Just because you are on holiday. doesn't mean that you cannot continue to exercise for the Big Walk! And so when we decided to spend the day at Siam Park, roughly 10 miles from our hotel in Playa Paraiso in Tenerife I thought this was a great chance to walk. But I didn't want to walk the roads which Google Maps said was the shortest route. It would take me onto the motorway which is an obvious no-no, so I added a stop; a pub on the seafront and voila I had my route. So off I set, around the front of the next hotel and started to climb... and climb... and climb...
It seemed to go on forever until at last I turned off sideways before turning up again, and the map said that I was only halfway up! On I climbed until I reached the turnoff and here it all changed! the turnoff was a dirt path. I wasn't sure about this. What if that led to a ravine and a narrow climb? I decided to stick to the road and go on and see if there was a path next to the motorway. This meant further climbing and then the road I wanted had no path! I decided to go the other way into the town and climb up through the town and just kept going, up and up until I was above the motorway and reached the road which ran parallel... but no pathway!
There were areas which I could walk along so I faced traffic and for roughly 200 metres walked until an area opened up behind a barrier and I was a bit more secure and I followed this to a bridge over the motorway with a roundabout... and my options ran out! There was a feeder road leading up to the roundabout which had a lane separated by a white line about a metre wide so I hopped across to that and headed down that facing traffic until... there was a bus stop on this lane! It turned out that they simply painted their paths onto the road rather than build up a separate pedestrian path and so I was away, following down, past petrol stations and on past a religious site. At this point I removed the seafront pub as I wanted to follow the route across the Siam park and I kept on heading towards Los Christianos until suddenly I saw the sea and realised something had gone wrong; the map was still heading for the pub!
At this point I was late to meet everyone so stopped the walk and caught a taxi the last two miles, but was really please, not so much with the distance as I knew it was going to be short, but with the climb and the fact that my legs had handled it with no issues.
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