Monthly Archives: February 2026

Gran Canaria

If an app says a walk is hard, take your crampons.

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Firgas, a pretty little town 500m up in the hills above Las Palmas.

Silence, then Salsa.

    It is true that the alltrails app did call this walk “Hard”. It is also true that I didn’t tell Clive this. Apparently the next stage after Hard is Strenuous. Given that the Barranco de Azuaje ravine walk near Firgas involved descending into a ravine, scrambling through narrow rock faces, abseiling down and up cliffs, and wobbling across rivers, in retrospect this makes sense. I just thought it looked really pretty. And Clive can read.

We took off into the hills above Las Palmas on a 2 euro bus to Firgas, a pretty little village in the hills. We had a litre of water with us, bought from the local shop as an afterthought. We were, in every respect, a mountain rescue team’s favourite category, “unprepared in every conceivable way”. Even down to my white Skechers which had very little grip, except around my broken toe. 

Bucolic.
Start of the walk. Shorts went on soon after.

   First impressions here were silence. Resounding, all-encompassing quiet. We wound our way down, down, down, into a valley that grew darker as we descended, and louder as the sound of a river became clearer. Past a creepy derelict hotel, once a posh spa, then along the ravine bed.

Creepy old Spa from the 19th Century.

The alltrails blurb mentioned that the ravine had a jungly vibe, which is true, but with chickens. I have no doubt they had escaped from somewhere higher up and their owners couldn’t be arsed to retrieve them down here. Or maybe they were on an adventure, like us. 

Chicken on a day trip.

  Because we were too mean to pay for the Alltrailsapp, we didn’t have much to go by in terms of navigation. The walk summary had warned that there weren’t any signs and that it could get slippery, muddy, and rather perilous. In classic “middle-aged couple blithely entering a potentially dangerous situation while mainly thinking about the best place to eat their sandwiches” fashion,  we ambled along until ambling became crouching, crouching became crawling, crawling became climbing, the white shoes became black and filled with sludge, and we began to feel the faintest twinge of alarm that we might be lost. 

Bamboo tunnel.
Love Clive’s expression here. The penny drops. We are off track. We have to turn back, or be lost in the jungle until a dog walker finds our corpses.

 

Safety briefing delivered by hen.

We had both read the book called ‘Why People Die On Walks” and it is almost always because they won’t turn around and go back the way they came. Having abseiled down a rock, fought our way though a bamboo tunnel and come face to face with a long stretch of water that seemed too deep to paddle through, we realised we were way off the route and needed to go back.

In my youth, I’d have sprinted up this like a mountain goat.
Hey, even mountain goats get old.
Valliant.

This decision saved our bacon and we eventually found the long, steep clearly marked path out of the ravine.

Never has a lemonade tasted so good. 

 One of the many things I love about Gran Canaria is that you can you be lost in the hills and an hour later be salsa dancing in Santa Catalina Square alongside two men dressed as chickens.

The strangest thing, though, was the woman jauntily boarding the bus in Firgas with her shopping trolley, heading down to Las Palmas for a spot of shopping. At 7pm.

Dancing in Santa Cataline Square.
Crowds are waiting. We are not sure what for.

We may have had a few beers…

Patagonia

Learning Spanish, Unlearning English.

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A small holiday epiphany.

Some of our Spanish school with random friendly strangers we met in the Marcado while drinking and eating tapas.

   These are the stories I will never tell. Like a stand-up comedian destined to stay forever in the wings. Hiding from two German friends to avoid joining them in what seemed to be a fiendishly difficult salsa class in the square. Breaking my toe on the bedpost, and while it was still numb, getting Clive to pull it straight and buddy-strap it, as it stuck out at an alarming angle. Yesterday. On my birthday. Having my legs and bikini line waxed in faulty Spanish. All I’ll say is that Spanish women are a lot less prudish than the average English woman.

My broken toe. Sorry, I don’t have a lot of photos this week.

This week I’m in a class of twelve, and the vibe is very different to the previous weeks when there were five to eight people in each class. So our teacher never asks me what I did yesterday, although I studiously prepare it each morning, just in case. The adult me knows this is just how it goes. I’m at the back, hidden behind a row of people; I planned to move after the first day but the class is mostly German and when I arrived a little early the next day to execute my plan they were already sitting in the exact same seats they had put their towels on from the day before.

The schoolgirl in me is in a right old strop about being ignored. Or perhaps it’s the middle child. 

“Look at me!”

I’m shouting in my head, while studiously staring at the table trying not to catch the teacher’s eye. Old habits die hard, even when they’re doing the exact opposite of what I long for. 

There’s a bit of relief there too, as no matter how much we plan our responses, we are level B1’s, so our speeches usually cause expressions of puzzlement to appear on everyone’s face except the teacher’s. 

“He’s doing something three times a day, but I don’t know what. Everyone seems very impressed. What could it be?” is an example of my thoughts. 

“He’s sailing with the assistant in the bakery opposite?” No, actually, he’s dancing. But often the conversation moves on and I never find out. I still have no idea what he did three times a day. 

Some of the twelve people in my class this week. Natalia, our teacher, is standing at the front.

 An Italian student who has never done any Spanish before, rattles off paragraphs of speech that the teacher totally understands. She gently corrects about one word in thirty. He works in a hotel in Italy and and is doing the course to get better tips. 

   Italian and Spanish are called Romance languages, and are based on Latin. So he understands about 70% of Spanish already. When I am casting around for a Spanish word, the English ones that work tend to be Latinate or French-derived. For want of another word, these are usually posh words, brought to us by William the Conquerer, originally used mainly by the upper echelons. The Anglo-Saxon words never disappeared, because the majority peasant class carried on using them. The posh words often cluster around law, medicine and government. So in law there are an awful lot of phrases that basically are two words, one based on French, one Anglo-Saxon, meaning the same thing. Law and order, cease and desist, null and void, terms and conditions – everyone needed to know what these meant, not just the poshos.

The Canarian School of Languages.

   In order to level the playing field, when we socialise with people from other countries, we all try and speak in Spanish. Most people from other European countries can speak English, but attempting to speak Spanish for the last four weeks has made me realise how exhausting that must be for them. The only trouble is we are beginners, and so most of the time after a glass of wine or two, we haven’t the faintest idea what they are saying, and vice versa. 

   Tomorrow is my last day at school. I must say I’m glad. I now have a rickety scaffolding of tenses and vocabulary that I need to start using. If I learn much more, like Homer in The Simpsons, it’ll push the old stuff out of my brain. 

We now have three weeks to properly explore the island, host friends, and have a go at practising what we’ve learned. 

Probably my favourite class, the second week, on left Trevor, an amazing Welsh linguist/author, my mate Norb, who hypnotises people presurgery so that they heal fast and don’t bleed, Michelle, a sweet and very young German person, me, and Uwe, a German journalist.