6th November

Thursday 6th November 2008, day 108. 28° 40’.4 N, 017° 46’.0 W. Santa Cruz de La Palma.

Ooh! Aah! Ow! We went for a wonderful (oof!) 18k walk up the central volcano yesterday and (aah!) today can barely move. My volcano climbing muscles (that’s the fat ones at the top of my legs) are not used to this sort of thing, no more are the volcano climbing down muscles in my knees, and together they are doing a good job of suggesting that a day writing emails and gently ambling round shops is just what’s needed. Except that, having sat down to do a bit of writing, I can’t get up from the chair!

Anthony, of course, being so young and fit and agile, finds all this creaking and groaning highly amusing – but even he is moving a bit gingerly, when he thinks I’m not looking.

The volcano in question is Taburiente, whose pinnacle collapsed aeons ago, leaving a massive crater 8km wide, and surrounded by sharp-edged peaks and ravines, worn down by thousands of years of erosion. Its slopes are covered in Canary pines, with almost nothing else growing at the very top apart from a wiry, slightly aromatic relation of the sage plant.

The road up has been blasted through volcanic rock; here it is a dark brown, and has the lumpy texture of soft friable earth, but is hard like iron, and as coarse as steel wool. As you climb, the plant-life gets less and less varied until the pines and sage take over entirely. The Canary pine is made for this sort of harshness, with the ability to force its roots down into lava as solid as steel, and to withstand forest fires. Judging by the growth of the unmarked trees, the last fire had passed through about fifteen years ago, leaving the trees with their bark charred and blistered into thick, many-layered, scales.

The path climbed steadily for three hours, giving spectacular views down to the plain below, while we breathed in the scents of warmth and damp and green living things. The sense of smell gets atrophied on a boat for lack of variety, so we revel in the scent of forests and flowers whenever we come across them.

The top of Pico Bejenado, at 1,854m, looks north across the cauldron to the peaks on the other side. When we arrived, they were just visible above the cloud filling the bowl, and then, in the space of time it took to turn round, almost all the cloud vanished, allowing us to look down to the bottom of the giant ravined, pine-filled hollow. By the time we started to come down, the cloud level had dropped again, giving us a cool soft light for the descent back down – and, amazingly, we timed it so that we arrived five minutes before the hourly bus left – worth yomping that final mile.