curving road leads up the hill to the town centre, but a wide series of steps gives the walker a more direct if no less taxing route. The table umbrellas of a refreshments stall are seen at the bottom.

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La Isla Bonita

Strains of Madonna flit through my head. It's Sunday 6 April 2014 and we have arrived at La Isla Bonita or La Palma as it's more properly known.

The Thomson Celebration moors up in the port of Santa Cruz de La Palma and we have an early breakfast as we are taking an excursion tour today.

Our first stop is at the Caldera de Taburiente National Park. The Caldera is a massive crater. Whilst it looks volcanic - and probably is - the crater was actually formed by natural erosion not a mighty cataclysm. It is huge though - 10 kilometres across and, at its highest point, almost 2.5 kilometres from the peak to the floor.

It is home to some pretty tame ravens as seen in our photo above. A few more photos are called for...

We set off as a group walking around to a viewpoint. They set off at a pace though and I found I was starting to feel the old angina making its presence felt after a bit, so we stopped and started back at a more leisurely pace. In fact the pace had been too much to actually admire the view - the ground was rocky and the drop at the side of the path extremely deep, so you tended to walk with your eyes firmly fixed as to where to place your feet! Taking it a bit easier meant you could enjoy the view a lot more.

Another couple joined us coming back. They were also struggling with the pace and she said she was quite relieved when we turned back as she didn't want to be the first.

We got back safely to the coach and had time to sit on a wall and relax a bit whilst the rest of the party came back.

Coming back we passed a sleeping giant...

Can you make him out? He's gone to sleep holding his pride and joy...

The Mirador de La Concepcion. Overlooking some brave souls who have built their houses around the crater of a volcano! It a few thousand - tens of thousands - of years since it made any fireworks, but still...

Form the viewpoint we could see Tenerife's Mt Teide floating in the haze above the sea. You could make out snow on the slopes near the summit. Once we got back on the ship I twiddled the pencil for a bit from our balcony. This wasn't a large sketch - I drew it across the top of the A5 pad so it only took a few minutes.

We also visited a small church - the Santurio Virgen de Las Nieves, the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Snows. This was quite crowded and we found out that a christening had been taking place. Just what you want in the middle of a family event - a load of camera toting tourists turning up...

Coming out of La Palma was a, or the experience of the cruise. Half an hour out of the harbour we were watching dolphins playing about in the sea from the balcony. I didn't have the camera to hand (but there will be some photos of dolphins from another day). However the real star of the show this day was a huge whale which majestically emerged from under the ship, which it had crossed beneath, and it was easily ten times the size of the dolphins, some of which were playing above it and not much more than the size of half its tail flukes. Awesome!

Colourful Coasts Cruise Index

A Day on La Palma

7 March 2004. Santa Cruz de la Palma is the capital city and port of La Palma, one of the westernmost of the Canary Islands. It is to this teardrop shaped island that we have sailed overnight.

Fran woke first and said "Have we docked yet?" I admitted I didn't know and she whisked back the curtains on the cabin porthole then shrieked at the sight of a much taken aback harbour pilot who was standing on the deck of his pilot boat about three feet away from her naked self... He could probably only see her face and shoulders but since that day Fran has been careful how she looks out of a ship window first thing of a morning...

By the time we were dressed and up on deck, the sun was out and blazing merrily down at the cruisers onboard, who by now are various shades of pink to bright-red-with-blisters... The bodies beautiful are still hard to find amongst the bodies crinkly.

We are booked on a half day afternoon excursion, so it is a lazy morning sunning ourselves and reading. Here Fran has gone for a couple of glasses of iced water - hopefully a bit fresher than the harbour water below which has a trail of rather disgusting looking stuff which has floated our way from a cargo ship moored at the other end of the dock...

The crew are playing on the lifeboats. This is described as a drill and is no doubt serious stuff, but it still looks good fun! Ok! The morning has gone and we must stir ourselves for the afternoon coach trip.

Our first stop is at a ceramics studio, where this chap is taking a break from making hundreds of little pirates - and one big one, obviously, to make a bowl in the manner of the ancient indiginous inhabitants of La Palma. As it's a volcanic island, I'm not sure how it could have indiginous anything except lava flows, but perhaps they mean the first ones to land after the fire went out...

Our next stop is at a local vineyard where the courier helpfully described the paint thinners posing as red wine as "not quite full bodied..." I should say not and to avoid litigation have avoided posting any photographs of the location or the grapes which the local goblins fill with vinegar every night.

Moving swiftly on, we arrive at one of the island's volcanic craters. The volcano, San Antonio last erupted in 1677 and was peaceful as far as any fire and brimstone was concerned.

The wind though was unbelievably fierce, threatening either to blow us into the crater or down the side of the volcano into the sea far below.

This was the view looking away from the bowl of the crater and either side, it was a heck of a long way to be rolling down razor sharp volcanic rock! Not a bad place though to tip any wine you may have bought without tasting it...

Final stop was at a small village with a small park laid out with mosaics and stone patterns. La Glorieta was the name of the park and admission was free and (Oh no!!!) there was a wine museum just 100 meters away.

It was extremely hot. Hot enough that you'd think the volcano could have rekindled itself, but we got back to the Carousel without any mishap or seismic phenomena. Tonight will be special and not just for the harbour pilot... Apart from breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, and main dinner, there is a midnight feast! Not to be missed!

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