I took redundancy in mid January and booked a trip to Tenerife towards the end of that month. I’ve never been abroad in January, or been swimming in the sea that early (oceano Atlantico was rough at times).

As it was a bit last minute I was allocated the best seat in the plane, 1A would have been expensive so nobody had taken it. There was a cloud inversion before we landed, photo above.

The countryside wasn’t as barren as I remembered from our other trip in 2003, but that had been in November. As well as cactus there were bonny pine trees and crops of bananas, lettuce, chillies etc.

Most of the climbing areas were dry river beds near Arico in the south east of the island. Usually with a choice of sun or shade, with slippery water washed starts to the climbs. Fortunately there were no star ratings in the guide book but many climbs were still getting polished. This is rapidly getting worse as climbers set off from a sandy base without cleaning their shoes.

We were based on the coast near Arico where there was a ladder down the rocks for swimming and there were wild fish to feed!

We climbed near Mt Tiede, we had climbed there on the previous trip, the rock is very compact and quite different from the other areas.

Guaria was also different and is also away from the other climbing areas, on the west side of the island. We had to register to climb there because of nesting Barbary Falcons but that wasn’t difficult to do, even on a Spanish website. We didn’t do much climbing there as it was south facing and very hot.

Los Naranjos had a viaduct at the bottom of the crag, there were a few local climbers there and we all got wet ropes!

The rest of the trip we mostly climbed in various gullies around Arico. A couple of times access was by abseil which was exciting, but then we found we could walk out!

Photos are here Tenerife