Do you like the idea of going to remote places? If not, you will find this piece quite funny.  You will roll your eyes a lot, and wonder why I’m like this.  You will also spend the next few minutes thanking the merciful heavens that you did not join me on this vacation.

If, however, you do like the idea of going to remote places, this post might be just what you have been waiting for.  I, on your behalf, will visit a remote place, and tell you all about it.  And then you will laugh, roll your eyes, and think twice about your own vacation preferences.

Do you know why remote places are remote? I found out this week.  It’s because no one wants to go there.  Remote places are difficult to find.  People in remote places are difficult to understand.  And the food in remote places is, well, difficult to eat.  Trust me.

Scene 1:

I am planning my trip to Tenerife, one of Spain’s seven Canary Islands.  Sounds exotic, doesn’t it, and vaguely tropical.  I am at my computer, imagining brightly coloured birds and possibly a goofball named Gilligan.  I also imagine swarms of tourists heading to their all-inclusive, beachside resorts. No thanks, not for me.  I just want a little cabin in the woods.  In the north, where the tourists aren’t. Halfway up a mountain, where the resorts aren’t.  Just a nice little piece of paradise, all for me.  And that is what I find.  Online.

Scene 2:

I am driving a tiny little twerp of a Ford up a 40-degree incline and the engine’s complaining.  It’s whining.  It’s weeping.  I’m in first gear with the accelerator to the floor, and the car is barely moving.  Happily, I have brakes.  Sadly, I do not want to coast all the way down this hill in reverse.  Please, little car.  Have a little confidence in yourself.  You think you can, you think you can.  There, you see? You did.  Just barely.

Now repeat that about 50 times, with ill-placed roundabouts and directions that make no sense.  Subtract GPS, wifi, a cell signal, and human beings.  Then subtract asphalt, and add random mounds of earth and stone.  Oh, and hanging vines.  Night is about to fall.  Welcome to Tenerife.

Scene 3:

The cabin in the woods is just as I imagined it, except for the worms (13 on the kitchen floor alone).  I am hungry, because supermarkets are not a priority on never-ending 40-degree inclines, and sleep was more important than food after my white-knuckle drive.  But it’s a new day, and I have four things on my to-do list: find some breakfast (bacon and eggs, preferably), upgrade the twerpy mosquito of a Ford, find the tourism office, and buy some groceries. It won’t be that bad.  And it will all be downhill.

That may or may not be an omen.

Scene 4:

I coast with ease into the village.  I walk past two closed cafes and consider a third (highly recommended by my host for its inexpensive, yet authentic Canarian food).  Six men are sitting at the bar, growling and drinking beer.

I enter.  The entire room instantly falls silent. Everyone turns and stares.  Who is this female humanoid invading our sacred man-space?

“Do you have any food?” I ask.  No one answers.  Everyone stares.  I make what I hope is a universal gesture for eating.  Still no response.  I point at a blackboard full of unintelligible foreign words.  “Menu?” I ask.  “Ah, menu!” they cry.  They know that word.  We now have one common noun between us.  Menu. Oh blessed menu.

I point to some items on the blessed menu and ask what they are.  No response.  More stares, followed by a sudden exodus of drinkers.  Well now, this is awkward.

But I am SO hungry.  I see some other people eating and I point to their plates.  I’ll have what they’re having.  It looks disgusting.  I don’t care.

It tastes disgusting, too.  Soggy peas and carrots, and the thickest, driest, ugliest brick of fishiness I have ever seen, emerging out of a spillage of questionable orange oil.  For a mere 10 Euros.  What a steal.

Scene 5:

I am at the car rental place.  There is nothing wrong with the car, they say.  It’s the altitude, they say.  At least I think that’s what they say, thanks to French, which is not as close to Spanish as you’d think.

Let me talk to your English-speaking colleague, please.

Ten minutes later, I have a much beefier car (three levels up on the price grid, of course), with a useless GPS modeled after the Commodore 64 (for an additional 5 Euros per day).

Ah, well, travel always has its surprises.

Scene 6:

I am in a city.  There is no parking anywhere.  There is no tourism office anywhere.  There is nothing but endless driving in circles.

Scene 7:

I have just paid for my groceries.  I am carrying two bulging bags of food, an 8-litre bottle of water, and all the loose items that don’t fit in the bulging bags.  Spanish elevators bring me nowhere, so I’m hauling everything up the stairs.  I finally manage to exit the building and start the long walk to my car, when a uniformed man comes running after me, yelling, “Ticket! Ticket!”

I show him my receipt. He nods begrudgingly.  As he walks away, my grocery bag rips and everything scatters on the ground.  Perishables are rolling everywhere.  The ticket-man looks over his shoulder at me, acknowledges my situation, and keeps walking. Meanwhile, I am chasing my Camembert down a 40-degree incline, stopping it heroically with my left foot.  No one cares.

Scene 8:

I may not have found the tourism office, but I do find a website that offers a turn-by-turn description of a nearby hike, for a mere 2 Euros.  My host graciously prints a third of it out for me, for another 2 Euros. Bargains everywhere in this place. Let’s go!

It is another harrowing drive to the trailhead, complicated greatly by the argument going on between Google Maps and my Commodore-era GPS.  Fortunately, my beefy car can handle the inclines… but can my thighs?

My chosen hike has three options.  I pick the hardest one, of course, despite this ominous warning:

 

In between nearly passing out on the ascent, and hovering over the edge of a cliff for much of the descent, it is a dreamy, head-in-the-clouds day of mountaineering.

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Of course, those same clouds completely obscure the magnificent views I had been promised, and the “vague T-junction” turns out to be more of an ambiguous K, sending me down a creepy Camino path for a good half hour, but I do eventually find my way back to the car.  And back down the mountain.  And back up the mountain.  And back to my bed.  Good night.

Scene 9:

I am slumped in a bus, pre-dawn, mildly annoyed that someone put their stuff on my seat when I stepped out.  I sit behind the seat-that-was-my-seat and consider the awfulness of getting up at 5am. And then people start yelling at me in Spanish.  Pointing. Shouting.  I am not in the mood for this.  So what if I took your seat? Someone took my seat! Go sit somewhere else! I was here first! Silence.  Sleepiness. And shouting again.  Gestures to the back of the bus.  Why should I go to the back? You go to the back!

And then someone who knows a few words other than “menu” walks up to me, and says those few words, and everyone stares, and suddenly I understand.

I am on the wrong bus.

My own seat, on my own bus, is quietly waiting for me on the other side of the parking lot, along with all of the German comrades with whom I will be touring the whistling island of La Gomera today.  Guten tag.

Scene 10:

It is pouring rain, and will be for two days straight, but I am okay with that, because I live in a cozy little farmhouse with three fireplaces.  What’s that? Firewood costs 1 Euro per itty-bitty log, making an itty-bitty fire that doesn’t even touch the chill in this stone fortress? Well, okay then.  I’ll just bite the bullet and pay 5 Euros for my scrooge of a host to turn on the heat. There.  That’s better.  Good night.

Scene 11:

Time to go. What’s that? I owe you an extra 25 Euros for three logs and two days of heat? Bargains abound.

Scene 12:

I have four hours before I need to be at the airport – my last afternoon behind the wheel in Tenerife. I am nearing the climax of this pick-your-poison car saga.  Had I been driving an automatic all week, it might have been more of a friendly, automotive tale.  But piloting a stick shift around an island made of volcanoes definitely brings us into saga territory.

Happily, I am highly proficient at starting on inclines, thanks to Shifters and several years of preparatory exercises on various mountain ranges.  But that doesn’t mean it’s been pretty.  There’s been cursing (mild, Mennonite cursing, but still…).  There’ve been heaves and shudders and clunks and stalls.  Oh, the stalls! Several hundred thousand of them.  That’s what happens when you swap a mosquito for a bull.  And we are about to charge into the unknown one last time before I fly away.

For this final afternoon in Tenerife, the internet invites me and my bovine beast on a one-hour coastal walk that is only 20 minutes away.  BAHAHAHAHA! 20 minutes, you say? More like 60 terrifying minutes of one-lane roads, blind hairpin turns, sweaty hands, and several new items for next year’s Gratitude List: namely, reliable brakes, tires with decent traction, and local drivers who wait patiently while I execute agonizingly slow three-point turns on various unmarked precipices.  I’m not sure what the beeping noises and emergency lights on my dash are about, but I’m still moving, so all is well.

Scene 13:

I roll into the parking lot of the rental agency with a flat tire and an innocent, Canadian smile. Audios, Tenerife!

Scene 14:

I am driving home from the Casablanca airport.  The highway is so wide.  So straight. So flat.  The other drivers are idiots, and I feel my hard-earned sense of superiority returning.  Pick a lane, buddy.  Any lane. There are so many from which to choose. What a remarkable, civilized country, to have so many lanes.  No matter that the lines are invisible to everyone but me.  I feel pleasure, just knowing they are there.

And my car! My sweet little pumpkin of a car! One step up from a mosquito, and two steps down from a bull, it has its endearing quirks (it has a guillotine instead of a trunk, for instance, and you have to hold your mouth the right way to unlock the doors)… but it shifts just as it should, without even a wince.  It’s carried me over the Atlas mountains and through the Marrakech medina, and if it can do that, it’s car enough for me.

And what about you?

You have now been to a remote place and done remote things, before heading home to your unremarkable life.  Was it fun? Did you have a good vacation?

I did, believe it or not.  Really. I would even do it again, with a highly-trained conquistador for a chauffeur, and my own supply of firewood.

Or maybe not.

Scene 15:

I am at my computer, planning my next vacation… to a flat, French-speaking city with a Metro. Brussels, perhaps, or Geneva…

Or Corsica… but then I’d need to rent a car…

Care to join me?