We’re in a really nice hotel half way up a mountain so it’s quite cold but it has a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi which we used today after our long walk up into the mountains.

We decided to walk from the hotel down to the village of vilaflor and then up to what is called Paisaje Lunor, which roughly translated means lunar landscape which meant that it looks like the moon. I’ve no idea what that meant so after breakfast we headed steeply down the hill into the little village.

Because Tenerife is a volcanic island lots of the rocks that you see all around you were once deep inside the Earth and they are black and twisted into amazing shapes.

The path up to Paisaje Lunor was very steep, here’s mampa soon after we started.

Because we had quite a hard day yesterday, it took time for mampa’s legs to start working properly, but after 2km of steep climbing they’d warmed up nicely and she was fine.

This next picture shows you the signs marking the start of our route up to and around Paisaje Lunor. It seemed that we had another 5km or so of hard climbing ahead of us.

The route took us past some really interesting rock formations. They look a bit like pieces of cake with different layers. The layers let us see what the Earth looked like millions of years ago. The light colored bottom layer is sandstone. If you look at it closely you can see shells and all sorts of things in it.

Every now and then as we walked we saw huge black boulders which had been thrown out of the volcano when it erupted many years ago.

The colours around us were amazing. Look at the yellow rocks on the floor. They probably have sulphur inside them which makes them yellow. The sulphur tells us that they’ve probably been made inside a volcano.

After a couple of hours of hard walking we finally got to Paisaje Lunor. I took a panorama of the scene which you’ll need to see blown up on your iPad to see properly. On the left and right hand side of the photo you should be able to see some very strange rock formations. They were made some 500,000 years ago when the big volcano on the island exploded and sent lots of really hot rocks flying into the air followed by molten lava pouring down on top of them. As the years went by, water and winds got rid of the softer rocks leaving these strange formations behind.

Mampa and I ate some figs and walnuts and headed back down the mountain. The walk back wasn’t such hard work and I had time to take more pictures of the plants and strange volcanic rocks and lava that make up so much of this island.

While we were still in the forest we heard a noisy bird up in the trees. We got our binoculars out and this is what it looked like.

However, apparently this bird is a Cuban Trogan which only lives in Cuba which is an island 1,000s of miles away. It’s a long way for it to fly. Very strange.

I’ve checked on the internet and it’s probably a great spotted woodpecker instead. Here’s a picture of one; you can see that they’re very similar.

When we got back we swam in the pool and enjoyed the Jacuzzi.

Mampa didn’t want me to show you but the white marks on the back of my vest are salt deposits from all the sweating going up the mountain. It probably smells too 🤫

It’s nearly time for dinner so I’ll stop now with a picture of mampa relaxing outside our room.

💕