The Update #28 – Visiting Friends

A friend of Amanda, Erez, has been staying in the apartment downstairs for 2.5 months. He is from Israel and is a cycling fanatic and this week was his birthday. On Friday we had a surprise party for him where Jap and I made fresh pasta for 7 people and we had never made it for so many people. We currently live with two Italians, Nicolo who arrived yesterday and Davide, the host. They both had no idea how to make fresh pasta, only the nona’s do that. But they do know how to make a carbonara sauce, so that was their job. Erez had set himself a challenge for his birthday. He wanted to cycle 22 times up a mountain with extreme hairpin bends on bicycles here on the island. That way he would make as many altimeters as Mount Everest is high. A challenge that he had done many times before on other mountains and always for charity. As a birthday present, Amanda gave Erez a photoshoot of that day, performed by us! It was a lot of fun and very special to be there and cheer on Erez on this huge challenge. It eventually took him from 8:00 AM to 2:00 AM to complete his challenge and when you see the photos you understand what a huge challenge this was.

After the photoshoot with Erez we drove on to Masca, which is also called small Machu pichu and we immediately understood why. The view was already fantastic while shooting but the valley at Masca was surprisingly even more beautiful. We both had no idea that there were such beautiful places to see in Tenerife. We enjoyed the view for a long time from a terrace at the top of the mountain. In fact, we were gathering the courage to go for a walk. Normally, we always try to do walks either very early in the morning or a little later in the day, but due to the photo shoot and the location of the walk on our route, that was really not possible. It was walking in the heat or not walking and in the end we opted for the heat. It was a 5km walk there and 5km back to the top of a mountain. The walk itself was really not hard but the heat made it really hard. Before we reached the top we were already through all our water… We thought we had more than enough water with us… but we were really wrong about how extremely hot it was. The view was worth it, from there we could see Erez cycling again! We tried to fly the drone at the top but once in the air it lost connection to the controller. We both had triple heart attack but luckily Jap was able to reconnect the drone, because if the drone had crashed there we would never have seen it again. On the way back Jap and I were both a bit grumpy, we were very thirsty and hot. On the way back we mainly occupied ourselves with what we would drink at the terrace when we would be back: A cold cola and an ice cream. Lon was not feeling well from the heat for the rest of the day, but we found a nice spot on the coast to sleep.

Amanda had mapped out a whole route for us, just short of hourly planned, so we continued with that. We started the day with a splash in the rockpools, had a nice lunch and ice cream in the cute village of Garachico and then we took a nice walk around a volcano. The Chinyero Volcano is the last volcano to have erupted on the island. We walked around the volcano and every kilometer it looked completely different. It was very easy to see where the lava used to flow down. If we weren’t walking through the fields of lava, we were walking through beautiful forest.

On the way back we drove through Teide NP and we were already very impressed by everything we had seen on this short route trip. But once in the NP we were really blown away and we both had no idea what it should look like. So it always makes the surprise even bigger, we both felt like we were in an area like the grand canyon. It was really beautiful, the sun was setting so the light was like the icing on the cake.

There was also a visitor this week! Niels V and Anne are on holiday on the island for a week! On our next days off we decided that we would stay in playa de las Americas so that Jap could surf and we would be close to Niels and Anne. We had a nice chat and drank a Barraquito together, we went to rockpools, where Jap and I had been before, and had a nice dinner in El medano. It was really great to see each other and secretly we had to giggle a lot about the fact that we stay for free in the parking lot at the beach and the boulevard and that they, like a lot of the other people walking around on the boulevard, pay for an expensive hotel. We secretly felt like the king and queens of the world.

When we got back Amanda and Davide weren’t there, they were away for a wedding all weekend, but their absence was made up for by the presence of Amanda’s Father.

Tasks of the Week

A lot of cleaning was done, because, among other things, Erez’s apartment was taken into use by Amanda’s father, Jap replaced sealants in bathrooms, harvested vegetables, cleaned up the shed and garage and built storage systems.

Spendings of the Week

Budget per day €54 and per week €378 and per month €1700