Pictures:
1. Camel caravan on the way up the cinder cone volcano.
2. The bodega's vineyard. Each semi-circle contains one vine. You can see they extend half way up the cinder cone in the distance.
3. Inside a partly collapsed volcano on the Ruta de los Volcanes.
4. You can just make out the bus in the left center of this picture, driving the Ruta de los Volcanes.
5. Another half blown out caldera.
March 31 – Arrecife, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain. The island is only 75 miles off the coast of Africa about where Morocco and Western Sahara meet. It's only 327 square miles in area. While the Canary Islands were known to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the first settlers were Roman. The Roman scholar Pliny described the islands as having large numbers of dogs. These dogs were supposedly the source of the name Canary.
The contrast between Tenerife and Lanzarote are striking. Tenerife has Mount Teide to create weather as the Ocean of Clouds forms as the result of the air currents around the mountain. This is the phenomenon that creates the rain in the lowlands and valleys, which makes the rain forest possible. The northern part of the island does not get this benefit and is arid volcanic moonscape as the result.
Lanzarote does not have a tall mountain to form these clouds and the resultant weather so the entire island is arid volcanic moonscape. Most yards are covered in the black volcanic sand that covers the island's beaches. This arid landscape is amazing in that they do grow grapes here and make wine. They also grow some crops in their highly organized fields. What they do is they dig down to the good soil and then put in the plants. Then they cover the entire field in black lava sand. This sand is very porous and it absorbs the humidity from the cooler night air and retains it during the day to water the plants. This is supplemented by a drip irrigation system when needed. They also build wind blocks on the north side of almost every row of their gardens and in vineyards they build a semi circular wall on the north, east and west sides of each vine. Each vine is also recessed into an inverse cone of the black volcanic rock to provide further wind protection and water retention.
Most of the houses are white with green widows, doors and shutters. This results from the influence of Cesar Manrique. He was trained as an architect but became a sculptor and painter as well. He was born in Lanzarote but left here to study in Spain in 1945. When he returned to the island in 1968 he was upset with the changes he saw toward commercialism and started a campaign to have the island remain in a more natural state. Through his efforts 90% the island was proclaimed a World Biosphere Reserve. They limit the height of any new construction to 4 levels in the larger cities and two levels in the villages. They have a yearly limit of 80,000 tourists, which is about equal to the islands population. He developed an architectural style that retained many of the traditional features of Lanzarotian buildings and suggested the white with green color scheme. It is not mandatory and some people don't follow it but most do. He also created sculptures that are actually large mobiles. These are dotted around the island. Many of them are in the center of traffic circles. His huge cactus sculpture became the logo for a cactus garden located here.
We drove across the volcanic landscape to the Timanfaya National Park. Just before we entered the park proper we stopped at the Paseo en Dromedario. Here we are going to venture out into the volcanoes on camelback. When we pulled in the parking lot there was an impressive array of camels sitting in long rows. They are tied together in strings of 6 camels and, unlike Northern Africa; here you ride in tandem seated in chairs on either side of the camel's hump. Since Diana and I were pared up they had to tie a bag of rocks on Diana's side to equal out the weight. We rode for about a half an hour up a small valley to the crater of a small cinder cone, around the cone and back down to the valley. Everyone seemed to have a good time. Diana and I certainly did. Our camel kept sniffing the butt of the camel in front of us when we slowed down or stopped. About half way up the cinder cone he started sniffing the butt of the lady seated on the left. Diana and I both started laughing when he finished with the woman and arched his neck to raise his nose straight up in the air in a joyous celebration like Snoopy in the Peanuts cartoon does when he's doing his happy dance. It was just too funny. For safety reasons all the camels are muzzled and the spitters have a plastic shield lining the lower part of the muzzle.
From here we entered the National Park. The park's logo is a devil with a pitchfork raised over his head held in both hands. He has the traditional horns and a pointed tail. We drove through fields of a'a, gummy-gummy and pillow lava to get to the El Diablo Restaurant. Cesar Manrique designed this building. It's made from natural volcanic rock, granite and metal. No wood was used as the building is atop an active vent from the magma below. The restaurant's oven is actually a large, beehive shaped room attached to the back of the hotel. You can walk into it and around the actual cooking surface. In the center of the room is a large 3-foot tall, circular basalt stone block wall. There's a metal grate across the top of this wall and food is baked by setting it on the grate. You can stand very close to this wall and it doesn't seem that warm but if you extend your hand over the grate it is very hot indeed probably over 300 degrees F.
We gathered outside and stood on an area of red volcanic pebbles. A man from the restaurant had us stand in a semicircle while he scraped off about 3 inches of pebbles from about a square foot of the surface. He then dug the shovel in and picked up some of the pebbles. He carried them in the shovel and had us hold our hands out to take a few of them. The first lady to get them jumped back, dropped the pebbles and said, 'Yow!!" After that everyone took them carefully and began to sift them from hand to hand to avoid the heat. They were hot indeed. I'd estimate about 110 degrees. Just to show you how conditioned I am, my first thought was that they wouldn't be allowed to do this demonstration in the USA. A shame really as it was fun to watch the reactions.
Next we moved to a natural air vent from the magma below. It was about 4-5 feet across and there was a large pile of old weeds beside it. After we gathered around the hole, the same man took a fork and put about two bushels of weeds into the vent. It took about 15 seconds for the weeds to catch fire and create a large blaze. After that we moved to a pipe about 6 inches in diameter that had been put in the ground. He had a bucket of water that he poured into the pipe just before he ran about 8 feet away. The resulting geyser was very impressive as I expected but I was not prepared for the noise it made. I sounded a lot like a mortar being fired…WHOMP! Very impressive.
The restaurants rest rooms were also impressive. The floors were natural stone as were the walls. The doors on the commodes were steel and had huge bolts to keep them closed. The most unique feature was the light sconces. They are steel frying pans set high on the walls with the bulbs inside so the light was all reflected towards the ceiling. The walls were whitewashed and the indirect lighting made shadows almost nonexistent.
The park is all about volcanoes. We're going to take our tour bus around the Ruta de los Volcanes, a narrow winding road through the park. It's a very interesting landscape with many colors in the rocks and lava; reds, yellows, grays, black and green predominate. They have shield, composite and cinder cone volcanoes. I didn't see any splatter cones but there may be some around. Shield volcanoes are formed when the molten magma is extruded slowly as lava and as it cools one layer builds on the next to form the volcano. Sometimes a portion of the lava will cool on top while the center remains molten and as the center pours out it forms a lava tube. When the roofs of these tubes collapse and leave the tube open to the surface they call them Jameos (Remember the J is pronounced as an H, this is Spain). Magma that solidifies in the main vertical tube and forms a plug is often ejected under pressure and throws chunks of hardened lava for great distances. Creatively they call these chunks 'bombs'. Shield volcanoes are huge. They are broad with gently sloping sides. Mauna Loa and Kilauea in Hawaii are good examples. When they erupt they generally extrude slow moving lava that causes damage but not much loss of life because it moves so slowly and they don't usually explode. They tend to form in places where tectonic plates meet.
Gas vents usually form cinder cones. It starts out as a hole in the ground venting superheated air. Over time chunks of lava honeycombed with holes pile up around the hole and form a cone shaped heap. Since no magma is involved the entire structure is like a pile of rocks but because the cinders are so irregularly shaped they have a cohesiveness that allows them to survive wind and rain and maintain their shape. The hills we climbed on the camels earlier today were large cinder cone volcanoes. At their largest, they are still very small compared to magma volcanoes. They are often found in groups on the sides of other volcanoes or near their base. They rarely get taller than 800 feet.
Alternating these two processes forms composite volcanoes. Sometimes the volcano has a lava flow and sometimes it ejects cinders. These alternating layers are why they are called 'composite'. These are the ones that usually erupt explosively yet between eruptions they are so quiet that they may seem extinct, much like Mount Saint Helens. They are usually large, impressive, snow-capped mountains.
As we drove around the park we stopped at various places while we heard an explanation of the history of that particular area and some details about the processes involve.
There are several indigenous plant, bird and insect species here. The only one I saw for sure was the Timanfaya Plant, which grows on the sides of the volcanoes. It's a small shrub with very low-key pale yellow flowers. At least the one I saw were.
From the park we drove to the ocean's edge. Here the coastline varied from craggy lava to lava sand beaches. Just a little further up the coast we came to a salt production area called Salinas del Janubio. Here they have a set of evaporative ponds that they fill using very old windmill pumps. The first ponds are very large. After the water reaches a certain salinity they move it to smaller ponds and then to even smaller ponds where the evaporation process is completed and the salt collected. There were some pretty impressive piles of salt at the edge of the smaller ponds near the ocean.
In the town of La Geria we stopped at a bodega for a small taste of the Canarian wines. There were two choices, dry white or sweet white. The servings were small so we got one of each. As it turned out Diana liked the sweet, it was almost like a medium Madeira, and I liked them both. The white was medium dry with a chardonnay-like flavor.
All around the bodega building were fields of vines. This bodega uses the semicircular walls, one for each vine. In another area they were growing some corn and onions, here they used the long straight walls to guard the rows of vegetables.
This is our second visit to the island and the only real difference we saw this time was that there were actually green fields dotted with yellow wildflowers. Our guide said that it has been raining a lot over the last few weeks and all the wildflowers had bloomed. Apparently it's like the California desert. How much rain you get and how quickly determines which wildflowers, if any, will bloom that year. Here they sometimes go a few years between blooms because some years there isn't enough rain to germinate the seeds. This year they had a lot of rain and all the grasses and flowers are blooming.
Tonight's entertainment was the Argentinean Devils. It's a family group, parents and adult children. They performed Argentinean tango, folkloric and gaucho dances. Gaucho dancing is a lot like flamenco but in riding boots. They stomp but they also perform kicks and they actually dance on he toes of the boots. Well, dance may be too strong a word; it's more like walk. Sometimes they also swing bolos while they dance. It's lively and fun to watch
A day at sea tomorrow to catch up.
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