I Love the Smell of Dawn….

I love the smell of dawn on the Tenerife coast. The air bears scents you don’t smell during day nor during  night – a mixture of ozone, the scrub of the dunes, and a freshness, which melts under the warmth of the sun. The silence, as the first light seeps along the horizon, is vast and exquisite. It surrounds you as the landscape stands on tiptoe, waiting for the new day’ s first sounds, and you hope it be the cry of a bird, or the whispering of ocean to earth,  and not the ugly sounds of men.

It has to have been an awfully good drop of wine which has made me sleep in and not want to get down to the beach.

I am ridiculously happy with this photo, because it’s taken me 3 years to achieve it!  I knew that sooner or later the sun would be rising in line with this pathway down to Playa Cabezo. I’ve taken snaps here before, but never managed to get it quite so framed as this morning. I must have taken about a dozen, but this is also the only one where that wave is trickling in just that way.

Blue Skies & Sculpture in El Médano

This sculpture stands at the end of the beach road, where El Médano becomes a bit wilder, where you can, actually see where the name médano comes from – it means sand dune.

Simply because a photo of this sculpture was the last picture in my last post I thought I’d show you a completely different view of it. It is said to represent the seven islands united, whilst on the wall behind you can see the seven pieces separately, as individual entities too.  Why do I say “it is said to….”? Because despite asking the local authority I couldn’t get confirmation of what I believed to be true. Though there are several interesting works of art on El Médano’s streets, they go their artists go unsung, which I think is a great shame.

An Unexceptional Sunset

I suppose it was obvious of late that I have been a bit disenchanted with the flow of life here.  There are some reasons, which I will come to one day, but not today, because I had one of those random experiences which make me blot out the crap and remember my passion for the island.

I was doing normal chores, I’d done a bit of shopping and went to pay my rent.  The real estate office is in Plaza Roja, close to where I live, and of late I’ve gone back to carrying my camera everywhere with me again. I’d stopped doing that during the move, and the not-doing-it kind of stuck. When I came out of the office around 6-ish the sun was going down, and so I thought I’d stroll over to the harbor to see if it was going to be a spectacular sunset. It showed no signs of being out of the ordinary, although ordinary is pretty good here, but it was pleasant after the heat of the day, so I walked along the boardwalk and onto the shore opposite to Montaña Roja.

This shoreline is pure volcanic lava frozen in time, sharp and sinister rocks which creep darkly into the ocean, and where countless rock pools form at low tide.  I took a few snaps. It wasn’t ideal. Foreground too dark, sun too bright, it was too early. As I picked my way amongst the rocks, the haunting cry of a curlew, who circled round in his search for easy pickings, and a lone, wee plover bobbing amongst the dark rubble.

There were few clouds around, and the sunset didn’t look like amounting to much, so I trod my careful way back to the promenade and the corner of the harbor, and as I ducked under the small bridge there it was the photo which had been worth waiting for, and which made me smile to realize that this was just an average day.

After the sun dipped beneath the horizon the sky took on a rosy afterglow, not as sensational as it can be perhaps, but pretty, and the for-once calm waters in the harbor and across this small bay turned that unreal shade of metallic blue they achieve after sunset and before sunrise.

I sat for a while longer, because you never know what may happen next at this time of day.  The old boys who hang out by the boats next to the slipway decamped for warmer places, it was beginning to get chilly, and the gulls circled as if they were surveying the waters one last time before they went to rest, and somehow all the things which had been nagging at me faded, not away, but into the background for now at least.

A Sunrise Worth Getting Up Early For

I’m an early morning gal by instinct.  So long as I get just enough sleep I can get up at any hour without problem, but of late I’ve been keeping odd hours, what with moving and the festive season. That’s why, faced with the prospect of getting up at 6am yesterday, and having done everything right to assure a good night’s sleep, I didn’t – sleep that is.  The fear of not getting up in time gnawed at my brain, which then fooled my body into thinking it wasn’t comfortable, so that I tossed and turned all night.

Trixy and I trotted down to the end of the street in the darkness. She hates it. She’s a daytime gal too. I made strong coffee, and we were off to meet up with Maria at 7am at the autopista junction.  I even managed to get a lousy #walkingwithTrixy pic of the Christmas lights, still shining bright in the morning gloom.

We were headed for Poris de Abona, just beyond the beach about which I wrote last month.  When I was pottering about on that evening it struck me that a good sunrise from around there, complete with lighthouse, might be quite spectacular. Maria and I decided, oh, let me see, about five years ago that we would do a project to record all the island’s lighthouses, and this was the first time we’d actually set out to do it! It’s been one of those things life got in the way of, although don’t hold your breath waiting for the complete set of photos!  Still, it’s a start.

As we meandered through the sprawl which is Poris, the sky, which had been coal-black only minutes before, began to pale on the horizon, and light leaked along the line where sky meets ocean. As I inched “Fred” (my faithful, old car) over the bumpy terrain beyond the proper road, and to the foot of the lighthouse, the pale was already turning to crimson.  Photographing sunrises and sunsets is such a “time is of the essence” thing.  We abandoned the coffee, left Trix to guard the car and wandered off, clicking happily away.

There is a point to a sunrise, here at least, where the sky is pale blue, but the sun hasn’t actually shown its face. The spectacular part is before it actually rises.  In that space we moved a bit further up the coastline to capture the emerging sun. We could see the outline of its fore-glow seeping along the tip of the purple mass of the island of Gran Canaria.

We were a short distance apart but with the noise of the waves crashing onto the ragged coast I couldn’t make out what it was that Maria shouted, but I looked over to see her gesticulating excitedly and swinging her tripod around.  When I glanced behind me El Teide and the surrounding mountains were bathed in the reflection of a sun we hadn’t even seen yet.  It it any wonder that ancient peoples found something magical and godlike in those peaks?

You have only minutes, in the absence of cloud, to photograph a sunrise, before the sun is too bright, at least with the equipment we have, and with the wind rising I found myself unexpectedly nervous. My determination (I hesitate to use the world resolution because the failure rate on New Year’s Resolutions makes the phrase an oxymoron!) is to improve my photography this year, and I don’t think this attempt was that good, but for the record, here it is.

With the rising,  the mountains turned back to brown and green, and the horizon became too bright, but the early sunlight was reflected in the foam and spray as ocean crashed onto rock, and close to shore the sea took on a turquoise hue it would lose with the brightness.

One more turn around, to see the lighthouse clear in the early morning sunshine, for now it was sunshine and not sunrise, and it was time for that coffee, and one of the great things about rising early with the sun is that the day still stretched before us, new and full of possibilities.