THE NORTH OF THE ISLAND

Today I went to the very northern tip of the island, which is the steepest, most green, and most chilly area in Tenerife. Poli and Sonia took me on a little tourist trip through the most amazing switchbacks, each bend revealing some little village below. The houses seem to barely grasp the mountain side, so steep are the slopes! The most incredible thing of all was when I asked about two or three little houses several hundred feet below us in a dense green ravine. There seemed to be no access to them at all...that is, by car anyways. Poli answered that the only way to descend to the little farms was by foot, by means of a snaking trail of not more than 12 inches wide! The inhabitants are subsistence farmers, without electricity, running water, or radios. How strange that only a few kilometers away sits Santa Cruz, a city equally developed and modernized as Minneapolis or Saint Paul! So the huge steep mountains act as a sort of barrier to the modern world, because its basically financially impossible to create enough roads to reach these tiny little pueblos. Picture the cliff faces in the opening scenes of Jurassic Park...that's what the North looks like.

Tenerife is like the island of extremes...There's the old and the new Spain right next to each other (like the mountain villages in relation to Santa Cruz, for example). Then there is the array of micro climates...from rocky barren desert to snowy mountain tops to dense evergreen forests to sandy beaches. In the south of the island, you can be swimming in 85º weather in January, while at the top of Teide the temperature is 0º with blowing ice storms. Lastlyly (cause I have to go to bed), there is the micro culture effect. For example, a tío from Santa Cruz will have a distinct accent from a tío in La Laguna, only 8 km away!