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. 

   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.

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. 

  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. 

 

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.

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.