Valley parking
The Valle de Agaete’s one of my favourite places to park myself and escape the urban grind of Las Palmas. Except every time I visit, I’m invariably working. Yesterday was little different, with a trip to San Pedro’s Finca La Laja and Tamadaba.
Family travel
Instead of taking public transport, I’d sworn never to go beyond Galdár again by bus, my wife gave me a lift. We were joined by Toddler Tom. Who proceeded to chuck up all over the back seat. Which made things a little awkward as we were meeting up the photographer who had been flown over from the UK. The rendezvous point was the Finca Las Longueras, a rural hotel. So the über-talented Tom Robinson’s first shot of me was mopping up kiddie vomit.
Tamadaba coffee break
The rural estate of Finca La Laja is home to the Bodega Los Berrazales, one of Gran Canaria’s most prestigious vineyards. La Laja also trebles as a coffee plantation, the most northerly in the world no less, and tropical fruit farm. I was there to spill the beans about the island’s hitherto underpublicized production of everybody’s favourite natural source of caffeine – for Let’s Go with Ryanair magazine.
Queens of the stone age
In the picture, you can see orange trees dwarfed by the Tamadaba massif. If you’d uttered the words Tamadaba massif to me in my London days, I would assume you were talking about the latest grime collective making a sound in the underground. An older, wiser, and more importantly, Canarian-based, me now knows that these mountains were formed by volcanic activity 4-5 million years ago. So more Stone Age than cutting edge then.
The finished article
I was pretty, pretty pleased with the final version of the story which went live on the magazine’s site. Which was also published in a pocket-sized mag. A copy which ended up in the hands of my children’s doctor. Who told me how much he enjoyed it. After all these years, I still get a kick from such feedback.
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