Costa Teguise; Saturday, 27 November, 2021

Breakfast complete and the most convenient tour pick up of my stay was from the bus stop right outside the hotel. Though once again this did mean spending a good 90 minutes travelling down the west coast picking up at lots of locations, and on this tour every seat was booked, which meant it was quite a painful process – especially towards the end as people weren’t happy that they couldn’t always sit together.

The tour I was booked onto was the highlights of the South of the Island, which would include another visit to Timanfaya, but given how impressive the location is I wasn’t too worried about that – and I’d managed to get a seat on the opposite side of the bus to the earlier tour so the panorama tour would give me a different view.

After the paperwork stop in Yaiza we first headed to El Golfo on the South West coast. Here the volcano has been partially eroded away by the sea, with the crater on the coastal side long since collapsed into the sea and the coast now lapping along the inside of the crater. However the outline of the rest of the volcano is still clear to see, and a spit of volcanic debris has managed to keep the water at bay from a lagoon formed in the back of the crater. The lagoon is home to algae that turn the water an iridescent green in contrast to the blue of the sea just a few yards away.

From El Golfo we had a short drive down the coast to Los Hervideros. This is one of the points where the lava from Timanfaya emptied into the sea creating lots of new land and some impressive natural stone bridges and features, helped by 300 years of erosion.

From Los Hervideros we drove back up the coast and into the Timanfaya national park where we stopped at the Camel ride. There is a group of around 400 camels of which around 150 work a couple of hours each day taking tourists up and down some of the dune like volcanoes. It’s all a bit Kitsch, but it is a good way of being able to see the volcanic areas without being behind a coaches window.

From the camels the next stop was the visitors centre for the experiments and then the panoramic tour, and I was glad I’d gotten to do it twice as the view from the opposite side of the coach was as stunning as well as different from the opposite side – including a lot more close up views of craters.

From Timanfaya we headed out of the park and to Mancha Blanca where we stopped for another buffet lunch before heading onto the final stop of the tour in the wine region of the island where there was a chance to sample the local wines, then it was back on the bus and back to Costa Teguise to start the drop-offs.

Back at the hotel I freshened up and then saw the news that once again whilst I was away in the Canary Islands the government was changing the travel rules and for a few hours – until it became clear the government needed to publish some legislation which wouldn’t happen until Monday – it looked like I was going to have to self isolate when I got back home.

I headed down to my last dinner at the hotel and then back to my room to start packing.