| Lanzarote again 1.05 | ||
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Kay
and I went last year and we liked it so much that we decided
to go again, but this time we took Simon too.
Cheap Lanzarote is a cheap holiday destination for people who live in western Europe. When the snow is falling and the skies are grey, a four-hour charter flight takes you to Lanzarote's sun and warmth. It's quite incredible. What's also strange is that no matter how urban I feel, how disconnected from nature, being in the sun and warmth makes me feel happy. Winter sun is no secret elixir, of course, a whole global tourist industry is organised around taking sad, pasty people from cold, dreary and grey countries to places that are a lot better. Lanzarote is an island that has benefited from that industry, but I noticed more during this visit how it has also paid a price. Sprawl We hired a villa from a company that advertises on British TV. In the adverts, a woman dives into a pool that's surrounded by palm trees. Our villa had a pool, although you'd have broken your neck if you'd tried to dive in, and there were palm trees too, but the resemblance ended there. I know that holiday companies stretch the truth, usually it's the discrepancy between the fantasy and the reality that I find the most interesting thing about visiting a place, it doesn't bother me because I don't expect a mass tourist destination to be a paradise. So anyway, we hired a villa for a week, it was big, clean, had marble floors, white concrete wall and a lovely gravelly garden studded with weird desert plants. Our villa was situated in the middle of a new development a couple of kilometres outside of Playa Blanca, which is a tourist hub on the southern tip of the island. If you stood in the garden and looked around, you would see nothing but a sea of identical villas in every direction. On the edge of the development were areas of land, squared off and ready for more villas to be built on them. All over Lanzarote we saw villas, holiday flat and hotels being built, little low-rise settlements for the tourists, all sprouting up, every which way. We walked, one night, along a road that had been built to connect the new developments but around which nothing had yet been erected. It was a road to nowhere, with eerie pedestrian crossings and not yet activated streetlights, a place of a future that had not quite happened. Lanzarote was a very poor place before the tourist boom hit it in the 1970s. One of its national dishes is called gofio, which is a toasted ground cereal, it's like eating flavoured dust, poverty food. People scraped a living. It's no surprise that the era that tourism exploded is known as "the euphoria years." Some locals, César Manrique amongst them, lobbied to limit the damage that tourism inevitably brings, and they were successful. But times change, tourism is an industry of greed and aggressive expansion, Manrique has been dead for years, the modern world calls and you can't help feeling that Lanzarote - a biosphere no less - has some tough times ahead. In the valley along the main LZ-1 artery road there's a town called Macher. In fields surrounding the town there are signs saying No Development! Another part of the world At night we looked up into the cloudless sky and noticed that the moon and stars were in a different position to where we were used to looking. The moon was right above us, directly over our heads. It was then that we knew that we were really in another part of the world. Plastic sheets Our beds were protected by plastic sheets. I hate plastic sheets. I hate the way that you half wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and sticking to them through the flimsy cotton sheet. The plastic sheets gave me nightmares, I dreamt that a red dust had come an settled on the land, volcanic dust, and that I would have to try and enjoy my holiday through the dust. In the morning I stripped the plastic sheet off the bed and stuffed it in a cupboard. Simon was 40 On Simon's 40th birthday we saw a field full of purple flowers and we waded in the clear waters of a lagoon until it was too deep to go any further. Fish I can't expain this but the sight of fish in the water, swimming freely, always lifts my spirits. For one reason or another we did not get to swim amongst the fish this time around, but I saw fish from the quayside and from a boat, and that constituted a perfect moment for me. By the quay I saw thousands of tiny fish in the clear, shallow water. They were black and silver, about an inch or two long, skinny and small. The sunlight reflected off the silver in their scales and shoal looked like tiny flashes of electrical light zapping on and off. We took a glass-bottomed boat ride to a beach. There was nothing to see as the boat nipped along, but at a pre-arranged spot the captain stopped the boat and got one of his go-fers to chuck a load of fish food over the side. There were four of us in the boat, looking down. An Italian man made a comedy routine for us pointing at the fish and miming catching, cooking and eating it. We saw such a sudden multitude of fish, a barracuda, silver fish we couldn't name, so many of them there, so suddenly. It was an amazing and beautiful sight, no matter how cynically orchestrated for us. When we got to the beach one of the sailors manned a smaller boat to go and pick up those who wanted to return to the port. We stayed aboard but the Italian man had a go on the speedboat just for fun, smiling and waving at us as he returned. Pool Having our own pool was a delight I can barely bring myself to describe. If you want to know more about this, I've written about having a pool of our own elsewhere on this site. The frantic day A holiday can never be a complete escape from everyday life. Despite the beauty of the island, the warmth, the ease of everything, I was tetchy and wound-up with premenstrual hormones. My brain felt wrong. I needed some time alone so whilst Simon and Kay took a daytrip to the neighbouring island of Fuerteventura, I did my own thing for a few hours. What did I do? I cleaned frantically, I moved objects around the villa, I tidied a cupboard and then I felt much better. Roadkill People drive like loons. The roads are narrow and winding and people drive along them in hopped-up cars as fast as they can. They take terrible risks on blind corners or in the path of oncoming traffic. We did not die in a collision this time, but the corpses of three cats, some rabbits and a hedgehog lay by the wayside. I wish I hadn't seen The big man who shouted "No!" as loudly as he could directly into the face of his grizzling child, shaking the pushchair as he bellowed; the fighter jets flying overhead, a bad reminded of the wars going on in other parts of the world; the arrogant English settler who patronised the bank teller, then patronised me and then zoomed off in his 4x4. 
The crow There's a crow that lives on an outcrop of rock at the Mirador del Rio. Its purpose, perhaps, is to surprise the visitors who come to look out over the clifftop. Once they see this vicious-looking bird, the universal gesture, so it seems, is to hold out one's hand towards it and make a click-clicky sound with one's tongue. The crow ignores this gesture and the visitor moves on. The three of us sat and watched a stream of people perform this ritual. We were sitting behind the crow, we watched the activity from the crow's point of view. Each poorly-dressed, stupid-looking visitor behaved as though they were the first person to offer a hand to the crow, some took photographs of it, or video. The crow disregarded everything except the promise of food. The lunch We ate a lunch in the Manrique-designed restaurant at the Castillo de San José. The art at the accompanying museum was underwhelming, but the restaurant was incredible. We sat amidst beautiful 1970s modern design that has been maintained and kept good since the day it was installed. Wooden light fittings, black tables and matching tulip chairs, a massive circular glass window looking out over the bay, uniformed waiters, low ceilings. Kay and I ate delicious Canarian vegetable soup with local cheese and gofio. I had a glass of punch. Afterwards the waiter cooked us crêpes suzettes on a portable stove, and we heard our fellow diners gasp when he flambéed them just for us. Everything was perfect. The concert in the caves We went to hear the Leipzig String Quartet play at the Cueva de Los Verdes as part of Lanzarote's music festival. The Cueva are a series of lava tunnels several kilometres long where the islands inhabitants once sheltered from persecution, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters. Today it's a tourist attraction, part of Manrique's architectural heritage, and the caves house a stage and an auditorium as well as other geological treats. To get to the stage you walk down, down, down into the depths of the tunnel system, along narrow paths, under rocky platforms and through archways that force you to stoop. One wrong footing could make you tumble into a hole in the ground, never to return. Not surprisingly, our hearts were beating hard by the time we got to our seats. There were maybe a couple of hundred of us sitting on fold-out chairs in the cavern that stretched out either way for further than I could see. The rock formed infinite patterns and was lit by a series of hidden spotlights. String quartets are generally not my most favourite kind of music, it's too prissy and precise for me, too polite, but I enjoyed the Leipzig Quartet and let my mind drift along with the music. The effect of the music and the disorientating surroundings was hypnotic, by the end of the concert I was in a dreamlike state, all heightened emotions, feeling, looseness in my heart like a body after a massage, the memories of people long gone floating around me like ghosts. The first step We spent our last morning on the beach at Papaguayo. It was too cold and overcast to swim in the sea, so we made our own fun larking around on the beach, making up games to amuse ourselves, watching the waves boom along the shoreline. It was beautiful. Then it was time to head to the airport. Simon announced the first step of our journey home that would not end until later that evening, when we had flown up the Moroccan coast, seen Gibraltar and waited for our bus in the rain outside Stansted. |
               
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