It was turning into one of those indecisive mornings. “Shall we go and lounge by the pool and read until lunchtime, and then head down to the beach? Or will we get in the car and head off for the day?” Neither of us could make our minds up. It’s often like this, and until we close the front door, we could be heading anywhere between fifty yards away and the other end of the island. It’s part of what makes us so fascinating, and no doubt would drive anyone else unfortunate enough to end up in a long term relationship with either of us to the edge of their senses. All things considered, it’s a good job Ali and I found each other. Neither of us seems to mind when one asks the other what we’re going to do today, only to draw a distant gaze and a blank response.
If anything, I’m a little more driven than she is, and so I made the call. “Right, we’ll go back to that place in Femes for lunch, then we’ll go and visit one of the bodegas at La Geria, and after that I want to go and walk up the red mountain for sunset” – that’s Montana Colorada by the way. “Ok,” came the predictable response. And so we had a plan; a nice simple one that didn’t require too much thought or too much driving. We’d drive up the mountain pass from Playa Blanca to the village of Femes that sits on the saddle, and the rest of the day would follow as planned.
Except that it didn’t. 12:30 we agreed was a bit early for lunch, and so we drove in the other direction and headed for a menu del dia at the place we’d stumbled across in Teguise a few days earlier. And just to make things interesting, we decided to go along the main road rather than the wine route, just to have a bit of a test run for that inevitable drive to the airport just over a week later. “It’ll be faster” I reasoned. It wasn’t, especially after a couple of wrong turns, one of which almost had us heading into the jams of Arrecife, the island capital. Eventually, we arrived at a dinner table to be served by a very harassed looking waiter, whom it seemed was working solo through the busy lunch hour. As he unceremoniously thumped our drinks onto the table and feigned no interest whatsoever in our opposing views on the inclusion of tuna in our ensaladas mixtas, we wondered who’d thrown a sickie and left him in the lurch. After the meal I was too frightened to ask for coffee as well, and spent the next twenty-five minutes looking for another establishment to replenish the caffeine deficit. The first such attempt found us hastily evacuating our seats, scarpering around a corner and tracing an elaborate circuit of the town after Ali had seen the price list. Six euros for a scoop of ice cream? Not on your Nellie!
Some time later, happily refuelled with coffee and ice cream we sat at a bench in the church square. By now it was some time after 4pm, and with less than two hours until sunset we considered the options. At the far end of the island, just another twelve miles or so away lay the Mirador del Rio, offering a classic view of the three small islands that fan away from the northeast corner of Lanzarote, while retracing our tyre treads down to the coast would bring us to the wreck of the Telamon, a long exposure magnet that lies a few yards out to see between Costa Teguise and Arrecife. Tentatively, we set course for the former, where the road rides up to its highest point on the island between Los Valles and Haria. And still several miles short of our target, as we sat at a layby gazing down at the white coastal villages of Punta Mujeres and Arrieta far below, we changed our minds again – and then furthered the endless mystery of our final destination by missing the turn without signpost that was supposed to take us to the Mirador del Risco de Famara.
As you can see, the error turned into what Bob Ross would call a happy accident. Finally, somewhere around five, we ended up here, at the lonely and altitudinous Ermita de las Nieves. Quite how often there’s ever been snow here, even at this distance above sea level I’m not sure, although I did need to put my long sleeved top on over my tee shirt to brave the last hour of daylight on this late November afternoon, as a fellow visitor from France told me his wife was very jealous of my telephoto lens. The view across the volcanoes that dominate the landscape over to the west from where we’d come was, well you can see for yourself can’t you? Even before the golden hour, it seemed evident that we were going to be in for a show, as layers of cloud allowed sunbeams to filter through and light up the spaces in between the distant cones. For an hour I watched from behind the long lens transfixed, as the colours deepened and the sunbeams bounced and weaved their way into ever more epic frames. As the sunbeams moved, I continually followed the drama, recomposing and focussing as quickly as I could keep up. It’s not often that I get to spend time in a landscape like this, and certainly I’d never seen a sunset sky such as the one we were witnessing now in the mountains. Eventually, the sun having disappeared for the day and the magic leaving centre stage almost instantaneously, I headed back to the car with an enormous grin on my face. The day of sliding door decisions had given us the best possible outcome with a sunset we’d never forget. It’s a good job we’re not that great at making our minds up, or we’d have probably missed it.
