Lanzarote Information

This is a guest post by Cliff Dean.

Four hours on the same hillside, drawing Kleinia. Sun on my face, cool breeze at my back from the dark blue sea.

From beyond the white cube house, the little dome of malpais, the abandoned Opuntia terraces festooned with lichens, comes the bored and hopeless barking of a poor dog chained up opposite the hilltop village. He barks all day.

From the ridge road behind him, in front of the palms and white roofs, comes the distant rush of traffic for El Mirador del Rio: a Kango hire-car, a struggling coach, a pack of cyclists - how loud they speak! I can hear them from here.

I can smell the goats too.

At 5 o’ clock this traffic will cease. No-one will pass.

Much smaller voices from a field down below, where workers are hoeing potatoes.

Silence...

...broken by the occasional distant wail of Alcaraván, from down by the track, where a white 4x4 is negotiating the ruts, the small rattles of Curruca tomillera and cabecinegra.

From the delicate hillside calligraphy of perforated dry-stone walls, shadows swing and stretch across the roffe (what colour is it? Black? Blue? Grey? Purple?) A clunking of bells as the goat herd makes its way along the contour...

A car has crept down the serpentine track. Now its occupants are slowly quartering a fallow field, hands behind their backs, staring intently down at the pink soil.

A Bisbita caminero is singing, there’s a twitter of Pardillo común and sometimes the tick of a furtive Petirrojo hidden down behind a fort-like, lichen-crusted almond shelter.

Every so often, the rumble of a jet, bringing another cargo of holidaymakers into Arrecife...

The sun sinks over rosy terraces; my hands are red from cold. Fading silver light shines through the lava tracery and the blue-spotted lizards have ceased to scuttle.

Last attempts to record old, scarred Opuntia, like some nightmare skinned and rotting rabbit clad in crumbling, flaking, rusting armour; a heraldic monster from “Repulsion” via “Donnie Darko” and the Palermo Catacombs...

I can hear Perdiz común grating on the dusky hillside. The tethered dog barks and barks.

He’ll still be barking when I’m home again in England. He’ll bark and bark and bark until he dies.

©Cliff Dean

Cliff has a blog Birding Walks in RXland which follows his bird-watching walks around Hastings and Romney Marsh in East Sussex. He grew up on the edge of post-war London. Watching birds from early teens. Studied Art in London. Teaching career mostly in rural primary schools, but also Art & Art history to A level. Recently retired. Married, with 3 children. Lives on the Sussex coast. Visited Lanzarote accidentally in January 2009.