I accepted voluntary redundancy at the end of August 2011 and used the small payout to purchase a good laptop, a reasonable digital (DSLR) camera and a Kindle with GPS. I hadn't taken photos for years and as I was about to move around I had decided that the Kindle would replace my collection of books I was always going to read. The next question was "What to do next?" A friend of mine had been telling me to visit Tenerife for years so I thought why not! Easyjet provided a cheap ticket and a browse around the websites provided a nice little apartment in Los Abrigos.
On arrival, after signing the paperwork I was asked if I was interested in hiring a car? Being on a limited budget and seeing how busy the island's roads were I had already decided that I was going to travel by bus. It turned out that Titsa, Tenerife's state bus company provide a 'BonoBus' ticket for either 12 or 30 Euros and the former can be purchased at most supermarkets. This ticket gives a discount on the journey and even produces a sliding scale over two or three journeys to an end destination. So off I trotted to the bus stand in the village to figure out Tenerife by bus.
The challenge I set myself was to see if I could travel all over the island exploring and seeing the festivals and cultural activities which make the island so unique. Out of this rose a collection of photo albums on Google Picasa (now Photos) and a weekly email to family and friends. I have included comments on the photographs and these will automatically display when run as a 'slideshow'. These comments explain what is happening or make observations felt at the time. Being a 'tourist' and having no Spanish I found this quite daunting at first and my first stop was the Titsa Information booth in Los Cristianos to get a timetable.
As the concept developed I started photographing the bus stops and including them in the 'walk around' photos of the destinations I picked, this then developed into photographing the whole route and that is the challenge over the year I intend to spend here. As it happened Titsa also enhanced their bus stops during the year by posting route timetables on each one. I have never 'blogged' before so the first few entries will be retrospective to bring us up to date. I hope that the photos, routes and bus stands will make it easier for visitors to travel around and to see some things which may not have been thought about before.
This 18 month adventure is recorded fully in
tenerifebybus.blogspot.com.
P.S. the prequel, hence the first post in this blog is a visit to Prague in 2008.
Comments
Post a Comment