Our apartment was on the 2nd Floor, facing the swimming pool. This was great as we could go back and forth as we like throughout the day. It was also a spacious 2 bedroom apartment with all mod cons. As soon as we arrived, I had to sort out 2 essentials for for the couple of weeks that we were going to be there. First of all, I had to get a car rental, and more importantly I had to get my DIVING sorted out. Yay!! Well, getting a car rental was a bit of a struggle. For those of you who have visited Spain or any of the Canary Islands before, you would know that the afternoon period is no time to do business. This is because the Spanish folks luuurrvve their siestas. Tried as I did, I could not find a car rental agency opened. All had signs saying that they would open at 6 or 7 pm. Hrrrmmph!! Aah! Never mind, I turned my attention to finding a dive shop instead.
Before I left the UK, I had printed out some contact dive shops. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to bring them along. Luckily, there was an internet cafe nearby, where I could look them up again. I managed to contact Dive Tenerife, who is owned by husband and wife team, Pete and Debbie. They are based at Las Galletas, which is about 15 minutes drive from Los Cristianos. They picked me up the next morning, as I was their only guest for the week, they jokingly said that I would be getting a 5 Star service. Indeed it was like that during my time with them. I did 9 dives with them in total.. In addition, I managed to do my Nitrox course with Pete. Proud to say that I got 100% in my assessment at the end.
View of the swimming pool from our balcony.
View at the seafront at Las Galletas, after our first dive of that day. We had to abandon further diving that day, due to the storm that was brewing up.
Atlantic Stingray. An adult can span 2 metres in size, just like this one. These shots were taken at La Cuchos, which means "the puppies". This is because they were quite a few baby stingrays at this dive site; which is actually a small boat wreck on a sandy bottom at about 22 metres.
A beautiful anemone. Most of the dives were rock formation. The corals cannot be compared to the ones in Red Sea of course. That's why I was very please to get a shot of this.
Memorial to Jacques Costeau. It was great to see this memorial the the "Father of Scuba Diving"- the inventor of the aqualung.
Mount Teide. The tallest mountain in Tenerife. Still an active volcanic mountain, but has not blown up in 50 years; or was it 150 years?? The views from the mountain range is just breathtaking.
Tenerife Zoo. We decided to visit the zoo. An excellent place for children. Actually, quite a range of animals there. There were also some shows throught the day, e.g the bird show and the feeding of the lions.
