Tenerife - Canary Islands

I'm at an internet café in La Playa de los Cristianos in Tenerife, it´s December, and it's 80 degrees. I can't believe that I´m on a tropical island and Martha is only a few miles away. I just talked to her, she called me on her new cell phone. I spent last night in the capital, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. A friend from Sevilla who flew into another island that morning met me there. We ate a café and planned our weekend out. We went to a fundraiser event near the port inside a bunch of tents where they were selling stuff. There was live music in the back where people were eating and dancing. We drank some Dorada - Canary beer, and listened to two old guys singing covers of old American songs, with the lyrics changed into spanish.

Today we took the island buses (called guaguas here) around, first to Laguna, a town in the mountains with a big university where we got food for lunch at a big market. Then we went to Puerta de la Cruz on the north side of the island, sat at the seawall and watched the waves crash into the rocks. Then we went to Los Gigantes on the west side of the island, where theres not much other than some recently built ugly developments and some really freaking gigante cliffs (hence the name). The last stop today was Playa de los Cristianos in the southern end of the island. The bus rides along the coasts and through the foggy mountains were really cool. Everything is cool here, the temperature changes a lot with the elevation, we had fresh fish and a banana split for dinner. Tomorrow we plan on going to the big Mountain, El Teide. It´s covered in snow for part of the winter, we couldn´t see the peak today. We want to summit it, its about 12,000 feet tall, the tallest mountain in Spain. On Monday morning I fly to Santa Cruz de la Palma to see Martha.