I finally got round to putting up a little video about our Rafting Bike day out just before the weekend. (No cracks about ‘fat-bottomed girls’, if you please).

I made the vid with Windows Movie Maker which has an annoying habit of freezing the computer every 10 minutes so the little clip nearly never got finished at all. Despite a growing urge to turf the whole lot into the briny, I finally got the it done and am quite happy with the results. What do you think?

Did you know that there have been several alien sightings in Tenerife?

Very late one cloudless night I even saw a UFO myself but by the time my hubby had  come out to see what I was shouting about, the mysterious and silent craft that were flying across the sky in perfect formation had disappeared. With no photo to prove it (or have dismissed as a weather balloon or whatever) and the memory of my hubby’s look of deepest worry as he pondered whether I had finally lost the last of my marbles, I shrugged off the strange sighting, putting it down in my mind to ‘military aircraft’.

I have always found the idea of aliens more comforting than scary. The thought that someone out there knows what the hell they are doing is quite pleasing. In my version of events, the aliens will let us get ourselves into the worst mess and then step in with the Germolene and lollipops right at the last minute saving us all from the course of destruction that we put ourselves on long ago.

Movies are never like that though are they. Except for that sweet one about all the wrinklies getting their groove back in the swimming pool of their old people’s home, Hollywood always has alien arrival accompanied by blood shed, plague, weather anomalies and planes dropping from the sky. (OMG! Maybe they are already here?)

The latest alien abduction movie, The Fourth Kind,  is no different. It focusses on the real life disappearance of several people from Nome, Alaska in the recent past. Even the recurrent and ongoing FBI investigations haven’t thrown any light on the mysterious goings on and so it must be aliens, right?

Of course the psychologist who winkles chilling subconscious memories from possible alien abductees just had to be drop dead gorgeous and so Milla Jovovich was roped in to play the part of Dr. Abigail Tyler. The movie is supposed to be quite creepy so I am guessing the little green men won’t be handing out lollipops and that their agenda in The Fourth Kind has got nothing to do with saving us from ourselves.

Whatever they are up to in Nome, Alaska, I doubt the aliens could have picked a worst spot to fiddle with the population. Even at the height of the tourist season, the sleepy city would find it hard pressed to find enough warm bodies to fill a football stadium. It is obvious that in a place where everyone knows your name, the regular borrowing of the citizens for a little research and development in a flying saucer would not stay a secret for very long.

The aliens would be smarter to organise their hunting parties on any Saturday night in Las Americas. There they could find any number of people who not only would be unlikely to put up much of a fight, they also wouldn’t need much in the way of anesthetic and would be unlikely to remember anything at all the next day.

The local website Lo Que Pasa En Tenerife is a good place to check up on the daily complaints of Tenerife’s residents.

Today one of the topics is the proliferation of shopping carts that are left in the streets of Santa Cruz.

The citizen reporter who scooped this story gripes that this is becoming so common it’s almost fashionable and why won’t people just return the effing  things. Well, okay maybe she didn’t say that exactly but I bet she was thinking it.

The comments on the original page are funny.

One person opines that it is obviously the fault of the South Americans and globalisation. Boy, is that a leap or what?

I don’t think the invasion of the shopping trolleys is a new thing at all. I seem to remember my hometown being festooned with the things when I was growing up (in fact I am sure most people reading this blog must have trolley-jousted at last once when they were small) and I don’t remember one Peruvian or Brazilian living in Cumbernauld at the time.

Where I live in Tenerife there is a bit of community spirit. We swap dishes and gossip at garden bbqs, attend each others kids’ birthdays parties and share two communal shopping trolleys. They are used to ferry shopping from the car park to the houses. As the driver parks the kids scamper off along the path to retrieve the trolleys from the gate of whoever had them last.

Strictly speaking only one of the trolleys is communal. My neighbour (yes, she of the poo-slinging scandal) got so fed up of having her shopping trolley purloined by the vecinos that she wrote her house number and family name on it in big black felt pen. Quite bold of her, I thought, considering she must have half-inched it herself from somewhere. It’s not like you can stop off at the €1 shop and buy yourself a Mercadona or Netto trolley, is it?

Anyone who has ever stood in the plaza in front of the Los Cristianos church at midnight on 31 December can attest to the fantastic firework displays that can be seen on the island. Well tonight and for the next few nights expect to see a different kind of lights in the sky. The annual Perseid Meteor Shower – also known as ‘the tears of Lawrence’ – for their appearance during this Saint’s feats days on August 10th is at its peak tonight.

According to the Tenerife Tourism Board the best spots to watch this spectacular display of shooting stars from are Montaña Guajara or around the Parador de Turismos.

The Perseid Shower can be seen from many places around the world and is a celebrated event in the amateur stargazers calendar. Google has marked the occasion with one of its special logos and Twitter is in on the act with the Twitter Meteor Watch which is being led by the starry-eyed astronomers of Newbury Astronomical Society. To participate you can follow @NewburyAS or search #Meteorwatch.

Tenerife went crazy when local football team CD Tenerife broke through into the first division.  Having finished the 2008-9 season in third place in the second division their breakthrough to the premier league in June this year after a seven year absence was heart-stoppingly exciting.  It was as if the whole island had won the lottery. There was dancing in the street, flag waving, lakes of celebratory beer and wine and car horns tooting through the night.

Of course, getting back into the premier division is only the first step on a very steep ladder  but CD Tenerife fans can keep an eye on the competition via Sportal Maps – a clever mash up of Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google maps and Google street view which provides a pretty unique look at sports facilities around the world. Football is one of the topics and there is also Nascar, Forumla 1 and 360 degree views of international stadiums.

Once on the site you can manipulate the images in several ways and come up with some excellent views. This is a part map, part 3d shot of the CD Tenerife stadium. Although you might not see it on the  screen shot, the view is close enough to see players in action on the field (still shots).

You can choose to see 2D, 3D, arial, bird’s eye or with labels – all of it a very cool and clever use of web services. You can click through on the picture to get to the CD Tenerife page on SPortal and have a fiddle.

It is not only Spanish Premier league home grounds you can spy on either. Look up the English and Scottish first league teams, Germany, France and more.

Ready to Go

Cousin Jan and her wild bunch are returning to Tenerife for the third time next month. There can’t be many of the activities on offer on the island that they have not tried already (except perhaps spelunking down the lava tubes) and they will be revisiting their favourite adventures this time including Bike Rafting and Bob-Diving.

It was Jan’s  family’s  enthusiastic reaction to their day Bike Rafting that encouraged me to add the activity to my Tenerife portal website (eTenerife.com) in the first place knowing that if it was equally enjoyable to 50-something parents, a teenage boy and girl and an 11 year old girl all with vastly different characters and hobbies that it was a pretty safe bet that any website visitor booking through eTenerife would also enjoy the day.

Now, I can see what they were all raving about. Nino and I and two of his French rellies an four other people went Bike Rafting on Saturday and we all had a ball!

Put simply, bike rafting involves being picked up in a minivan and transported up the mountain to a starting point from where you sail back downhill the 22 miles to Los Cristianos (or Golf Del Sur or Playa San Juan). Being downhill all the way there is hardly any peddaling involved at all – something which came as a great relief to me.

The Journey Begins…

The journey begins in the pine forest corona at the lip of the crater. The pines scent the air and the view over Tenerife South is magnificent. Where everyone else seemed to breathe deep and grin madly at the scenery my tummy was doing backflips.

I don’t know if everyone on the Bike Rafting trip that day was as nervous as I was to start with but then my biking track record is pretty grim. I have had my lip stitched back together from a bike accident when I was three, a black eye from a lonely concrete post that stood sentinel at the bottom of a scruffy hill  along from my house when I was ten. I ran my cousin’s friend’s motorbike up the school wall in Belgium (and it had a crate of beer on the back at the time), nearly cut three old Belgian ladies off at the knees as I crash landed into them after trying and failing to brake in Aalst and caused the domino effect on a long line of bikes for hire in Yangshou, China which resulted in me being chased down the road by the furious business owner.

In the ten years flocks of bike rafters have been shepherded down the mountain no-one has ever had a serious accident. Even so, my disasterous biking experinces warned me that there was a first time for everything and if anyone was going to go careering off the road and down the hill the hard way it would be me.  It didn’t help that guide Thomas quipped that should anyone’s brakes fail to remember that we were heading for Los Cristianos.

I needn’t have worried. Almost as soon as we started, I began to relax and enjoy the ride.  The feeling of the wind rushing past, the smell of the pines, the silence and the spectacular views just wrapped me up in a bubble and carried me through that first nervous patch.

The pace is easy and relaxed. For most of the time brakes are applied to keep behind the guide but now and then there is a steep downhill slope followed by an uphill surge where all brakes are off and you pelt down hell-for leather in order to maintain the momentum to get you back up the rise without pedalling. It is totally exhilarating.

While the bike riding is the main event there is more to the day than that alone. Owner Mauricio and guide Thomas have the route so carefully planned that they have interesting stories to tell on each stop.  They also play off each other like an old comedy team and you have to keep a careful eye on Mauricio to know when he is pulling your leg. On the rare occasion when  the group of bikers is required to cross lanes of traffic Mauricio positioned his van and trailer across the road like a mother hen  spreading her wings  while her chicks scampered to safety on the other side.

The scenery was not restricted to the rural lansdscape either. We flew though the villages where the locals waved and bid us “Buenas Dias!” and then on down to just past La Escalona where we stopped for a drink and traditional Spanish nibbles. From there it was small sideroads all the way down to the highway into Los Cristianos and the day finish with a gallop along the beachfront and an explosive surprise from Mauricio.

If you are looking for something to do in Tenerife, I can not recommend this day highly enough to everyone.  So far Mauricio’s oldest participant is an 85 year old World War II veteran and young kids can ride along on a baby chair fitted to their parent’s bike. At about nine or ten years old a child will have enough strength and maturity (depending on the child of course) to handle their own bike and I imagine the day would give them a huge sense of accomplishment.

Book your Bike Rafting at eTenerife (my website) or direct with Mauricio at Rafting Bikes. If you do book direct with Mauricio please let him know you read about the day here so maybe he’ll give me a freebie the next time.

In a bid to cause as little disturbance as possible the final asphalting of the Añaza to Caletillas stretch of the Southern Tenerife highway (TF1) is being done between 22:00 and 06:00 hours right through the night. This caused signifcant tailbacks on Saturday night but quite likely was nowhere near as inconvenient as if the twenty kilometre stretch had been closed off during the day.

Even so, from today and for the next four or five days there will be one lane cut between Taibaba and Añanza(going to Santa Cruz) so expect delays if you have to drive to Santa Cruz this week. The lighting and signage has also to be done so some interference or blockage of the slow  lanes of the carriageways in both directions can be expected until that is finished.

TF1 Roadworks