Mount Teide

On the Wednesday of our vacation I woke up feeling... delicate... & suffering from a touch of party-flu from the [thoroughly enjoyable] evening prior. That day we were scheduled to visit Mount Teide & the surrounding national park. The coach was scheduled to collect us from a bus stop just outside our hotel at ~14:20. Nearly 40mins late, I climbed aboard & promptly fell fast asleep for an hour or so. After a brief stop at a road-side cafe for a "comfort break" (where NONE of the restroom stalls were equipped with toilet seats?!), drink & an ice-cream I was starting to feel human again (albeit delicate). The first photo-op stop was some 30-40mins into the national park where we had a nice clear view of the Teide's summit. This photo depicts quite a lot of reasonably large flora. This was one of the few places were plants were seemingly abundant. Much of this national park was comprised of large areas of volcanic rock (varying size). If you were to be knocked out, put in a space suit & dropped in the Teide national park, you could easily fool yourself in to believing you were on the surface of the Moon! I'm also lead to believe that the folks at NASA used areas of this park to test the Mars rover due to the terrain's similarity to that of the surface of Mars. Sadly we did not make it to the summit of the Teide. Due to the popularity of this place (attracting ~3million people per year) the government has decided to protect the peak of Mount Teide by restricting daily access to just 200 people. Anyone can apply for a pass to visit the top, but this must be requested between 1-12months in advance.... As we were not armed with this knowledge we did not take in the view from the peak. HOWEVER, we did watch the sun set over the Teide: A warmly romantic sight worth seeing.

More photos by jsmcbride