Day 15 (February 16, 2011)
Itinerary: Try to get a whale watching cruise from Tazacorte, beach day in Tazacorte, relax in the room playing Wii, watch the sunset, dinner of corn crepes, early to bed
Another beautiful island day! It is our last day on La Palma, and in this marvelous apartment we have. We made another yummy breakfast and then drove down to the coastal town of Tazacorte. The plan today is to take it easy and stay close to home so we can go to bed early to catch our early morning ferry tomorrow.
We started out at the tourist information center in Tazacorte, but they were not much help at figuring out what time the companies would go out for whale watching. Language was a bit of a barrier since I couldn’t say whale watching in spanish. So, we decided to walk down to the port as it didn’t look very far away on the map and we had a good parking spot. Once we were down the path a bit, we realized that it must be a farther walk because we weren’t even down to sea level yet. We were slightly amused that our path along the road was marked as a hiking trail, but we were able to find the port easily.
We found the port under construction and the port town to be fairly empty. Unfortunately, but the time we wandered to the 2 companies that offered whale watching, there were no more for the day. One had already left and the other was supposed to have already left, but apparently had no clients to take out. Instead we walked along the port to a nice place to sit and watch the waves crash on the rocks. Here we could almost pretend we were at Los Gigantes because the cliffs extended maybe a couple hundred meters in the air.
A pigeon came to visit us, and we properly called it a rock dove per a sign in one of the park visitor’s center labeling pigeons as rock doves. We find this amusing.
Our stroll from the port over to the beach was sunny and peaceful. As I mentioned before, it was a beautiful island day and we never saw any dark clouds all day. We’ve really only had one bad weather day all vacation. We are very happy with our warm island weather here on the Canary Islands.
We found lots of crabs walking out along a pier and some sleepy seagulls with no interest in the crabs. The black volcanic beach had a splattering mix of retired beach-goers and young families playing in the sun. We found a spot at a restaurant to people-watch and eat some lunch. We were slightly disappointed to find out that once again, a tortilla espanola is actually an omelette with no tortillas in it. We plan to hit up a grocery store before Mark goes back to Algeria, though and find some tortillas for him to take back.
There were several amusing people along the beach. One was a hitchhiker with a cardboard thumb and a Tazacorte sign hanging off his backpack. There was a cute little dog wandering around with a collar, but no owners begging food and attention from people with a tail wag. We also saw many pink northern Europeans in various stages of sunburn.
At some point in the afternoon, we strolled back to our car watching the lizards on the path duck away as we came near and drove back to the apartment. We played more of Kirby’s Epic Yarn on the Wii all afternoon until the sunset colors streamed in the windows and we went out to watch the nearly full moon rise in the east as the sun set in the west.
This was a perfect way to spend our last day here. We both really like La Palma with it’s lack of tourists and abundance of hiking opportunities.
We ate dinner in town at that corn crepe place we ate at the first night we were here and then packed up and went to bed. Tomorrow we have to wake up at 3:30am to catch our ferry back to Tenerife.
