La Isla Bonita. Continued

La Isla Bonita. Continued The beginning — La Isla Bonita La Palma is one of the world’s highest islands in terms of height relative to area (the third, I think). Its highest mountain, Roque de los Muchachos, rises to 2,425 metres. I mean, just 15 km in a straight line from the coast—and you are already almost 2,500 metres above sea level! It isn’t hot here, and there is snow lying in shady spots along the road. For a couple of days, the two of us drove over hill and dale (the children expressed a preference for doing jigsaw puzzles and schoolwork on the yacht). Winding along the hairpin roads of the northeast, we came across a ravine we had already passed the day before. It was easy to recognise the place: what looked like brownish smoke was billowing out of it. Curious, we were surprised to discover that the smoke was simply a cloud that lives permanently in this particular ravine. And its colour... it occurred to us that, since this is its home, the cloud welcomes guests informally, in muted everyday clothes rather than a dazzling Sunday best outfit. Silence The grandeur of nature makes your heart stand still; it is simply afraid to beat in case it frightens away... I was going to say “the silence”... no, it isn’t quiet here at all. The birds are singing their hearts out as though there were no people or cars anywhere in the world. Every bend in the road carries you off, now into the Siberian taiga, now into a subtropical paradise, now briefly to Mars. How can you squeeze into words the rustle of wind through long pine needles, the many-voiced chorus of birdsong, the furious roar of waves at the foot of the cliffs? It is hard to convey the sweet, sauna-like resinous scent of Canary Island pines, the damp vitality of laurel forests. You want to absorb this smell through your skin, take it in, carry it away with you. ... The island’s highest point is crowned by the observatory’s white domes. A paved road leads up to them from the foot of the mountain (although La Palma has no foothills to speak of—it turns into mountain almost at once). But, as it turned out, that is not the only road. Off-roading As usual, we took our low-slung Ford deep into the back of beyond. Apart from us, the only people who venture onto this unpaved service road, cut along a forested ridge, are firefighters and loggers. For both of them, there are water taps and neat stacks of firewood at every bend; for us, there were boulders and holes deep enough to scrape the underbody. Weaving between rockfalls, we suddenly emerged straight beside the observatory’s snow-white domes, seemingly out of the bushes. Since dusk had already settled over the observatory, we decided not to go looking for more trouble for our exhaust pipe and headed home down the hairpin road to the marina, where our boat brownies had been waiting for us. They probably wanted dinner by then, and even bed. La Palma Marina looks thoroughly high-tech, is not very expensive, and draws tourists and locals to its boutiques and cafés. There are cups of coffee, pints of beer, and shark-bitten surfboards in the shop windows. We, however, had more need of the supermarket, showers, and laundry facilities (all very stylish). There is internet here too; for yacht crews, it is included in the marina fee. The internet itself, however, seems unaware of this and behaves as though it were completely switched off. The verdict we see most often in the browser window is that Safari cannot open the page. Whenever that message disappears, we hurry to write a post about La Palma for our Facebook group, choose the photographs, and click “Publish.” Next — La Palma: In Search of a Safe Haven and Life on the Bottom