Hacienda Cristoforo We checked out before 12:00 and drove south. The next few nights we were going to spend just north of the big tourist purgatory: Hacienda Cristoforo in Adeje, north of Playa de las Américas. ¹
We ate our breakfast in the restaurant again, since we had to get up so “early”. The coffee is terrible. Even the fruit juice is what they call a “nectar” – a bit of fruit juice, water, and suger. The juices are terrible. Only much later will we learn how to find those little places that sell fresh orange juice. Some machine in the background, they drop the oranges in a basket at the top, and they are automatically cut and squeezed. Amazing! Delicious! Why don’t they have this kind of stuff here in Switzerland?
But I’m getting carried away. Today, breakfast was terrible.
Only Claudia has her beloved Guava nectar. It’s what she wants every morning, from now on. I don’t like it, but she doesn’t care. Guava juice it is. I stick to water. The drinking water here is good. I prefer the Teide water, it has a slightly sweet aftertaste. I avoid water from the mainland, or god forbid one of these artificial cocktails Nestlé or Vivendi Universal are marketing (remineralized water and all that). Nestlé... 🙁 ²
We drive south. We should have brought little external loudspeakers along. We don’t like to put on our MP3 players, everybody listening to his own music. We want to share it. It should be playing in the background. It should be playing in the car. It should be playing in our hotel. But I forgot to bring them along.
We arrive early in the afternoon. Too early. Nobody is expecting us. It looks like stone houses in Ticino (the Italian speaking part of Switzerland). They have a horse, a donkey, a pig, a sheep, and several geese in the back near the pool. We were to find out that they also have tons of cockroaches in our bathroom. We also find two cats and a very nice dog. Claudia sees her first geckos.
We find three cockroaches in our bathroom today. Comparing the description of the Asian Cockroach and the German Cockroach behaviour, it seems that we were seeing German Cockroaches. They didn’t like to fly. They liked to hide in cracks and holes. They were usually found in the bathroom. The strange thing is that they must have been at least 3cm, maybe 4cm long.
I killed two of them. One escaped. When entering the bathroom, we looked around cautiously. We scanned the dark wooden beams. We examined the walls. We watched the cracks. We carefully took our shower while the other one watched our back. It was terrible.
Out bath tub had an integrated yakuzi. We never tried it.
There is also a solitary wasp that is building its nest in one of the corners of the room. Once we are convinced by the landlord that it is harmless, we quite enjoy its coming and going through our front door. We keep all the doors open because the heat would be unbearable otherwise.
The landlord looks like Socrates when he had more hair. Or maybe like Gandalf when he was younger. Long white hair with soft curls, long white beard, white linen clothes. The lady has a mesmerizing smile, dark eyes, long black curly hair, soft voice. He is Greek, she is Spanish.
As the wasp’s nest grows, we discover several other such nests in the darker corners of the living room.
The owner’s name is Denis. He likes it “biodynamic” (*Based on a series of lectures given by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924, Biodynamics is a method of agriculture which seeks to actively work with the health-giving forces of nature. It is the oldest non-chemical agricultural movement, predating the organic agriculture movement by some twenty years and has now spread throughout the world.* ³). The cockroaches, the wasp, the cats, tiny ants... It is getting far too biodynamic for us!
We never visit the pool.
We buy some food in a tiny supermarket, and spend the last hours of sunlight on Playa Torvisca (at Playa de las Américas). It is calm, here. Not many people around this late in the evening.
I think Claudia would have preferred all-inclusive tourism to our *turismo rural* – she keeps talking about some good pasta, Spaghetti Napoli, or a good pizza... The off-season is very nice.
When we come home, I make some Spaghetti Carciofi (ie. canned artichokes). We don’t have any cream, and add some queso blanco (white cheese). It’s rough fare.
The landlord’s kids have brought their friends to his parents’ Hacienda. They sleep next door. They try to be quiet, and we sleep well. No cockroaches leave the bathroom.
#Canary #Islands
