It was Sabine’s idea.  She wanted to feel some sun before term kicked off.  Term actually had started the week we left but she arranged things so that her absence would be ok.  But she could only do Thursday to Wednesday.

Except that she thinks it was my idea to go somewhere warm.  Whatever.  It was certainly down to me to find somewhere.  Because her time away was only 6 days not 7, our package holiday options became a lot more limited, if not nil, especially as we wanted a direct flight from Glasgow.  As Pauline, a friend of my sister’s who’s in the travel business, pointed out when I asked for help.

On top of the 6 days, not 7 and the direct flight, I gave her other challenging criteria – temperatures of around 20C, a short haul(-ish) flight – i.e. not Dubai (too long a flight and I don’t like the place anyway) and half-board at an adults only hotel.  It came down to Tenerife or Lanzarote, flight with Jet2 and booking the hotel direct.

Pauline was wonderful, coming up with one hotel suggestion after another.  Her baseline was Royal-Hideaway Coreles in Tenerife, a hotel highly recommended to her by friends who’ve been there several times.  We looked at all the options she proposed and kept coming back to this one which while a little more expensive, looked brilliant.  And it was.

The flight out was long enough at nearly 5 hours.  We arrived at check-in less than an hour before take-off because in my head the flight was at 9.45am instead of 8.45am.  I don’t normally make such a rookie mistake and felt very stupid, a state of mind not helped by the check-in guy’s condescending attitude and unnecessary fear-inducing comments that stoked Sabine’s anxiety.  However, they took our suitcase and we got to the gate just as they started boarding, so what was his problem?

The row behind us was populated with a 30 year old mother from Glasgow and her two children (husband with a third child not sitting with her).  Her broad Glaswegian timbre had two tones – very loud and even louder.  She spoke to her children like that and she spoke to her friends further forward in the cabin like that so that we all could hear (who she told she’d had to take the kids out of school) ….. until, that is, she went to sleep, leaving her two kids with nothing to entertain them on the flight except their iPads and kicking the seat in front.  They were actually very polite in the way they responded to Sabine’s very sweetly articulated exhortations asking them to desist.

Ours was the last of seven Jet2 flights to arrive in Tenerife South that day, on top of Tui, Condor, Air Baltic, EasyJet etc.  We had European passports which gave us a fast track, smugly walking past all the Brits …… only to find just one immigration officer dealing with all the Europeans and all the people in wheelchairs and their families, while the Brits were speedily processed through the electronic gates made available for their sole use.  It took us ages to get through.

We had been told it wasn’t necessary to book a transfer from the airport as there were plenty of taxis but I did anyway, which was just as well because the queue for taxis was depressingly long.  Our driver had a life story I won’t tell you here but it was quite extraordinary and entertained us for the 20 minute ride to the hotel.  Before we arrived, he described it as looking like a cruise liner and he was right. 

About 6 years old, in two all-white buildings, one of which (on the left of the photo) was adults only, with all the rooms on 5 floors facing west over the Atlantic Ocean with great sunset views.

Sabine had never ever done a holiday like this – a fully catered hotel, in the sun, with no agenda or activity in mind.  The hotel was everything we’d hoped for and much more.  All the staff we met were very attentive and professional, nothing was too much trouble, and they all spoke good English. Our room was enormous with a large balcony. 

Attention to detail was evident everywhere – one example: in the roof top bar, a maintenance man was inspecting chairs and tables to see if they wobbled and using a screwdriver to fix any errant legs he found.

Sabine did a free yoga programme nearly every day with Jonny, the trainer who happened to be a German from Essen.  She even got me into an aqua gym session late one afternoon in the pool – what prats we must have looked, the only ones doing it, with Jonny leading, music blaring, Jonny talking over the music, stopping other people using the pool, being overheard by everyone on their sunbeds around the pool, in the pool bar or on their balconies above the pool, and if anyone wanted to watch seeing a couple of uncoordinated idiots trying and failing to mimic Jonny’s movements.  Not a pretty sight.

The breakfasts were superb.  We ate late (10-11), stuffed ourselves actually, so that lunch was unnecessary.  Seating was outside or inside and we always chose outside.  The morning and evening temperatures were mostly and deceptively chilly and we needed to dress warmly at both meal times, while it was pleasantly warm during the day, hitting 20C in the afternoon in the sun.

Our half-board was a very up-market trough (as I have called this kind of buffet dining experience since the first time I watched all the guests pushing and shoving to get at the food at a hotel in Mauritius).  We could sit inside or out, but went inside to the buffet (where everyone was perfectly civilised) and where you could choose a dish from a selection of six starters and six mains and watch it being prepared by a chef behind the counter.  On top of that there was a self-service salad bar and desserts to choose from.  We had three themed evenings – seafood, local and Mexican.  The starters, mains and desserts were always excellent.

Seating for the trough

The hotel boasted a two Michelin star restaurant and a one star, as well as a seafood restaurant, and an Italian restaurant.  However, you didn’t get a credit for not going to the trough, and as there were some excellent local restaurants in the village recommended by Pauline’s friends, we didn’t feel any overwhelming need to pay through the nose for tiny portions in the posh hotel restaurants.  In fact, because the buffet was so good, we only ate out once, at a wonderful seafood restaurant in the village called La Vieja where, as a main, we shared a huge seabass baked in a salt crust – heaven.

During most days, in between these two meal times, we did absolutely nothing.  We did go for a walk over some fairly unappealing scrubland by the coast to an overlook of a nudist beach on the first day. Fortunately I’d brought my binoculars, but they were a mixed blessing – after no more than a cursory sweep it was apparent that it was mixed and not every person’s physique was out of Vogue magazine. The cacti were impressive though.

The feathered bird-life was a little disappointing but I didn’t go looking anyway as honestly I wasn’t that bothered. I still saw some birds I don’t normally see – Spanish sparrow and Yellow-legged gulls with the highlight being a close-up look at a hoopoe that Sabine spotted the middle of Los Christianos – here’s a photo from Botswana:

And a lot of feral pigeons.

At the 5^th floor pool bar, waiting for us to leave the nuts that came with the drinks

But we were unable to find a wildlife tour guide who would have taken us out for a day and shown us some of the island – the lovely concierge at the hotel and her colleague also tried and couldn’t come up with anything.

We did wander around our charming little fishing village of La Coletta, at least the waterfront part that isn’t now hugely built up – still with restaurants and bars everywhere and all full mid-afternoon.  There were a lot of Brits around which probably explains a lot – I reckon 95% of the people there, although in the hotel we did begin to hear more Germans as the days went by.

We didn’t go whale watching, maybe something for next time, we didn’t go parasailing in the bay, and we didn’t go paragliding off the mountain behind the hotel, definitely not something for next time.  This latter sport was very popular – the most we saw were 15 paragliders that seemed so close together that they must have taken off one after another.  There was also a botanical garden somewhere that might be worth a look next time.

The low point of the trip (hoopoe excepted) was the day we spent in Los Christianos, the nearest larger town.  The weather was bit cloudy and not looking too hot.  We asked the same lovely concierge about getting the bus which stopped right outside the hotel but she must have been new in post because she hadn’t got a clue.  She consulted the internet (which we had already done) but to no avail and finally she had to ask one of the bell-hops.  But she was so sweet and earnest trying to help that she simply endeared herself more to us, despite being completely useless.

If anyone offers you the chance to go to Los Christianos, say you’re too busy.  If anyone suggests you might like a holiday there, never speak to them again.  Once we were on the bus to Los Christianos and out of the relative oasis of La Coletta, it was very revealing how the other half lives – one huge hotel after another and wall to wall people – all the way there and everywhere in Los Christianos. 

And you get to see (remember 95% Brits) a section of society that perhaps you don’t normally.  Without a lot of clothes on.   Despite the cost-of-living crisis, it seemed that nearly everyone had spent a lot of money on tattoos and I didn’t realise that men of a certain age did nipple-piercing, proudly taking the opportunity to display the results, so much so that Sabine asked why it was that men with the biggest fattest bellies liked to walk topless along the crowded promenade.

Another revelation was that you could rent mobility scooters (by the week) and drive them on a packed pedestrian promenade.  In fairness one or two drivers had walking sticks but most didn’t – was it just too far for them to walk?  Some were two seaters so that wifey could be spared the ordeal of walking too.  Needless to say, they weren’t the most sylph-like examples of our species.                                                                                                              

We’d have had to wait a while for a bus to get back to the hotel with an hour’s journey ahead of us and I needed a pee, so Sabine very kindly offered us an Uber for the return.  And not just any Uber. This E class black Mercedes comes along (he does Uber trips in between airport transfers) and whisks us back to civilisation so serenely that the contrast with where we’d just been could not have been greater.

It was a wonderful break from reality but possibly long enough as you could get very comfortable in that artificial environment.  Would we go back there? In a flash!  We did see a hotel more inland (we don’t really need the beach) that looked more wildlife-friendly which would be worth checking out too.  A month or two later in the year or in the autumn might be warmer too without it being too hot during the day.