Picture heavy fun review - MSC Armonia - Canary Isles and Madeira - incl. DIY trips

[lorrdean]

For you two, it just has to be a panda, it just has too lol

[Elmartellama]

Goldcar is a very dangerous company to rent a car from. Maybe they have changed, but not long ago they forced you to pay the full oil deposit, and buy it at their very expensive prices, so you do have to drive a lot to make up for it and even so lose a lot of money.

 

Also, they forced you to have like 600€ in deposit if you didn't book full insurance, and then they have your money for months. Hope that didn't happened to you.

 

We had a car booked with them in Lanzarote, but one day I read reviews and cancelled immediately. In the Canary islands is always a good idea to book with Cicar.

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura – driving

You guessed correctly—of course it ended up being a panda:

We were quite stoked. Life would be perfect, if we could possibly end up getting a small maneuverable car like this on Madeira as well --- but this is a story for later on.

Driving around in Fuerteventura is a lot like driving through the American West. Doesn’t it look like we could easily be in Arizona?

Lol, but I admit I never saw a hill shaped like this in the US:

I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination.

This “art” looked like it could very well be a part of some Native American reservation however:

The higher up you drive, the more spectacular the views get:

And of course there’s no better view than the one of your cruiseship upon your return:

Driving around Fuerteventura in a “Goldcar” car worked out just fine for us. Yes, we did pay a full tank of gas with our credit card and a deposit. I actually like the fact, not having to get gas right away or having to fill up the car later on before dropping it back off. The deposit as well as three quarters of the gasoline were paid back immediately after our return. We didn’t even expect the gas to be reimbursed to be honest, because we figured that must be the way they make their profit, since the cars are so cheap. For us, it worked out perfectly. If we’d ever be on Fuerteventura again for a couple of days (which I doubt), we’d rent with them again. This is a single, personal experience though .... so of course I can't deny that there might have been problems with this company before or you might get in trouble in the future. For us ... all was good.

Just the fact that you can’t rent one of their cars directly at the port would lead me to another company right on sight for another cruise port stop.

Stay tuned!

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- Antigua

This city was once the capital of the island --- lol, which doesn’t really say much, because they had plenty of different capitals throughout history. Anyway, it happened to be on our route and we decided to stop and take a look.

In the morning we checked out the area around the church (locked).

Loved this tree:

The shadows were awesome.

See how early it still was?

This building reminded me of Texas …. Gee, who would have thought we’d do a tour through the US today. But wait, the mandatory US flag is missing. Guess we’re in Spain afterall.

Lol – and of course Tanja finds a naked lady (mermaid) and just has to take a picture.

On our trip back to the rental car office later on, we passed Antigua once again and this time stopped to check out the mill, “Molino de Antigua”.

Sadly, the park with the mill was closed… Sunday, remember? – so we could only see it from outside … still … very pretty

(picture taken through the locked gate)

… if you pass this place on a weekday, I really think it’s worth a stop. They supposedly have a museum, a bar, different exhibitions and a gift shop on the premises as well.

Stay tuned!

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- Mirador de Morro Velosa (part one of two)

Under the term “Morro Velosa” you find two different attractions on the road from the port to Betancuria. You have the Mirador and the Statues … both in separate locations … here’s a map:

Whoohoo, almost there

There is the Mirador sitting on that hilltop:

But will the gate be open (between the green and yellow line on the above map)? I had read online, that it might be closed on Sundays, because the Mirador-building with its café and exhibition is closed then as well….

Whooohooooo --- open gate! Happy, happy, joy, joy ---- Let’s drive up there!

You pass the gigantic and in our case completely deserted parking lot

 

Into the yard of the closed for the day mirador building

More to come…

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- Mirador de Morro Velosa (part two of two)

Even if the building is closed, you can go around it to the platform with the view

Quite impressive … too bad that it was still cloudy and foggy

Oh and did I mention how utterly, bitterly cold and windy it was?

The forecast said something about 20 plus degrees CELSIUS! So we opted for shorts and t-shirt. Baaaad mistake … In true desert fashion it was bonechillingly cold in the morning …. See?

Lol – so our visit to the mirador was quite short and it was sheer bliss to crank up the heater in the panda after having taken the above picture.

Stay tuned!

Stef

[Jules.]

You had a new style of panda rental car too! Did you find it much different to your current car?

I have the old style panda too-I love it (so easy to drive!) but my ambition is to upgrade to one which has 5 seats and air conditioning :D

 

Sorry for the blatant hijack of the thread :D

[denisey]

So I get my nice cup of tea and settle in for the next installment of this adventure....and nothing! Sigh!

 

The views from Mirador De Morro Velosa look a lot like the Eastern part of Washington State.

 

Looking forward to more soon!

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

You had a new style of panda rental car too! Did you find it much different to your current car?

I have the old style panda too-I love it (so easy to drive!) but my ambition is to upgrade to one which has 5 seats and air conditioning :D

 

Sorry for the blatant hijack of the thread :D

 

Hi Jules,

 

The driving part was still the same. The outside style got a little more curves to it ... personal taste if you prefer the old or the new design. It doesn't really make a big difference. The interior however has changed quite a bit. It now feels a lot more luxurious. Tanja said it feels like sitting in a much bigger, much more expensive car than it actually is and I totally agree. A very, very pleasant lack of cheap plastic feeling:D.

 

Lol -- I also have yet to own a car with air-conditioning .... but we'll sadly have to exchange our old fiat strada pick-up this summer .... so maybe soon:o. Lol -- I wonder how much THAT interior has changed over the years ... if the panda improved so much already my hopes for the new strada are definitely way up there:p.

 

Stef

 

ps: you may hijack anytime:p

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

So I get my nice cup of tea and settle in for the next installment of this adventure....and nothing! Sigh!

 

The views from Mirador De Morro Velosa look a lot like the Eastern part of Washington State.

 

Looking forward to more soon!

 

Sorry to dissapoint Denisey,

 

yesterday was the so called "futureday" here in Germany. This is when 6th to 8th graders switch their classroom for a job internship for a day. Sigh, this is the only kind of social-well-behaviour-for-the-future-generation I do in my practise. I'm usually booked for three years in advance and I have one girl here following me around all day long and I have put together a pretty good program to cover a lot of aspects of the job ... both theoretically and hands-on stuff. They love it every year but in the evenings I am so pooped that I basically just fall down and start snoring. So now I have successfully mastered another futureday yesterday ... a happy 6th grader this time ... 364 days till the next one ... thank God!

 

Sigh, then I have Tarik (8th grader) come home from his internship around noon:confused: and hear that he didn't get any structured program whatsoever and just ended up standing around watching the adults work .... grrrrr....... he was in a bakery ... at least now he knows this isn't for him ... he still doesn't know what is ... but I'm hoping that he'll continue with his school a little more eagerly now ( I know --- probably not -- but I'm allowed to dream, am I not?)

 

Anyway -- you see there was no time for cruise critic yesterday. But I'll post another review post today. Promise!

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- Morro Velosa Statues

After driving back down the little side road from the mirador and turning left, you can’t help stumbling onto the parking strip to the side of the road, where you can already see the statues.

Lol – the heater just started to spread its warmth … guess who chose to remain in the cozy car:

Lol --- sissy!

Well, I was brave to check it out for you guys … well, at least the northern part … across the road one could look at the southern scenery as well, but I ditched that to return to Tanja and the heater eventually.

Anyway, here’s what you see from the street:

You might ask yourselves … who are these semi naked guys and why did they build these statues in the middle of nowhere … right on the sight there is a poster which tells you:

So now you know.

The kings get more impressive if you see how tall they are:

It really was a cool sight to see. The huge statues staring out into a grand landscape, which would have looked like this (another info post on the site) if the fog would have lifted:

But even with the fog hiding some of the further away scenery it was quite breathtaking. I recommend to check this out … hey, it’s free and it’s on the way.

Lol – last but not least there was this sign:

No common squirrels – they look more like the chipmunks from Disney … very cute and apparently very eager for tourist-provided snacks. We had read that they come up to you and actually beg for food… they won’t be fooled though … I also read that someone who tried to feed them a pebble instead of a nut was instantly bitten into the finger.

Lol – I know we shouldn’t … but one of our goals on Fuerteventura was to feed real nuts to an “Atlashörnchen”. We smuggled a small bag of nuts all the way from Germany onto the ship and onto this island… we felt very naughty … but now we were giddy to find one of those little guys to feed them to.

For now … no animal in sight … no wonder … it was freezingly cold and I was the only dumb mammal to shiver away here. Definitely time to hop back into the car and continue our drive to Betancuria.

Stay tuned!

Stef

[suekay]

In England they do "work experience " for a week. First son was allocated to a "pound" ($/€ shop) where he spent the first day stacking sweets on shelves. He was bored, so I told him to ask politely if he could do something different the second day. They said yes, and had him stacking biscuits all day. All staff had their own chair in the staff room so his lunchtime was spent eating sandwiches while leaning against the sink. Enough! I phoned to say he wasn't going back for a third day as he had learned enough about how to stack shelves. We did turn it into a positive experience though, he realised that it was the type of job he'd be doing year after year if he didn't work at school to gain qualifications. We arranged work experience ourselves for our other 2 children and that was so different for them. Sorry to hijack but you brought back old memories

[oncruisecontrol]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

next up: the white lion pub

 

 

stay tuned!

 

Stef

 

Thanks for posting.

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- Betancuria (part one of two)

Betancuria is supposed to be the prettiest town on all of Fuerteventura. It was the old capital, founded in 1404 by the Norman conqueror Bethencourt.

Lol – it was supposed to be safe from pirates. It didn’t work. They were robbed and burned down in 16th century anyway. The inhabitants rebuilt their homes pretty quick though.

The location proofed not only to lack the awished security from pirates, but was also a nuisance for the farming folk who had to endure long distances to their fields. Soon the capital was close to becoming a ghost town, because people moved away to be closer to their work.

Well, the authorities at the time didn’t approve of this and so they issued a law that forbade anybody who owned a house in Betancuria … which were a lot of people in those times to stay away from their house for an extended period of time under the penalty of 15 years!!! of imprisonment.

The locals were forced to live in their abandoned homes for at least a certain part of each year and they were also forced to maintain a certain stage of “prettiness” to the facades of their buildings. Of course every tourist today benefits from this very old, long ago law --- afterall you still get to see a picturesque town today although the original plan to maintain it as the capital had to be given up in 1834.

Mhhh, I didn’t like the fact of it looking pretty today merely under force from the past – gave it a shallow taste, but that’s just me.

Almost there

This is the central space around the church.

Our one and only wish was to find a store which would sell clothing. A woolen pullover, a jacket …. Heck a blanket, anything ….

Anything to warm us up would have been welcome … but the town was completely dead. We ended up seeing three people. One was a man washing his tourbus on the parking lot, when we arrived. The restrooms on that parking lot were still closed. We took the little walkway up to the church and in front of the church there was this tent set up

Inside was a stage with this drawing as a background.

Mhhh, maybe they had a roaring party the night before and it now being Sunday morning around 10 to 10:30 in the morning didn’t really help.

Across the place from the church there was the Casa Maria … it is a museum/restaurant/Fuerte-info-movie-room/giftshop. This would have been our only chance to perhaps find clothing … but to enter the gift shop we would have had to pay the entrance fee to the museum and movie thingy and we just didn’t want to. It looked like they were just opening up and were laid out for big tours. The two people out front didn’t acknowledge us two little people standing there and so we decided it’s not worth it and left again. And those were the only other people we saw in the entire town.

Screw it --- let’s get outta here.

Sorry, but all we wanted was to leave and continue to our next destination. Too bad, a restroom would have been quite nice right now.

Lol – I’ll show you the most positive things we found in Betancuria in the next post

Stay tuned!

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

:rolleyes:our highlights of Betancuria:

 

 

 

a pretty cactus:

 

 

a cuddly, yet quite filthy cat:

 

 

 

 

and a cool truckload full of goats:

(lol -- we saw them on our way back through Betancuria after our hiking trip ... as you can see, because there is an actual human being out on the street.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bye guys, have fun on your pasture.

 

 

 

Well, and as the goats head out for their day out on the fields, let's forget about Betancuria and head into the woods as well. Next up is our main attraction for this day: Our hiking trail! We quite loved it, so be prepared for many posts!

 

 

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- Vega de Rio Palmas

When following the FV-30 westwards from Betancuria you’ll soon arrive in Vega de Rio Palmas. On the left hand side of the road you can see the church coming up.

Definitely worth a stop.

Rats, there was a mass in progress, so we couldn’t go in ….

I really wanted to see this little statue inside:

foreign picture:

The trail we wanted to hike here has a lot to do with it. Lol – there’s a legendary and a more realistic approach to the story.

We’ll start with the basics:

To the south-west of Vega de Rio Palmas there is this canyon called Barranco de las Penitas.

At the top, there is a creek leading into a man-made lake, created by a massive dam to hold the water. Below that dam is the stoney canyon, which is pretty narrow and leads south in a pretty steep angle. Right in the middle of this canyon, there is a little chapel/hut/hermitage where strange things supposedly happened in a former century.

The lower part of this info poster along the way tells you about the legendary background:

Well, the more down to earth version is that early monks brought this statue with them from France and when they got under attack by pirates, they brought their beloved statue into the canyon to hide it in a narrow crack of the rocks. Maybe the pirates killed the monks who knew of the exact hiding spot … nobody knows. But the statue got forgotten for over a century, just to be found again much later … by monks again apparently. The whole miracle thing around it ….mhhhh…. believe what you wish.

Anyway, this statue and the legend behind it is a big thing on Fuerteventura. Once a year in September, they have this huge festival “the Pena”, where the statue is being carried in a big parade from its place of residency (the church in Vega de Rio Palmas) back to its spot of appearance (or reappearance) in the canyon. It’s a pilgrimage for many. They walk from all over the island …. From the very north in Corralejo and the very south in Jandia to Vega de Rio Palmas and spend the entire weekend there. The tranquil village is then filled to the max with people celebrating the little statue for two days and two nights.

Well, Tanja wasn’t too pleased, when I told her I’d love to wait until the end of mass to see the statue …

sigh … so we ended up leaving without seeing it. Bummer. In her defence: She

would

have waited ... but I saw how annoying that thought was for her and decided it's not worth the hassle.

But the important part is the trail anyway, so I’ll start telling you about that in the next post.

Stay tuned!

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

 

Fuerteventura -- starting our hiking trail

 

 

 

during the Pena the trail would look something like this:

 

foreign picture:

 

 

 

...but since it was February and not September, it was amost completely deserted ...

 

no wait, this little guy greeted us right at the parking spot.

 

 

 

a close up:

 

 

 

... and then we started walking. I have no clue what Tanja wanted to do with this thing:

 

 

but she had fun swishing it around ... later on, on Tenerife we saw streetworkers using them as brooms to clean the streets.

 

 

 

You start descending into the creekbed and I really liked the colorful rock formations here:

 

 

 

 

 

next up: impressions from the walk along the creek

 

 

 

stay tuned

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Fuerteventura --- hiking along the creek to the Barranco de las Penitas

 

 

 

 

 

Not much to say ... just enjoy the pictures and pretend you hiked along with us

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

local wildlife:

we desperately searched for some Atlashörnchen, but I have to report we didn't find any to feed. We grudgingly carried the little plastic lunch box with the nuts back to the ship. Who knows ... we still had three more islands to go ... maybe we'd find some little critter to feed them to.

 

 

 

looking one way:

 

and the other:

 

 

 

 

...we really enjoyed the path along the creek. So much flowing water on an otherwise barren island. It felt like an Oasis in the middle of a desert.

 

 

 

 

between the creek and the lake the path leads over a vast rocky plain to the side. Those pictures will be up next.

 

 

stay tuned!

 

Stef

[TheCaveman]

Thank you for sharing all this with us...

[Pluto_fan]

We get to enjoy the hike with interesting scenery and no physical exertion! Love it! :)

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

 

Fuerteventura --- hike to Barranco de las Penitas continued

 

 

 

After following the creek for a while, the trail leads you here:

 

 

 

see how small I am ... it was kinda cool to walk along this open stretch after having ducked through fern before.

 

 

the plants here howewer looked a little less ... aehm ... alive:

 

 

Along the path you see this info poster ... it's the text I've shown you earlier.

 

 

 

almost at the lake ... but what was best was that the sun finally started to gain some strength and we weren't shivering anymore. See the blue sky peaking through the lessening clouds?

 

coming up: the lake

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

Thank you for sharing all this with us...

 

:) my pleasure :)

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

We get to enjoy the hike with interesting scenery and no physical exertion! Love it! :)

 

... and without freezing your butts off:D. Glad you're enjoying the hike. We did for sure ... lol -- despite of the (very minimal) exertion and the (very maximal at first) chill;).

 

Stef

[Kreuzfahrtneuling]

:o sorry guys --- life getting in the way. I'll try to be back tomorrow .... but promise to post no later than sunday. Hang in there.

 

Stef

 

PS: no worries --- we're perfectly fine and enjoying ourselves:D.

[Pluto_fan]

No hurry! All the wonderful details and pictures are worth waiting for.

I'd love to do this itinerary on the Opera in December...so I hope you're done by then. :)