🗓 Week 22 / 26. february - 1. april 2023

research trip El Hierro

with Javier, Thomas, Audrey and Chiara

we visited the island of El Hierro with Thomas and Audrey

a letter

hello dear grandpa,

We had a wonderful time on El Hierro and Tenerife. There were 25 of us on El Hierro and we all stayed together in a very cute resort with different flats. I was with four friends (multi-international: Myrto (Greek), Mari (Brazilian), Korbi (Swiss), Clodi (Italian)) in one, there was a pool and some avocado trees, also some mango trees but I was too early for that, and we lived next to a pineapple field. During the day we drove all over the island (we had rented 6 cars with which we always drove in caravan style through the prairie) and looked at all kinds of things, the organic farms, the beehives, the banana plantations, the water treatment centres, the wind turbines and their energy centres, the volcano remains which are now almost walk-in caves. We have seen so much different nature… the pine forests that have developed a special kind of pine here - which are heat resistant and live on even after a forest fire, but die below 0 degrees, wet forests in the mountains where the clouds are always hanging and therefore all the trees have grown moss like beards, the cooled lava fields that look like extraterrestrial terrains - desert with black rocks and boulders and streams that look like they want to keep flowing, here only a few short cacti grow that stick out of the black like miniature trees. The natural swimming pools in which you can swim, again made of lava (or rock?) - we hacked into the rock by the sea, there are simply large pools into which the big waves slosh with a little less force and hold the water. Here you can snorkel beautifully and watch trumpet fish and turtles and I know how many other small colourful fish. Once we also found a beach, at sunset we went to the very tip of the island, where there is only an old lighthouse that has not been in use for a long time. And there was a beach with red sand and a great surf. We sat on the big round stones until the sun was all the way in Brazil and then quickly waded through the coming tide back to the jetty towards the car. A few days later, Javier (our local tour guide of the island - the best person I’ve met in a long time) told us over dinner at the top of the mountain, with a view over the clouds and after a while all the stars of the universe, about lentejas and queues curada and asparagus and lots of mojo on everything, that this beach is not natural but that some time ago people had worked in the rocks above it. These rocks above our little beach were a certain part of a solidified volcano that runs into the mountain like a ring (huge ring, horizontal and several kilometres in diameter) and whose rock is reddish-brown and very porous. Well, work was done here and the rock was loosened and eroded and rolled down to the sea and collected there. They thought that the current and everything would take care of it, but no, until today there is still this small red sandy beach, which is actually neither sand nor beach.

On the eighth day, I took the ferry with Clodi and Mari and we chugged to Tenerife. The sea was pretty wild. I had somehow forgotten that I’m not so good at driving. For the first hour and a half I puked my guts out and noticed nothing but the toilet and the swaying windows. Well, we survived that too, and then we were on Tenerife and had a campervan, with fridge and bed, and drove it down (what felt like) every road on Tenerife. We went to Teide National Park, a new desert where they actually have a scientific observatory for the universe and an institute that does sampling in the area to test prototype equipment for Mars, Venus and lunar excursions. Because the soil and the climatic conditions here at the 3000 metres above the earthly sea level are probably similar to the conditions we assume on these other planets. And we went to Masca, a tiny village (actually just a few little houses) high up in a very steep narrow valley. Super green and colourful with all the pink-purple flowers and wild bananas and palms and papayas (papayas, by the way, were our daily breakfast and I miss it extremely already). Of course, we also saw the ugly sides of Tenerife (hard to miss, unfortunately). Once it was late and we were looking for a place to sleep at Los Gigantes and found a parking space on the coast in this crazy ugly, inhuman hotel accumulation. After consuming our wine and tomatoes on the rocks by the water (climbed over the fence to escape the asphalt and plastic white ugliness) we walked around the place, I was really so shocked, the only positive was a drag show where an artist changed from woman to man several times during his performance. But really abstruse that night. On the way back to our car we had to get a bottle of wine and chocolate. In the morning we packed up as quickly as we could and set off, this time to another national park in the north. As long as you don’t meet any houses or people in Tenerife (except for those from the island itself, who are really all quite heart-warming), it’s wonderfully beautiful (of course, nowhere near as beautiful as La Gomera or El Hierro pero bueno).

On the last evening we had a farewell dinner in La Laguna, papas arrugadas with lots of mojo, tomato salad because they don’t taste good in Barcelona either, and the best dessert in the world, polvito uruguayo. And while we are sitting there in this cute little restaurant, with the green checked paper tablecloths, with salty hair from the sea and our bikinis still under our clothes, sipping wine and talking about everything and nothing, not only does a huge parade with a statue of Maria and cuckoo clan-like figures go by (semana santa, very catholic here and it will be Easter Monday in a few days) but it also suddenly starts to rain and after a while to hail and it gets freezing cold. Totally absurd, but a clear sign for us that it is time to leave the island. Chiao, Adeus, goodbye…

an audio dejavu

lisen to the audio piece about el hierro.