Day 12: A journey through the clouds

Today we wanted to discover the Esperanza forest northeast to El Teide. We headed to Santa Cruz de Tenerife at 9.30. It was cloudy. The traffic near the city was chaotic, but thanks to Doris we didn’t take a single wrong turn. When we got on the TF-24 at La Laguna, all of a sudden we were in secluded nature. We had our first stop at a viewpoint and admired the red forest soil and the long green needles of the pine trees. The higher we got, the more clouds came into our way. Although we were looking attentively for the miradores (viewpoints), we missed them. Probably our first stop was at the Mirador Pico de las Flores anyway? However, it was fascinating to watch the wandering clouds, changing the face of the landscape from minute to minute. At Mirador Ortuño we took a short walk.

We entered the area of the Teide National Park and had a ride through the thick fog of permanent clouds. Exiting the cloud layer we met pure sunshine and had an overwhelming view onto the cloud ocean. The peak of El Teide poked out of a sea of batting. We stopped at a viewpoint and watched how the clouds slowly sneaked up on us. Other cars stopped as well, and it was fascinating to see how the clouds finally enshrouded us and made the sunshine almost disappear. In this foggy moment we were able to see a circular rainbow right in front of us. One minute later the clouds dropped back and freed the sun again. I was able to capture this sequence of moments in a movie.

During our journey we came past the Observatorio del Teide. We entered the cloud layer again, where it started to drizzle. At La Caldera del Pedro Gil we wanted to see the stone formations called Organos, but as we didn’t know what turn to take at a fork, we turned back. We took a snack in our car and drove on. We came past the Piedra de la Rosa that is located right besides the road, but we didn’t find a space to park our vehicle, so we moved on.

We headed for Orotava. As the weather was still hazy, we didn’t have a nice view anymore. The Mirador Humboldt would have interested me, but it was closed and a building site, and the weather wasn’t suitable anyway. So we finally decided to drive home again. Doris managed the traffic hell near Santa Cruz de Tenerife with excellence for another time. We stopped for a coffee in between and reached Adeje at 17.30.

As the next day was a public holiday, we went shopping to the supermercado. Several other people had the same idea. We overlooked the Halloween whoopee. Later we had dinner at “our” BBQ restaurant again. From our balcony we could watch the fireworks that celebrated the end of the summer season.