THE ROCK - A-Z CHALLENGE

I am late on parade today with my A-Z post, so it's a good thing I had it planned!

To those of us who live here, Tenerife is sometimes known affectionately as THE ROCK. and let's face it - there's an awful lot of rock about.
BUT when people say "Steady as a rock" they are using an inaccurate simile, as the inhabitants of my village discovered eighteen months ago.

Parque de la Reina has its own motorway access – No22 if you want to explore – but in November 2013 it was blocked by a ROCK FALL that just missed crushing a car and the young couple inside.

There is a banana plantation perched on top of the cutting and I suspect that decades of watering were responsible for bringing down the wall.

The Cabildo chopped back the rock and were part-way through building a RETAINING WALL when there was a second collapse – fortunately at night so no workmen were injured.
The road was closed for months.

ROYAL BRITISH LEGION

REMEMBRANCE DAY – the Tenerife branch of the RBL – sadly now closed due to the increasing age of its few active members and an increase in the amount of paperwork demanded by Head Office – hosted a REMEMBRANCE SERVICE at Westhaven Bay, Costa del Silencio, for many years. One year the crew of a British Royal Navy ship joined us - that was a day we shall never forget – and other guests have included Ricardo Melchior, President of the Tenerife Government.

These photos show how locals and visitors remember the fallen, Tenerife-style.

LAUNCHING A WREATH INTO THE ATLANTIC IN MEMORY OF THOSE LOST AT SEA

THE WREATH IS BIO-DEGRADABLE

AND AFTER THE PARTY WE FACED THE LONG PROCESS OF COLLECTING UP THE TINS AND COUNTING THE MONEY!

SHOW AND TELL SUNDAY

poinsettia

First things first - apologies for absence. I have been busy lately rewriting a novel - I'll tell you about that another time - and my blogs have been infrequent, to say the least. So I have decided to kick-start it again with a "Show and Tell Sunday", and if I have any followers and visitors left, please leave a comment to encourage me to continue!


Christmas is coming in Tenerife as well as the rest of the world, and one of our first signs is the poinsettias coming back to full colour in the gardens. We also have Los Reyes - The Kings - waiting on the roundabout to be lit up at night.


For those of you who have been following the avalanche story - here is this morning's set of photographs.
When the workmen told me it would take twenty days, they should have added 'probablemente' - this is manana country, after all!


People have been blaming the rock-fall on the heavy rain we had two days earlier - our first in over a year - but I think it is more likely to be due to the banana plantation perched on top. This is a closeup of the cliff through which they cut the access road when building the autopista 25 or so years ago -  Huge rocks, so heavy that I cannot lift a head-sized one - interspersed with gravel layers riddled with holes in which the local pigeons nest.

Twenty-five years of steadily-seeping water - we are lucky there wasn't a school built at the base of the cliff.

Steady as a rock? I will never use that phrase again without visualising this - and  yes, that side road really IS that steep!

RECYCLING ROCK

We see this sign all over Tenerife and usually drive light-heartedly past it.
As I blogged last week, we should not be quite so blasè, for although there was no warning sign here, on November 11th a rock face fell and almost crushed a young couple in their car.

Since then we locals have been following the progress of repairs with interest, because anyone wishing to go south on the motorway from here has to take another, more convoluted route, and the sooner it's fixed and re-opened, the better.

I walked up there this morning, and stood under the bridge to watch while a workman wrapped a canvas belt round a rock as big as he was. He then stood practically underneath it while a machine lifted it into position in what appears to be a retaining wall built from the rocks that fell. Recycling at its most basic.

Oh yes - and someone has covered "Los Cristianos" on the road sign. I looked round the back and it's just several strips of black bin liner tied together, but I suppose it's better than nothing - perhaps I should take some parcel tape with me tomorrow?

AVALANCHE!

These two pictures appeared on the website www.newsinthesun.com this week - the young couple just escaped being crushed when tons of rock fell from a vertical cliff-face on the road from our village - Parque de la Reina - to the motorway on Monday 11th. Luckily the driver reacted quickly enough to swerve onto the other side of the road.

The Cabildo put a barrier across the tunnel, but failed to warn drivers leaving the roundabout in Parque de la Reina that they couldn't get through -

a Men Working sign and a Falling Rocks sign is not enough information. The traffic during the rush hours since has been chaotic. Cars wanting to access the southbound carriageway of the TF1 drive up, stop and look, and then do a three-point turn in the road and go back to find another route.

Cars wanting the northbound carriageway have to wait until the 3-point-turn is completed, and cars rushing OFF the northbound carriageway have to slam on their brakes to avoid hitting them.

I walked up there again this morning and in five minutes I counted 23 cars, one truck and three motorbikes maneouvering to turn round.
Oh yes - and three near-collisions.

There were workmen clearing more of the rubble, but they couldn't tell me when the road would be re-opened - presumably the cliff must be made safe first, although the banana plantation worker on top of it didn't seem concerned as he chopped back cacti within inches of the edge.