Live the Impulse: Webbed Feet in the Banana Republic

Santa Cruz de la Palma, bananas and rain.

All I can think is that we are being broken in for our return to Devon. We are in (the currently very wet) La Palma at the North Western end of the Canaries cluster. From our (currently very bumpy) berth at the (currently under construction) marina at Santa Cruz I am watching the blankets of rain roll in, from the North East (from Devon in fact). Out to sea the muddy sky is breaking open and puddles of blue are appearing, tantalisingly promising some hope of better weather. But when I look back at the island, it’s hard to believe that it holds a beautiful mountainous core rising to over 2500 metres – all I see is an uninteresting hill standing in front of a bank of fog (I could be in Plymouth).

Sheltering from the rain in a banana grove.

We have spent several days attempting to dodge (mostly unsuccessfully) the bulbous clouds botoxed with rain. I’m sure it’s all very beautiful here – if only you could see it. I’m whingeing, sorry – inexcusable really given the amounts of sunshine I’ve been blessed with just recently - and I should mention that we did see something quite spectacular yesterday on the Southern end of the national park. At the col of La Cumbrecita we watched banks of clouds whir in from the sea, skate across the mountain top and tumble into the valley where they lay, thick like whipped cream and strangely suspended above the villages beneath.

Cloudscape at La Cumbrecita.

With all this rain La Palma is, needless to say, very lush. Flowers abound (and it’s winter). There’s a curious mixture of pines, brooms, bracken with succulents, bougainvillea, drifts of bright orange climbers with trumpet-like flowers. Driving up the foggy mountain, with copper coloured leaves falling all around, the road rusty at its edges with plants losing their summer green, we realised that we’d missed autumn. It’s a strange thing to be constantly travelling South. When you’re in one place you witness the seasons changing and therefore can make sense of time passing. But we have cheated this process and the result is disorientating. It’s hard to explain.

There are other aspects of this life at sea that are also bewildering, leading to some soul searching. We build nothing, we plant nothing, we are not part of any community. Our lives on the ocean are transient, we touch everything lightly, taking little but also we give little back. There is a pointlessness to cruising (note the meaning of the word itself) which I find disconcerting. But then, I suppose, life itself is rather pointless when you look at it with logic, and perhaps all the things we achieve (building, planting, knitting booties for the next generation) all give us a sense of purpose, which helps us survive the strange enigma of our lives (we are given life and at some point it is taken away). In this sense then, our voyage is enlightening although not necessarily in a comforting way.

Balconies in Santa Cruz
(apparently where the loo was in olden days, nice)

Church in Santa Cruz.

Impulse is like our very own time-travel machine, moving us through different seasons, climates, geographical zones and cultures. We have seen places that have long been devastated by the greed and opulence of mass tourism. Others are at the very beginning of this process. Yesterday we drove through a strikingly beautiful lava field. Peppered with bright yellow diggers, it is about to be carved up for a housing development, undoubtedly to attract foreign investors. But who am I to deny a small island its chance of achieving greater wealth? It is just sad to witness irreversible changes being inflicted on yet another landscape.