SMOG OR CALIMA?

This is a satellite picture of a storm of sand blowing from the Sahara Desert and heading for the Canary Islands.
When it arrives it thickens the air with orangey-brown dust, raises the temperature by several degrees, and covers cars, terraces and plants with a thick layer that infiltrates the house and makes dusting a daily chore.
It clogs your nose and throat, restricts your breathing, and puts hundreds of vulnerable people in hospital.

Sounds familiar? In the UK you call it smog and it's a matter for headlines in the national papers.
Here we call it a calima and we get at least one a month.
And you think you've got it bad?

THE WEATHER IN TENERIFE

 Una calima mas!

No sooner has one dust cloud lifted – or rather, dropped its load onto my car, my terrace and every surface in the apartment – than another drifts in on the prevailing summer wind from Africa.

These calimas often used to be followed by rain, which freshened the air and washed the trees – we have even hastened to park the car outside in it – but this no longer happens. 

We’ve had nothing more than a few pathetic showers in the last two years – we need RAIN!

And yet the wild plants manage to survive. I drive past this fig tree several times a week and I thought it was dead. Today my morning’s walk took me right past it – and it's struggling but alive! 

As is the yellow weed that is taller than me, waving bravely against a sere desert backdrop.

If you know where to look, life is bursting out all over.

CALIMA in TENERIFE

This is a calima. I took this photo this afternoon from the T-Gas station in Las Galletas.
Guaza Mountain in the foreground is only three kilometres away and murky, the one behind is maybe another two kilometres distant. Normally we can see them clear as a bell, and that faintly darker haze is an entire mountain range - buried under a blanket of grey dust blown over from Africa.

  Mount Teide? It's in there somewhere, but the destruction of the delicate surface of the Sahara by trucks and four-wheel drive safaris where previously there used to be only camels means that we get two calimas a month rather than three or four a year. The hospitals fill up with asthma patients, the blanket of dust holds in the heat, and our temperatures soar to 50 degrees Centigrade.

I had to go up the mountain a little way yesterday to the Outpatients building at El Mohon, and looked in vain for the splendid view of our neighbouring island, La Gomera. See that line of cloud over the sea? that's where it is.
 Actually, now I look at this photo more closely, you'll have to take my word for it that there is sea in the background!

RED ALERT!

  RED ALERT – that’s the level of heat we’re threatened with today, although at present we only have an Orange Alert. A calima has come in from two directions at once and the temperature has shot up to 35C. RESIDENTS and tourists alike are advised to stay indoors and drink lots of water.

Of course there will always be holiday-makers who don’t listen and end up burnt to a crisp. Just because the sun is hidden by a thick dust-haze doesn’t mean you’re safe!

When we drove back from San Isidro market at 8.30 this morning there was already a blast of hot air through the car windows. This is a photo of what we bought for about €25 – and that doesn’t include the bag of potatoes that I couldn't fit on my worktop.

 At the market there were huge RABANOS (RADISHES) and RUCOLA (ROCKET) and one solitary ROSA among the lilies.

AT LEAST WITH ALL THOSE VEGETABLES IT WAS COOL IN THERE!

RETURNING to my Helter-Skelter theme, when Albie wanted to get married in church he discovered he had no birth certificate. Norah was able to REPAY the Smiths’ kindness to her by RUSHING through his belated REGISTRATION, totally unfazed by the lies she had to tell in the process. An unforeseen and not completely welcome RESULT arose a few years later when his call-up papers arrived - until then Albie had lived beneath the RADAR. 

But if Albie hadn't been in France, Bert would have died, and there would have been no-one to RESCUE the baby.

CALIMA!

On my morning walks, this is my usual view down to Las Galletas and the sea, about five kilometres in a straight line through the banana plantations. I couldn't see it at all this morning - the sea and Las Galletas could have ceased to exist.

Turning round, my normal view from this angle is of Mount Teide in the distance, behind the buildings of Parque de la Reina. This morning, however, we woke up to a calima. This one is grey - sometimes they are orange - I suppose it depends on the area of the African desert the wind blows the dust from. The result is much the same - dust on everything - eyeballs, ears, tongue, clothing, and every surface imaginable. And of course, we are also breathing it. People with lung problems die of calimas every year.

CALIMA

You see that island shaped like a leg of lamb, just to the left of the roundish one in the middle of this picture?
That is Tenerife, almost hidden under the cloud of sand that is sweeping in from Africa. Another calima. The temperature has shot up to 40C, everyone is coughing and sweating, and it's impossible to sleep without a fan going full-blast.
The Canary islands used to get two or three calimas a year - now we get about twenty. Why?
Because the fragile surface of the Sahara Desert is being destroyed. Camels' feet don't break through the crust but the heavy-duty tyres of lorries do. Tourists in 4x4 vehicles add to the damage, as do cross-desert races in off-road vehicles and on powerful motorbikes. Then there is over-cultivation and unauthorized open-cast mining, all of wich are doing irreparable harm.
Does anyone care? I doubt it - profit always comes well before the environment, doesn't it?

QUE CALOR!

We have another calima - fine dust that blows in from Africa. It reduces visiiblity, sometimes to such an extent that Mt Teide disappears, it clogs up the sinuses, makes the eyes smart, and sends the temperature soaring. On our terrace at ten this morning it was already 36F.
It's not only people that droop in that kind of heat, especially when it descends so suddenly. My morning walk took me past this beautiful jacaranda tree, the blossom from which is already dropping in the heat, creating a mauve carpet.

There was one lone man in the pool at nine o'clock, but by eleven it was full of shrieking children making the most of their fathers' one day off work. This afternoon will probably be the turn of the learners. The locals teach their children to swim before they can walk and ignore their screams. At first I was horrified, but after years of witnessing this method I have seen that it works. Before the season is over they will be diving in without armbands, but the first few weeks are heart-rending to listen to.

And in our garden a cactus is beginning to flower. Last year it managed three flowers at once, but this morning there were six buds. At the moment they are only marble-sized, but I shall take a photo every day to show how they grow. As they say - watch this space!.

CALIMAS, COLUMBUS, CAVES & CARNAVAL

CALIMAS blow in from Africa and can be as insubstantial as mist or thick as a CLOTH. CLOUDS can flow down the mountain like treacle over a pudding, or CLIMB as the sun heats the ground. It can be difficult sometimes to tell the difference between cloud and calima until the sinuses fill up with CATARRH. Then it’s a calima. The last one must have had a nasty African virus stuck to its sand-grains because I've had a CATASTROPHIC CHEST infection and hacking COUGH for two weeks. Yet still I managed to keep up the blogs – I hope you’re impressed.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS CALLED in at the CANARIES on his way to America, and the history books tell us that he picked up supplies. What most of them fail to mention is that he also COMMANDEERED some slaves, so when Spain CELEBRATES Columbus Day, we have Dia de Canarias. To the English it is ironic that the Spanish port named after him is Puerto COLON.

The CONQUISTADORES didn’t get everything their own way, though. There are CUEVAS (CAVES) all over the island, many of them almost inaccessible, and the locals who lived in them waged guerrilla warfare against the invaders for years.

Many caves are still used for storage, primarily of wine and CAVA, the local CHAMPAGNE. Some are still inhabited, with walls at the front, extra rooms CARVED out at the back, electricity and water installed.

I heard of one family who lived for years in a cave with a ladder as the only access - imagine CARRYING the shopping home!

.

And of course, no C would be COMPLETE without mentioning CARNAVAL – that month of madness that CULMINATES in a parade of COSTUMES so vast that only the strongest can wear them. The buses fill up with transvestites as the macho males reveal their feminine side, the CRUZ ROJA sets up a tent hospital in Santa Cruz, and every COLEGIO has its own COLOURFUL parade.

CALIMA!

Half our island has disappeared!
A calima came in yesterday - at first just a haze in the air. Sitting outside the bar at 7pm we could see Las Galletas on the coast 5 kilometres directly south, and Mt Teide to the north. By 7.30 they had gone, smothered in a thick brownish fog of fine sand that had blown in on an easterly wind from Africa.
Every surface was gritty, our eyes stung, sinuses ached from breathing dust, and we had to buy another drink to wash the taste from our throats.
Today, on my morning walk, if I looked straight up the sky was blue, but the horizontal view told a different story. Cho mountain, 500 metres away, was hazy, a further kilometre along the road, Guaza mountain was only a murky outline, and Mt Teide might as well not have existed.
It was a weird feeling driving to the shops later. Most familiar landmarks were missing, leaving me and my little car isolated in an eerie, shrunken world.
There used to be only two or three calimas a year - now we get two or three a month. Apparently it's due to vehicles replacing camels and breaking up the surface of the Sahara. Heavy lorries with huge wheels, careless mining practices, adventure tourism and cross-desert races in 4x4s are destroying the fragile balance of nature.
When you fly into Tenerife you will see beige areas that look like concrete bases for some vast building. These are the plastic covers to keep the sun off and the moisture in banana plantations, every acre of them covered in layer after layer of African dirt.
We can see the top of the calima now, which means it's settling, clogging the pores of every leaf.
We washed our car on Wednesday - you wouldn't think so now.