Last night I was the lucky winner of the food poisoning lottery and spent the whole night feverish with the bathroom as my favourite room in the apartment. Karine has had a cold for the last couple of days and she’s been getting better. Since I couldn’t catch her cold apparently, karma decided to get me back.
To add a little flavour to the day, Instagram decided to have a fit and refuses to let me know why. Maybe it doesn’t want to catch what I have. At some point it might let me back in but who knows when.
I felt somewhat better in the morning, other than food did not speak to me at all, fever was mostly gone and managed to sleep into the late morning. We decided to keep with our plan to explore the island knowing we could turn back at any point. Also, finding bathrooms is a lot easier when driving around than when hiking kilometres from the nearest services.
First stop: the 📍salt museum. Not really a museum dedicated to salt, it’s dedicated to reviving how salt was harvested traditionally. While they insisted the way it’s done on Fuerteventura is unique, to the layman like me, the process does not seem dissimilar to other salines we’ve seen. The big difference being that instead of an inlet direct from the ocean, they built a low pool along the show that only gets filled by the crashing waves giving them a lower level of suspended deposits from raw seawater. In a twist of irony they’ll tell you all of this on the first panel you read. From that point forward they’ll explain that their salt is very special because it contains so many other minerals in it… nobody told them that these extra minerals comme from the suspended mater in the seawater I guess. Still, the whole whale skeleton and the pretty colors of the salt made for an enjoyable tour. Also: we were alone on the site!
Enriched by our museum visit we continued on to clear our minds in the 📍Dunas de Corralejo (Corralejo’s Dunes). It’s a 10 square kilometres expanse of sand. Interestingly, there are a couple of claims that the sand comes from the Sahara. While it is true that the haze comes from sand dust from the Sahara, the wind does not carry sand particles large enough to make dunes. At best it can cover your car with a fine layer of dust. Also, to believe this you must not have gone on any other beach on the island as it’s pretty much the same sand everywhere. The dunes themselves are beautiful with more life in them than one would expect. Sadly, there’s no spice, giant worm, Fremen, nor muad'dib (the dessert mouse, not the chosen one).
With these two large sites done and having crossed the island from north to south for the second time (first time was yesterday) we turned around, took the side roads and headed to a series of miradors to admire to beauty of the island. With the haze in full force by then visibility was about 3 kilometres. Not great for panoramas but it does add a certain atmosphere to our pictures. We were very glad to have chosen yesterday as our beach day.
About halfway back we stopped in 📍Betancuria. Described as the most beautiful village on the island. Unlike the Tenerife villages we visited (that all turned out to be large-ish towns) that one is truly a village focused heavily on serving visitors. It’s cute but during the high season it must be a disaster to visit. We stopped for a quick bite in a restaurant that had seating for the almost the entire population and the most beautiful bathrooms Karine had ever seen.
That last stop almost proved to be fatal for our car battery. When we sat in the car to leave the half deserted village the car would not start. Turn the key, radio comes-on but engine does not start. Check the symboles in the dash and the battery light is vibrant yellow and doesn’t turn off after the selfcheck. First though: shit the battery died! Try to reach the small rental agency that’s only open when there are cars to pickup or drop off, to no avail (it’s Sunday later afternoon by then). Go through the sequence a number of time to ensure it’s just not the anti theft system not properly registering the key. After many, many attempts and different configuration, once everything that could remotely drain the battery, the car finally accepts to start! Our theory is that our big car with the tiny engine cannot effectively charge the battery while the AC is trying to fight the 33°C heat to bring the cabin to a comfortable level. We kept the AC on low and power requirements to a minimum for the next hour as we drove back. To our relief it accepted to stop and start again without any battery warnings after that. While Karine’s Spanish is steadily improving on this trip, we didn’t want it to expand to conversation with the local equivalent of the CAA. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for no other issues tomorrow and drop if the car before it craps on us.