For Eleanor and Anwen. What a gorgeous walk. Lots of changes of scenery, Forest to mountain top, steep accents and vertiginous (that means really, really steep) descents. Not a lot of people which was nice. The weather was glorious. We saw lots of lizards, lots of cacti, some of which had beautiful red flowers on them We caught a bus to Cruz del Carmen from the bus station in Laguna which is where we’re staying. We’re actually staying in the Laguna Gran Hotel which is really nice, but the pillows are much too big so I had to use my jumper as a pillow last night. Mampa is going to ask the hotel for less fluffy pillows for tonight. I took lots of photos and I’m going to include a lot of them here so that you can see what it all looks like. We’ll start off with one of three wise men hanging from the balcony of a house near the hotel. Apparently it’s epiphany on 6th January which is when the three wise men apparently managed to walk across half the world to get to a small stable in Bethlehem 2000 years or so ago. Seems a little unlikely but who knows. I took the next one at the start of the walk. Mampa is raring to go. She’s just had a coffee and half a biscuit, she has loads and energy now and can’t wait to be off. The next one shows you the Forest that we walked through for the first 40 minutes or so. Apparently the forest is an example of the type of forest that we had in England thousands of years ago before the weather changed and they were all replaced with the oaks and beech trees that we see around us today. We came out of the forest and found ourselves quite high up on the hillside. The trees had disappeared and were replaced with bushes and cacti. We walked on for quite some time and came across a chap who was looking after a herd of goats. The poor things didn’t seem to have anything to eat, the ground was brown with no plants anywhere near them. The baby goats were bleating, mampa says they were crying because they were hungry. 😥 But then a walker showed up and unloaded his backpack which was full of food for them. They all charged over to eat 😊 We carried on walking and a few hundred metres further on we came across a Cockerel and a hen, perhaps his ♥️. Mampa said that he was probably protecting her but as we got closer he shot off into the trees leaving the poor hen to run in front of us without him. So I don’t think he was very brave, do you? Now for another picture of our favorite person 😍 She’s looking a little confused because we weren’t quite sure which way to go, but we realised very quickly which was the right path and on we went past some lovely cacti. A Robin (can you see him hiding in the tree?) And a 🍋 tree up on the side of the hill. This is what our path looked like. And this is what the mountains around us looked like. Tenerife is a volcanic island. Millions of years ago it was under the sea but a plume (a big bubble) of magma (rock so hot that it had melted and was a liquid) had pushed up into the sea floor and had lifted it out of the seas and high into the air. This next picture shows what parts of it look like today. Everywhere we walked we could see evidence of how the sea floor which is made up of sand on top and underneath that sand that has been squashed so hard that it’s now a rock called sandstone had been pushed up by the magma. It’s really interesting to see what’s happened to the land over millions of years. Shortly before we got to our halfway point, a small village called Chinamada, where the people all live in strange houses which are cut into the rock so that really they’re living in caves with the front of what looks like a house added on, we saw a lovely lizard looking at us. Can you see him? It’s very difficult for the people in Chinamada to grow things because they’re living on top of a mountain but there are always tiny little areas where they can grow potatoes and other plants. Here’s mampa again 💕 And here are some houses, or should we really call them caves, in the rock. We stopped and had lunch in Chinamada, bread, chips and a seafood mush inside some breadcrumbs 😒. Then we took a short detour to look at the sea. Pretty impressive isn’t it? The rest of the trip was pretty difficult. It was all downhill but very, very steep and because the mountains are so steep the path had to zig zag around like crazy. It was very very hard work and it took us nearly two hours to walk 5km to catch a bus home. These last few photographs show you some sections of the path but it’s not easy to see how steep the path is. Hope you like this little blog. If you do, I’ll do another one tomorrow. Night, night 💕