Time to travel. Travelling through the first snow flurries of the year to the airport before dawn. Air Berlin has a new slogan: fly full. After an exuberant breakfast, the stewardess notices my pitifully questioning look through the hole in the centre of my lox bagel. Humming quietly “All this and much more”, I fall asleep lying across four seats.
The last time Dominik was on holiday was two years ago. Iberia swallowed his suitcase – without a trace and to this day. His kiteboard is the very last thing to come off the conveyor belt. From then on, everything can only be good. The wind forecasts for the next few days on Fuerteventura range from great to surreal. Our apartment has a terrace with direct access to the pool – it’s in the centre of Corralejo and is ridiculously cheap.
First task: assemble the board. Second action: looking for food. Walking hungry is bad. But 24 degrees in November is fine. Corralejo is already quite empty at this time of year. There are 135,000 guest beds for every 3500 inhabitants. Almost all of them are empty. The first restaurant is Chinese. The waiter cuts Dominik’s duck into individual fibres in a rather Teppanyaki-like butchery orgy. Afterwards, it looks like a burst sofa cushion, but certainly occupies three times the stomach volume.
We walk along the beach to the Flag Beach kite spot, five kilometres away. Black lava stones form sandcastles. In between, fine yellow sand in the sunset. The travel guide has a picture of a purple beach and violet sky. A little too gay in Photoshop, I thought.
Half an hour later, the sky on the way home proves me wrong: blue, purple, orange, pink, streaks of light from torn clouds in the stormy sky. The sun is setting, the sky is glowing. Cerveza Tropical…good night!
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.