A few years ago my parents bought an apartment within the Playa Bastion complex, on the Costa Tenguise in Lanzarote.
In those years, on practically every conversation my Dad has told me how wonderful it is and how I should go - which was always met with cynicism and moaning from me. My Dad is like me, in other words he hates to admit he’s wrong. So I knew if there was anything wrong with the apartment, he would be unlikely to admit it!
That said, I really fancied a cheap holiday somewhere vaguely hot and I cannot complain at only having to pay for flights.
After seeing the Decemberists play through all of Hazards of Love and a few classics Ruth and I tried to get a few hours kip before having to leave the house at around 4am. About 6 hours later we were descending down to Lanzarote.
The view from the plane was great, seeing the volcanic landscape truly is an image. From a distance I naively thought that the huge cluster of white painted apartments and buildings was chalk. After getting through passport control it was a fairly short journey to the complex.
As I turned the keys into the apartment door I pleaded for it not to be shit, having to spend 6 days in somewhere bad would certainly be a chore.
I was pleasantly surprised that the apartment was actually really nice. Very spacious, decent kitchen, lovely shower and had all the things you would need. The balcony was a decent size too to have breakfast in the sun.
Ruth and I spent the next 6 days being as lazy as possible. There were 2 swimming pools barely a minute from the apartment which we went to every day to play in. We invented lots of cool games, all of which I won.
Occasionally we ventured a few minutes down the road to the beach. The one directly by the apartment is a bit rocky on the shore which is annoying as you cant really swim in it but you do get to see lots of cool waves crashing on the rocks. Fortunately there is a friendlier beach a few more minutes walk away where you can swim with some very bold fish who dont seem to mind having to dodge humans all day.
A few evenings we went out for a walk, where I got to climb up a health and safety inspectors nightmare of a little tower. I also encountered “horny cat”, who was well in to me. Ruth was having none of it though.
One day we decided to venture out in to the capital Arrecife. Unfortunately we couldn’t actually work out where to get off on the bus so we ended up going to Puerto Del Carmen. Except even then we ended up at a pretty sketchy shopping center rather than the nice beach front. Still we made the most of it and Ruth managed to win on the game of utter luck: Mini-Golf.
Overall it was a really nice break. It was fantastic to get away from mobile phones, computers and London. The weather was glorious and I felt utterly content. The only downside was the fairly outrageous prices of food and the general lack of decent fresh produce. Still, once we worked out that it was fairly economical we ate out a few times - we had steak - twice.
