Whilst you are looking at this picture you should be aware that once the three sets of "taxes" (harbour tax, lights tax and recreational tax) are added to the bill, Marina del Atlantico is more expensive for the winter than Barcelona, which probably means it's the most expensive winter marina in Spain.  To avoid any doubt - Santa Cruz is NOT Barcelona.  (More like a slightly warmer version of Swansea.)  Below is one of the views from Samarang.

You will be told by the marina staff that the "taxes" are due at every marina in the Canaries and sailors passing through take this at face value, and pass through as quickly as possible.  In fact the "taxes" do not exist at any other marina, nor have they been heard of on any other island.  They don't even exist in the two other marinas six miles either side of Marina del Atlantico.  The others are of course full and well maintained, whilst Atlantico is half empty (once the December rush is over) and has unrepaired pontoons from storms 2 years ago!

It was dreadful.  We took the level test and were assessed as 'intermediates'; given the appropriate books and shown to our classroom, where two German girls were already studying.  Ivan, the teacher, took our books away and returned with elementary books.  We spent the next three hours conjugating the verb "to be".  Revision is always a good thing, but.... 

The next morning we arrived early for a frank discussion with Ivan.  He agreed that the level was too low, but they didn't have an intermediate class.  He assured us that next week would be better, after the German girls left.  Things now got worse, Ivan started leaving the syllabus to have conversations with us at a level that was incomprehensible to the girls (for whom we felt truly sorry).  Additionally the method of language teaching was decades out of date, the sort of grammatical approach that one sees in the Latin classes of films about English public schools in the 19th century.

And then it was Christmas.  A pretty quiet affair this year as all the cruisers had now left and the marina was virtually empty.  The highlights had to be the free classical Christmas concert for which the main car park next to the marina had been closed for weeks to allow the installation of a covered stage and terraced seating for 10 thousand.  At midnight, as soon as the concert ended, we dashed back to the boat for the firework display which was set off from the harbour wall not much more than a hundred yards from where we were berthed.

And then a week later Lindy's mum, Audrey, came to visit for a few weeks.  We had deliberately waited for her arrival before doing too much sight-seeing and now hired a car to explore the island.  Santa Cruz has its shortcomings and the tourist resorts on the south of the island are not to our taste, but the scenery in the interior of the island is truly fantastic.  It ranges from the cloud-enveloped forests in the north to the lunar volcanic landscape surrounding Mount Teide in the centre.  Teide itself is Spain's highest mountain and is often snow- capped in spite of the temperature on the coast.  

 Los Cristianos,  well what can we say.  We'd made a quick visit there a week or so previously to view the boatyard facilities, and chose to stay in the boatyard cafe overlooking the harbour for lunch.

Los Cristianos exists solely for the tourists, who you will find neatly packed in rows around the pools of the hotels and apartment blocks or on the numerous golf courses carved out of the desert and constantly sprinkled with water produced in the energy hungry desalinisation plants along the coast.  In Los Cristianos, and its relatives along the coast, you can come for your few weeks of sun without ever being troubled by the sound or sight of the Spanish language, or of having to risk tasting Spanish food, which is fine if all you want is a couple of weeks in the sun.  MacDonald's and Kentucky round every corner, as well as, what I think I'm safe in  saying is, the worst Chinese food I have ever eaten - Let's be clear here soggy/crispy duck and tinned mango slices do NOT go together.  And if you did wake up one morning with a weird desire to put mangos with duck, well they grow fresh on Tenerife all year round for goodness sake.

That there is a demand for this kind of holiday is beyond doubt, and with 65% plus of their GDP coming from tourism it is a demand that the Canarians are happy to service - particularly since they had no other use for the desert in the south of the island anyway.  That's how free market economics works and we are big fans of the free market.  I suppose if we worked in a factory in Birmingham all year we might feel differently, but we now have too many weeks in the sun and for ourselves need to look for something more.

For us it was great to meet our friends and we would have liked to spend more time with them.  Still could have given the duck and mango a miss though!

Then there's the competition to choose Queen of the Carnival.  This is less a beauty pageant and more a design and engineering competition, as the girls are all but invisible within the structure that will form their float.  This has to be, in spite of its proportions, light enough for them to move/drag around the stage in a vaguely elegant way as they stand inside it.  Actually that should read ' Queens' in the plural.  As well as the queen proper there is a competition for children, a competition for ladies of the "third age" (what we used to call old folk) and then of course there's the drag queen (possibly the most sensational) .

All of the queens and murgas competitions go on for a couple of weeks and are televised, but the third part of Carnival, the real part if you like, starts when these are completed and goes on for another week - this is on the street.  All the queens and murga bands at some point make it out onto the street, but so does everyone else.  Anyone who has a truck or a van, builds a float.  These range from the spectacular, to half a dozen neighbours in a van with some booze and a ghetto blaster - though the latter are in the minority.  

As well as the floats there are troops of dancers and, even if you are not involved in any of these things, you still dress up.  You need to understand (if you've never experienced it) this isn't just a procession, it's everywhere - every bar, every square, every street corner.  Drag is huge and, putting to one side the guys for whom this is a way of life, seems to be especially favoured by bearded men.  You could be forgiven for thinking that you'd woken up in the annual meeting of the Kenny Everett fan club. 

The whole thing goes on all week, every night, all night until dawn.  One of the most memorable things is the good-nature that prevails.  Copious amounts of booze are consumed, and by the end everyone must be exhausted, but we saw no sign, nor read any reports, of any violence or any problems of any kind.  The closest  ever experienced to this in terms of citywide general drunken friendliness was hogmonay in Edinburgh.