Canary Islands part 6: Tenerife
This is our first stop on our 7 day cruise. It was Terri-Lynns 50th Birthday trip on the Canary Islands. If you would like to start at the beginning click here. Each day we will visit one of the Canary islands as well as one day in Morocco and one full day at sea. Cruise ships offer a number of daytime excursions for a price and we could think of nothing worse then being shuffled into a bus and taken to a location where we will have to follow some person with a flag on a pole as they proceed to ‘guide’ us around town. I’m sure you have seen this. It is quite funny looking actually and certainly not for us.
Also, did I mention we are not cruise people?
One challenge of deciding what to do also is that cruise ships obviously stop at ports that are surrounded by over priced mediocre restaurants that locals would never eat at and souvenir stalls that all cater to tourists. Thousands of people every day arrive at these ports of call. This is probably fine, and even a good thing for many of these passengers but for seasoned travelers that avoid these types of locations it meant being savvy enough to do some research each night before arriving and finding our fastest route away from the crowds of people with cameras slung around their necks.
We noticed one excursion offered by Pullmantur was a day trip to the historic town of San Cristobol La Laguna. So sure, there would be massive amounts of tourists there but the town looks pretty and we can easily find our own way there without any help.
We began our exploration in the port town of Santa Cruz De Tenerife. It is a nice place to walk around and our main goal was finding the local bus stop that would take us to La Laguna.
So that was easy enough. We took the short ride to San Cristobol La Laguna for lunch. It is a charming little Canarian town and yes, we saw the tour groups following the person with the flag. I guess one plus with these tours is you get to know the history of what you are seeing, but of course you could just google it.
The above photos are from San Cristobol La Laguna. We took the bus back to Santa Cruz and returned to the boat to, well do what you do on a cruise, drink.
One tip about cruises. Buy the drink package. You will save money and have no stress worrying about “should I have another?” This cruise was an amazing deal. $386 USD per person that included drinks for 7 nights.
At night the cruises always have a show. So get dressed up, have dinner and make your way to the theater. As embarrasing as this may be, I was called up on stage, of course. It’s hard to be discreet when you are a Tony.
The next day we would set off for the next island, La Palma.
