Canary Islands and Why Ship Excursions are Not for Us





Market in La Laguna

 We visited two of the seven Canary Islands - the islands of Tenerife and La Palma. In both ports, we decided to cast fate to the wind and try the ship excursions, something we have never done before. We’ll talk more about each individual tour in a minute, but the biggest problems with these excursions were our fellow passengers! Who are these people and why are they so angry? Unfortunately, they were almost all Americans, and listening to them you would think that being on a luxury cruise like this was some kind of strange and unusual punishment. Who knows what they were expecting from these excursion tours, but they complained about everything all day long. It was pretty disheartening, but we managed to have a good time anyway.

Our first port was Santa Cruz de Tenerife on the island of Tenerife, the largest island in the Canaries. For us, Tenerife was more modern and less appealing than La Palma. We visited La Laguna, considered the most charming city on Tenerife where we saw a church with a grand silver altar (made with silver from Mexico) and a fun market filled with stands selling all varieties of tropical fruit and an incredible assortment of fresh fish. Our guide, Jackie, was a nice person but could use some work on her guiding skills -- very disorganized and no sense of humor. (Now that Anne gives tours herself, at the Moravian Museum in Bethlehem, she is much more aware of this kind of thing LOL!) We did love some of Jackie’s pronunciations: our favorite was “aristo crazies” for aristocracies!
This was called the “Culture and Wine” tour, so you know what is coming next. The Bodega Alvaro in Tacorante was our favorite stop -- an old-fashioned place with floor to ceiling shelves of dusty wine bottles covering every wall.



Wine tasting in Tenerife

We were given free reign to help ourselves to a couple of glasses of Canary Island wine including a bland white, a so-so red, a very nice Rosado, and a wonderfully spicy, high alcohol concoction called “Ruda” (this one was so special it wasn’t even for sale!). All of these wines were served with a nice selection of tapas including thinly sliced ham and yummy little boiled potatoes that we dipped in a great spicy sauce. 
                      
The next day, we docked at Santa Cruz de La Palma on the smaller, and much more interesting island of La Palma. We were dismayed to see some of the same complaining folks as yesterday including a trio from Texas who seem to have “Longhorns” embroidered on every piece of clothing they own, but this was a much better tour. Our tour guide, Robert, was excellent, and the island was beautiful.

Beautiful La Palma

                                           
First stop was the San Antonio volcano at the very southern tip of the island where we had a good walk around the rim of the volcano enjoying the strange geology and gorgeous views of the ocean. This island was much smaller with more vegetation (bananas, lots of colorful flowers) and sweet little houses painted in every pastel color from yellow to purple.
 

Colorful pastel houses on La Palma



Next stop (you guessed it): a winery. La Palma has all these old (and odd) grape varieties that were brought here years ago from countries like Portugal, Spain, and Italy. We tasted Listan (a bland white), Negromoll (a nice, powerful red), Sobra (a tasty semi-sweet white), and Malmsey (their famous white sweet wine) to name a few.

Walking the rim of the San Antonio volcano