Friday 9 December 2016

Hiking in Masca

One of the things i absolutly HAD to do while at Tenerife was hiking in Masca again. Yes, i have been there before on my biology studytrip but it was awesome and beautiful.
The problem was that my parents both have some trouble with their backs and stuff but the good thing was that my uncle and his fiancĂ© were so ready to go because i told them how awesome the trip was. But a thing i tihnk they didn't understand was the difficulty of the trip. I told them about how you literally have to climb down at some places and teeter along cliffs only holding yourself up by a rope. It's pretty exciting!

We ordered the trip through Thomas Cook who had a cooperation partner who made these trips. I never got the name of this company and i tried to contact Thomas Cook about the name of the hiking guides but they never wrote back. Anyway, the bus came an picked us up at our hotel and i think it took an hour to get everyone from different hotels before we headed to Masca. We got divided into different groups by nationality because they had a 4-5 different guides that spoke different language. We got an Scandinavian guide who spoke spanish as well. We did expect an english speaking guide as it said on Thomas Cooks website but luckly we understood swedish all of us.
They had everything you needed for a hike. You could rent boots and shoes from the guides. Also walking sticks for only 1£. There was food in the trip and lots of water and fruit. You basically just need to wake up and get out to the bus in the morning. That's it.

Anyway the trip was beautiful like the last time. The landscape was amazing and the moutain goat was happy. It had been raining so there was a lot of water runing down the cliff so it was slippery and it was impossible not to become wet but it just made everything seem more green as well. The guide was really good at explaining things as we went on and i learned a lot of new stuff that i didn't learn or noticed from the first trip.
Like some of the palm trees (That is endemic for Canary Islands) was black because of a great fire many many years ago and the last volcanic eruptions (rather small) was not from Teide, but from "another" colcano near Masca, so the affect could be seen a few places. We also saw some kind of small pigeon up close because they were use to hikers giving them food. They were really cute! And she brought a banana so she could feed the small lizards and showed us cactus lice that is used for colouring in lipstick and things like that. Very fascinating.

And a random thing i just HAVE to metion! When we were at the end of the trip and about to hit the shore the guide stopped us to say good bye and suddently a cat appeared. We were all very confused because we just went through 8 kilometers of cliff so how did the cat end up there? People started to feed it the ham from the sandwiches the guide gave us and gave it some water as well. We found out later that it belonged to some people that owned a little house at the shore that you can also reach by boat. So they took their cats with them when they went there apparently. So they crawled around to the hikers and begging for food. In the end a boat brought us back to Los Gigantos from where they drove us home to our hotel.

The pigeon look alike bird
Look at the small people down there!


The Masca "elephant"

The mysterious cat!

The road to Masca. A very... unique experience in a big bus. 

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