With stilettos on the Teide

Eureka! We’ve made it. We’ve found our way out of the urbanisation! I speed up the bends to Teide in our little Toyota. At an altitude of 1000 metres, I remember that I forgot to make a note of the route. Hopefully we’ll make it out again in the next few days…

The sky is blue and we soon have the clouds below us. Red rock, black pumice, the scent of Canary Island pine. Wonderful. There are no straights. There are only curves. The Ipod yodels in the back seat and we yodel at every bend.

After about an hour we arrive in the outer crater of the Teide. The rocks become colourful: green, brown, white, yellow, grey, black. You don’t even notice the 12 degrees at 2000 metres, the sun is stinging. I had actually set my alarm clock for six o’clock today. I wanted to at least conquer the inner cone from 2500 to 3700 metres. But the dreams were too good. Besides, Mum is not really enthusiastic about a seven-hour scramble in loose lava rock.

We take the cable car. It costs a mere 25 euros per person, but saves a lot of dizziness in the thin air. It’s still six degrees at 3500 metres. Ice crystals grow on the rocks in the shade. Clouds pass by, but most of them are 2000 metres below us. The path around the summit is paved, but also well iced over on quite coarse pumice stone.

There are two types of hikers here. Some walk around in evening dresses, black tights and patent stilettos. Russians can do that, it’s not a sin, even the Red Army didn’t always have the perfect equipment. The other category are the extreme athletes. For 500m of secured path they have hiking boots, an 80l rucksack, Mammut jackets for 1200 euros along with a colour-coordinated tent and, of course, walking sticks.

Somehow I can’t do anything with either of them. I hate mediocrity. But sometimes it’s simply the only sensible extremism. The Russian woman slips. Two seconds later, one of the Arctic Circle hikers fires his flare. But the other one has already called for a rescue helicopter via CB. We flee.

In the evening at the hotel. We drink sangria among seniors and think nothing bad…almost…in my shadow, Mum develops an almost fatal tendency to blaspheme. Maybe some of the British seniors here worked for the secret service in WWII, understand German and never travel without their good old Browning. Then the solo entertainer starts singing…