North-West of Gran Canaria: Sardina del Norte, Faro Punta de Sardina and rock pools

Small development next to the lighthouse looks Santorini-esque under the hot Canarian sun

By now I walked most of Gran Canaria and liked most of it, too. However, there are still parts of the island of which I am aware mostly because of the photos seen in various social networks. Sometimes I have a feeling people want to keep the most beautiful places to themselves and that is why they don’t explain where they take their photos. If that is the case, they shouldn’t publish the pics in the first place. For me, it works as a challenge, and I imagine I am not the only one.

Beautiful water, isn’t it?

Morro Jable — Gran Valle — Cofete Pass — Villa Winter

A view towards Villa Winter from Degollada de Cofete (Cofete Pass)

Cofete is one of the places on Fuerteventura where I always wanted to go and somehow didn’t manage to do so. Even now I can only put a half-tick in that particular box (which is a bit nonsensical, same as the one-palmed clap). But I came close this time.

I have now so many people and organizations from Fuerteventura listed as contacts in Facebook that it brings me all sorts of useful info. On the page on Cabildo (sort of like the island’s council) I saw an announcement of the excursion to Cofete organized within a program called “Fuerteventura al Golpito”. They arrange excursions more or less every two weeks, provide a guide (or two, as it was in our case), and a free bus which picks people at Puerto del Rosario and Gran Tarajal. You have to phone and put your name on the list, and then they send you a message a couple of days in advance, stating the meeting place and time, plus in this case a change of route.

The original route was estimated to be two hours longer than the one that we eventually did, and I am jolly glad of the change too. It was hard going as it was, we were back in Morro Jable in six hours instead of the estimated four, and we didn’t stop for very long anywhere. Even the stop at Villa Winter was rather brief.

The Villa Winter itself was rather disappointing, I must say. I don’t know what I expected really, but the place has this aura of mystery about it (hidden rooms! secret passages! a submarine can come up right to the basement! etc.) so I didn’t expect goats, rubbish in the inner courtyard and peeling walls. Maybe, if the owners allowed us into the basement, as they sometimes do apparently, I would be more impressed, but they didn’t, so I wasn’t.

The route was beautiful if somewhat hard. Shame that we didn’t have time to come down to the water level, but that would probably have delayed us a lot more, and the bus driver was apparently getting really impatient as he was counting on the shorter time.

Las Palmas

This weekend we went to Gran Canaria for the first time. If you consider that we've been living on one of the Fortunate Islands for over a year, it is a bit odd that so far we've only been to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote (ok, ok, and Isla de Lobos, if you start counting smaller ones too).  But time came to check the rest out and off we went on Fred.Olsen ferry from Morro Jable.

Ferry itself theoretically takes one hour forty minutes, but in reality it took about two hours in both directions. Both ways we also swayed quite alarmingly from side to side, maybe the "normal" timing really happens when the ocean is a bit calmer.

Important note: if you plan your journey yourself and are a foot passenger, i.e. one without a car, don't be fooled by apparent proximity between the arrival point of this ferry and town, as I was. I looked at googlemaps, checked the distance using my fingers and figured it's about one kilometer. When we arrived though it became clear that the arrival point is not where the googlemaps think it is. It's a lot deeper into the "container area" of the port, and you have to walk along Avda. de Las Petrolíferas, which is indeed lined with those huge cylinders full of something oily and therefore doesn't exactly smell of roses.

Ajuy

This weekend we took out a little rental car and went on a few outings around Fuertevetura. One of those was to a place named Ajuy, which, I must say sounds quite shocking for a Russian ear. Especially when you say something like “I am in Ajuy” in Russian.

Anyway. Prior to this visit, I was convinced that the road to Ajuy is extremely bad; not at all sure why by now. The small road that goes to the village itself (FV-621) is not that narrow and doesn’t behave like a snake; a somewhat trickier stretch is on the bigger road FV-20 between Tuineje and Pajara; or, if you are mad enough to take FV-30 bewteen Betancuria and Pajara, that should provide you with a good adrenalin influx. Still, if your car is powerful enough, it’s not really that bad, especially with automatics.

Argonaut

The day before yesterday, Kirill found a nice looking shell with what he thought was something dead and slimy inside it on the sand of our favorite beach. He picked it up and carried it to show us; while he was walking, he felt something touching his fingers, and when he looked at it, a sad blue eye popped out to look at him. He started dipping the whole thing in the water as he walked; at which point the shy dweller climbed out of the shell and made bid to escape. The animal abandoned the shell; it looked like a tiny octopus. Kirill released it into water and it swam away, changing the color as it went. It  left the shell with us. According to my limited knowledge of octopuses at that point, they don't have shells, so we decided that the animal was probably carrying someone else's shell around for protection, rather like a hermit crab.

Timur's abstract and things

Yesterday me and Timur went to the post office to pic up yet another parcel from Amazon - two more Terry Pratchett's books for Yuri and me, we have the full Discworld collection I think.

Picking up stuff in the post office is a sort of quest here. I really miss UK in this respect - I loved it when my parcels turned up at my doorstep, accompanied by a cheerful postman and his wireless digital signature panel. Now I go to post-office, take a ticket out of the machine and wait till my number comes up. Yesterday the waiting list was over 60 numbers, so we walked around with Timur, making little purchases and trying to occupy ourselves as best as we could. At some point I gave him my camera and he made a few snaps of a windmill - and above is the close-up of its door