Gene and Erica have been cruising for three years, they tell us, but seem very negative about it. In fact, they don’t appear to care much for sailing. Nor do they have a good word for any of the places they have visited either. They have been in this marina for several months already and do not intend to leave until just before Christmas, indifferent about reaching the Caribbean in time for the Festive Season or the Millennium celebrations either.
We say how lovely La Gomera is. They haven’t been. They have seen nothing of this island either, apparently, beyond the supermarket and the newspaper kiosk. Although they did take the ferry to Gran Canaria, they say acidly. ‘To observe the ARC’s preparations!’
Gran Canaria is one of the larger islands in the Canaries group. It is also the starting point for members of the ARC – the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers – as well as a major jumping-off place for many independent yachtsmen embarking on an Atlantic crossing. With so many boats gathered together, provisioning there is a major event.
‘A zoo!’ sneers Gene.
‘Mass apple washing!’ snorts Erica.
I think wistfully of the twins and their youthful enthusiasm.
Happily this is the only occasion we are favoured with Erica’s presence as she appears to spend much of her time horizontal in the saloon. I know this because during the first couple of days we cross their deck a few of times to get ashore and there is a hatch directly over her favourite roost. As with our earlier stay at this marina, there is a severe shortage of aluminium ladders to get you onto the quay. Gene and Erica have commandeered one of the few, and it is securely tied in front of their bow, but our using it means having to cross their boat and getting waylaid by Gene. We avoid the risk by going ashore in our dinghy as we had during our previous stay here.
I finally decide I’ve had enough when, brandishing yet another newspaper one morning, he informs me with a larger smirk than usual, ‘President Clinton has requested that Mr Blair return the Elgin Marbles to Greece.’ I nod at him thoughtfully and then ask if that means Mr Clinton will be returning Texas to Mexico. There is a lot of spluttering. If you can’t take it don’t dish it out, I always say. After a couple more face-offs in similar vein we rarely see him.
On our starboard side there is a catamaran with four young Frenchmen on it. One of them lives in Trinidad and during the following days there is a friendly exchange of information. David lends them our Atlantic Islands pilot so they can get SSB radio frequencies for their new receiver, while the one with the local knowledge provides us with maps of the island and directions as to where to find Trinidad’s best Millennium party. ‘Pier One’, he tells us, ‘is the place to be!’
The unfortunate thing about Frenchmen is that nobody seems to potty train them. You can actually identify a French boat at a distance, without benefit of a flying tricolour, by the silhouette of yet another Frenchman urinating over the side of his boat.
Other nationalities simply roll their eyes, or sigh, or ask sardonically if French marine toilets are really so expensive that nobody can afford to install one. In truth, it is part of the culture and groups of Frenchmen turn it into a social ritual. With four of them next door it’s rather like having one of those infamous open urinals that were once a central feature of French towns, and still are in some places. In all other respects they are delightful neighbours and when the time comes we are sorry to see them go.
In the meantime, with water and electricity available again, the laundry gets done and Voyager’s interior is vacuumed. Her woodwork is polished, her kitchen and bathroom sanitised, her decks and cockpit are washed and her helm, bright work and gelcoat buffed to a high sheen. In between times we fill the fridge and gather the ingredients for a large Christmas cake. Christmas cards, newly arrived in the shops, are selected – with one for David furtively purchased and sneaked away – and we treat ourselves to an English newspaper.
Behind the kiosk in town that sells them there is a small, weedy area rarely frequented by anybody. In it is a very small fountain, just a bowl on a pedestal with a very small upward jet of water. So small, indeed that it is more like a drinking fountain except there is no button to press. The flow of water is constant, suggesting a loop, and therefore not fit to drink. Standing in it is a pigeon.
I always feel sorry for urban pigeons. Seabirds always look so clean and healthy while pigeons spend their days pecking about in dirty streets and their nights roosting on the filthy narrow ledges of buildings. In consequence they tend to look rather seedy. This one, however, has found the ideal answer to personal hygiene. It is using the small fountain as a shower, rotating under it, fluffing and shuffling to wash itself thoroughly under the thin but constant stream of water. I have seen urban pigeons wash before, when they have an opportunity, usually in gutters or pools of polluted rainwater gathered in broken pavements. But what this one does now I have never seen one able to do before. After completing its toilet, it gracefully raises a wing to allow the fountain to sluice its armpit. This done, it makes a half turn and rinses the other one.
There is a running joke through one of Jacques Tati’s films; Mon Oncle, I think it is. His character’s snobbish sister-in-law, a French Hyacinth Bucket, is obsessed with demonstrating the superiority of her home. Her front garden contains a small dreary fountain which spends most of its time dormant but the moment someone rings the doorbell the lady of the house flicks a switch and the fountain leaps into life. Similarly, the marina has a fountain, just inside the entrance, and when a yacht of suitable grandeur arrives, it too is switched on. If its arrival occurs after dark, the jets of water are enhanced by coloured lights.
The space on our starboard side, vacated by the French catamaran, is quickly taken by Mojo, quite the most stylish and expensive yacht to grace the marina and the fountain goes on accordingly. She is 80ft long and so new and shiny that it actually hurts your eyes when the sun glints off her topsides. With a 120-foot mast she carries a lot of sail and to cope with it all she has the biggest winches (powered, naturally) that we have ever seen. Worth several million in anybody’s currency she has a French delivery crew of two young women and five young men. No sooner have they tied up than the latter are to be seen relieving themselves over Mojo’s stern.
‘A coupla million quid,’ groans David. ‘And they still can’t afford a toilet?’
But they are a jolly lot and very polite. Surprisingly so, for the delivery crew of such an expensive boat. Our experience so far has been that the more grandiose the yacht, the greater the delusions of grandeur exhibited by its crew. Unless the owner is about.
Happily, not this lot. Although they do tend to forget that their monster of a yacht towers over the smaller ones on either side of them, and that what they do on their deck tends to spill over onto those of other people. Nor do they seem to be very practiced at what they do. Accordingly they make a complete pig’s ear of filling Mojo’s water tanks and we only just manage to clamp our hatches shut before they flood our interior. While another day our laundry is drying nicely on the foredeck until they hose their boat all over it.
One afternoon, as we go into town, we notice that the Dutch couple’s boat has reappeared in the marina, so on our way out we stop off to say ‘Hi’. Piet is busy up his mast. He greets us cheerfully.
‘When you off?’ we call up to him.
‘Next week,’ he says. ‘All being well. You?’
‘The same.’ Then we add tentatively, ‘Jan going with you?’
Piet’s round face, already glowing from physical exertion and a warm afternoon, deepens another shade of red.
‘We had him aboard for a week to see how we got on,’ he says, wrenching his spanner as if it were a garrotte. ‘I am putting in self-furling gear instead.’
13
A Magical Mystery Tour
After all the hard work we have put into preparing Voyager we decide it is time for our promised shore leave. On our trips into town we have regularly passed an office on the promenade advertising car renta
ls. This morning we go inside. There is a man at a desk talking on the phone, so while we wait David picks up a brochure from a neighbouring desk and we sit and consider it. During what turns out to be quite a long telephone conversation we work our way through the Spanish descriptions of the cars and the prices and decide exactly what we should like.
When the telephone call ends, the man looks up at us, smiles and says, ‘Yes?’
We point to one of the cars listed in the brochure and say, ‘We’d like one of these, please.’
Two separate businesses share this office, the man explains. Then indicating the unoccupied desk as the half we want, adds, ‘He’s not here at the moment.’
One of the wonders of language is its subtlety; its ability to encompass the tiniest shades of meaning. It is across cultures where, with the best of intentions and the kindest of motives, this subtlety sometimes escapes. The key words here are: at the moment. For us, they have a specific meaning.
‘When will he be back?’ we ask, expecting the answer to be something like, ‘In about 20 minutes,’ or ‘after lunch.’
The man hesitates for a moment, glances at the calendar on the wall and then says, ‘December.’
This is Spain! This little island may be a long way from its mother country but to all intents and purposes this is Mediterranean Spain and time is merely relative.
We thank him, find another car hire firm up in the town, and emerge with a dark green Seat Marbella.
Our first stop is Candelaria, a small town just south of Santa Cruz. It has a big public square with the sea on one side, shops and cafés on the other and a large church at the far end. According to our multi-language guide book, the Church of the Holy Conception was the only parish church for Santa Cruz until the 18th century. Completed between 1500 and 1502 it is one of the oldest on the island and has a rather splendid tower.
The church’s beautiful interior not only contains its famous Black Madonna and Child but, unlike any other church we have ever visited, instead of sculpted stone or painted-plaster statues this one has dressed figures with porcelain faces, hands and feet. They wear rich apparel – satins, velvets and lace – except for the coarse habits of the monk saints. The crucified Christ lies in a glass coffin between white satin sheets with a satin and lace pillow under his agonisingly arched neck. Nor do the virgin and child simply stand on a plinth in a recess. They reside in a small furnished chamber with an elaborately-panelled ceiling. The Virgin of Candelaria is the patron saint of the islands and thousands of Canarians make a pilgrimage here every year.
The absence of conventional stone statuary inside the church is more than made up for on the beach outside. Much larger than life-size, they are the Garanches, mythical early kings of the island. Each one is an individual, towering above you on his rock, staring resolutely landwards, his bare bottom turned towards the sea. Huge and macho they may be, but also touchingly human somehow, and impressive in their monumental greyness with the sea crashing from behind them over the shoreline’s smooth black rocks and up onto the black beach. Despite accepting that the area is volcanic, it still takes a little while to get used to the idea of black sand between your toes.
We buy coffee in one of the cafes opposite the Garanches. It pours with rain while we sit inside and drink it, and stops just before we leave. The air outside has become fresh and clean.
We drive inland, twisting and winding rapidly upwards until we are above the clouds. I don’t know if it is the recent rain, or something special about the light up here, but we are startled by the greenness of the forests, and the brightness of the occasional village gardens bursting upon our retinas with the brilliant reds of bougainvillea, geranium and poinsettia trees. After decades of buying a poinsettia at Christmas in a 10-inch pot, which goes into a decline if your central heating goes off for too long overnight, I find poinsettia trees growing wild particularly beguiling.
We turn left and follow the road along the ridge which forms the backbone of the island. From it we look down between pine and date palm onto magnificent views of fertile valleys and the island’s spectacular north-west coast.
We also make a closer acquaintance with El Teide, the volcano. Cloud covers its summit and there is snow visible beneath the cloud. Below the snowline there is a stunning crater and you can drive for miles around its rim. It is a journey of infinite and totally unexpected variety. At one point you look out upon a brown moonscape, at another the crumbling pillars of Arizona’s Monument Valley. After that come miles of black clinker as if a giant has been burning cheap coal. Then it is as if the same giant has piled one giant-sized shovel-full of damp, black clay behind another for as far as the eye can see. Finally, incredibly, you stare out over a vast area of aquamarine stones scattered on soft golden sand.
We make a detour to Vilaflor, ‘Spain’s highest village’. It has a very old church with a wooden barrel-vaulted ceiling. It is also surprisingly cold up here. There are snowflake road signs next to warnings about forest fires. Today’s fire risk is set at 4 on a 5-risk scale. And unlikely as it seems at present, with scattered showers and chilly temperatures, there is an ever-present reminder of forest fires in the acres of pine trees which, though apparently still alive, are blackened all the way up their trunks.
For whatever reason, they rake pine needles into big, low, square piles here. Despite the fire warning signs and blackened trees, however, the driver of the car in front of us flicks a lighted cigarette end into one of them. We stop at a cold log cabin for a hot lunch of chicken in garlic sauce. The middle-aged and very busy maitre de is multi-lingual and incredibly courteous in all of them.
And then it is on to Masca, a hill village hidden in a magnificent gorge. Built by pirates, originally it was inaccessible by land. It could be approached only from the sea, north of Los Gigantes where, it is said, in the right conditions you can swim with dolphins and where we had stared up from our cockpit at the dramatic and almost perpendicular cliff. The island’s modern road now crosses the top of Masca. There is still no vehicle access down into it. Entry is via a cobbled path, which drops almost vertically between the first of the small houses. Descend, and you enter a place of lush vegetation, jagged rock formations, vegetable patches and banana groves.
Back on the road again, there is something different round almost every bend; and there are a lot of bends. In fact, much of the road around the island is a switchback. You spiral for miles down into a gorge and then back up the other side and sometimes the road is so narrow that you have to pull over when a large tourist coach comes the other way. The most worrying encounter has a courier wiping a streaming windscreen with a fistful of tissues while the driver hurtles blindly towards us around a hairpin bend.
For a land mass of only 785 square miles, this is an island of immense variety whose terrain produces a wide range of microclimates as well as its stunning scenery; from fertile valleys and the rich green of pine forests to dramatic seascapes and lava fields. The latter takes on many different colours, but one of the most arresting is simply black and palest cream. At one point the road has been cut through it, and although its sides look like soft sand, in reality it is as hard as stone, but so porous that the rainwater trapped behind it seeps through and trickles down the road to meet you.
After Masca we pass through the lava fields of Santiago del Teide, created by the last eruption of the volcano in 1909. We are on our way to Garachico, an area devastated by the 1706 eruption and a great, brown, dusty moonscape.
In complete contrast is Icod de los Vinos, a pretty Mediterranean town of white stucco houses, colourful gardens and what is reputed to be the world’s oldest tree. Many a tree around the world has similar claims made about it but, as well as looking very old, this dragon tree is huge. It is also in a very pretty area of a town blessed with many beautiful trees, and an old church in a rather lovely square. Inside the church, with its splendid ceiling and wooden panelling, a small group of people on scaffolding discuss, in hushed tones, their current res
toration of a fresco.
Before we return the car we stock up with supplies for the crossing, spending a small fortune and filling two-and-half trolleys, including a whole Edam cheese which is quite expensive but proves to be well worth every peso.
The rest of the day is spent sorting and cataloguing supplies and then storing them anywhere we can. And remembering to put an apple in with the potatoes. As long as potatoes are kept in the dark – ours live under the galley sink – an apple will inhibit sprouting. And after the potatoes have all gone, you can still eat the apple.
I also have our Christmas cards to write, ready for posting on our next trip into town. They will arrive far too early, of course, but it can’t be helped. It will be too late to post them from the Cape Verde Islands and it gives me an opportunity to include a reminder of the last posting date for cards to reach us via David’s brother Tony. I do so love a card at Christmas and a bit of news. And if family and friends leave ours until they post the rest of their cards, we shan’t get them until sometime in January. Presents are nice, but Christmas isn’t Christmas without cards.
14
A Spell of Bad Weather
We are having dinner one evening when one of Mojo’s crew calls down to us. It’s one of their birthdays and they are having a party tonight. We are invited. I’m touched. It’s undoubtedly that courtesy thing where you avoid offending the neighbours by inviting them to your party, but I appreciate the thought anyway. I also suspect we should seriously cramp their style. With the possible exception of their skipper, there is no-one on board even half our age. I thank her, wish her a great party, but say we are having an early night. She draws down the corners of her mouth and looks anxious.
A Thousand Miles from Anywhere Page 8