A Walk In The Park

La Gomera is a very steep island but the center is realtively flat not being formed by a great big volcano like La Palma and Tenerife. Also, the main peak, El Alto de Garajonay, is quite accessible so we decided to try visiting it. I worked out a route where we would get the but to a place called Igualero and then we could walk over the top and catch the bus back from somewhere closer to San Sebastian on the other side. This would be neither too long or too steep for our unfit legs and poor heads for cliff edges.

This view is typical of the island with a mixture of sedimentary and basalt. These islands would really be a geologists dream though the human interaction would really make it a geography teachers dream location

The problems started when the bus failed to stop in Igualero. I suspect that I did not press the button hard enough to tell the driver to stop. The next stop was at a place called Chipude about five kilometers on and so another five KM from the mountain top. We then set out to walk back as waiting for the bus would have taken for ever. It is a long time since I have done any orienteering and I am decidedly rusty at it! The upshot was that we wound up zig zagging across the north eastern side of the island though we did eventually get on the right path. To cap it all off, we took a wrong turn very near the top and wound up back on the road about a km from Igualero and also in thick fog. So, we have failed to climb to the easiest peak in the Canaries and have managed to clock up about eight kilometers of walking.

The higher parts were all in fog and we didn't get to walk in the cloud forest on the other side though some of the landscape in the high places was amazing for it's mossy greenness.

Perhaps the strangest part was when we did get the bus back down. We had prepared by taking trousers, sweaters and waterproofs all of which we needed up there. Then, on arrival back at San Sebastian, we had to instantaneously strip everything off to get back to sub tropical winter temperatures. I didn't take a thermometer but it must have been a good ten degrees cooler up there!