Lanzarote’s crown jewels aren’t the easiest to get unfettered access to, you know. It’s ok if you’re a YouTube leviathan, or someone with the resources to go on one of their workshop expeditions, but other than that, it seems the only option is to take the bus tour and witness the inner secrets of the Timanfaya National Park under extreme supervision along with a large number of other paying visitors in broad daylight. Visitors of the Instaselfie persuasion that is. Which is about a much use as a penguin sanctuary in the Sahara, unless photographing bland blue skies is your thing. I guess a bit of high contrast mono might work, but wouldn’t it be great to stand on top of the mountain looking down over the craters at sunrise or sunset? The authorities are very protective of this precious landscape, as life struggles to regain a foothold in the dark cracks and folds of the black lava fields. Without queuing up and paying for the bus tour, you can’t get in. Not unless you’ve got a special permit, the photographer’s equivalent of one of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets.
Of course there is an alternative option. You can stand a few miles away, brandishing a big lens in the general direction of this precious wasteland. I’d already done that twice, from the higher slopes of Montana Negra. And now Ali and I had driven along the road through the malpais, paying a visit to the Timanfaya visitor centre on the edge of the park. After we’d been thrown out at closing time, we drove a few miles further, arriving at a rough parking area just outside Tinajo. From here we could walk along the appropriately named Rios de Lava, which I think we can all grasp the meaning of with even the most rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, a path through the twisted lava flows towards the unequal twin craters that go by the name of White. Caldera Blanca, and Caldereta Blanca.
It was one of those treks that seemed to go on for longer than it should have done, partly because we stopped at every one of the regular information boards along the route, reading each of them in detail even though they said pretty much exactly the same things as the boards at Volcan el Cuervo had done on the first Tuesday. Pretty much exactly the same thing as all the boards at Montana Roja a week later for that matter. By now we were all boarded out, just going through the motions. If you asked me to tell you what was on them, I really wouldn’t be able to tell you. It all goes through the remaining handful of active brain cells and comes out the other side before any of it has registered. Suffice to say, it was rather lively around here nearly three centuries ago, when this entire corner of the island was ablaze with volcanic eruptions that went on for six years.
Eventually, we reached the rim of Caldereta Blanca, the little one of course, abandoning all notions of climbing her larger sister. Getting here had been effort enough thank you very much, and we still had the return hike through the lava fields, past those boards again. We really didn’t need to read those boards yet again. Besides which, I have a friend who ran the Geography Department at the college we both worked at, and he’d furnish me with a far greater overload of tectonic technicalities than mere boards could ever tell me if I were daft enough to ask. He never wastes the opportunity to start banging on about pahoehoe lava flows. Whatever they are. I’ve been told enough times, but I still can’t remember.
For an hour we sat at the top of the crater, looking in all directions as I wielded the telephoto lens with abandon. Here, we were completely alone in the silence, watching the evening begin to glow with yet another orange sunset over the beautiful broken wasteland. And when the light began to fall, we knew it was time to make our way back to the car.
And as so often happens, timing was everything. We’d arrived back at the car now, and it was just in time for me to set up the tripod and grab the classic Canarian dusk colours, that orange band lighting up against the dark silhouettes of the land and the rapidly deepening sky. It always happens so quickly in these subtropical latitudes, the moments between the golden hour and darkness fleeting across the landscape in a race towards the night, at the same time simplifying the scene and reducing it to shapes and light. A shot of the Timanfaya National Park, no less. Albeit from five miles to the east. Better than the bus at any rate.
