We took a 51/2 hr flight to Tenerife and stepped out into a place with no snow.

It was my first time out of Europe, so for me it was a novelty to walk around in a place where the kind of plants you buy from the flower-shops, like cacti and succulents, were growing wild on building-sites.

We went on bus-tours to remote villages high up in the mountains, ate out every day and put on too much weight, took a boat to the Island of La Gomera where we visited a garden full of beautiful tropical flowers and walked past old buildings that Christopher Columbus had known.

One evening we went out and saw a show consisting of traditional flamenco dancing, spanish guitars accompanying professional dancers who were very good, dressed in their amazing costumes to an incredible light-show.

Another time we hired a car and drove to the volcano of Teide which was, I think, about 3000 meters high, with snow onthe top. The desert around had been used as the backdrop to some of the scenes from star-wars. Because the sky was so clear an observatory with some very powerful radio-telescopes had been built in the area.

I was a bit tired of people scrounging for money and also tired of people coming out of the many restaurants in the area to try to persuade the tourists to come inside.

We were staying in Playa de Los Americas where every available space had been built on and devoted to the tourist-trade;- hotels, restaurants on every corner, night-clubs and souvenir-shops and noise well into the small hours because it was always warm and there was hardly any rain.

I hope we can manage to upload a few photos