The Canary Islands

The Canary Islands are beyond beautiful, and a place that you can find virtually every ecosystem. There are beaches, canyons, forests, mountains, and barren wastelands. Rising from the Atlantic not far from the shores of Africa like a scattered crown of fire-born jewels, the islands are a place where volcanoes sculpted earth into stark cliffs and black sand shores. Where ancient winds carry whispers of Africa, Europe, and the New World all at once.

Each island holds its own unique soul: Tenerife crowned by the mighty Teide, Lanzarote with its otherworldly lava fields, La Gomera veined with primeval forests, and Gran Canaria where golden dunes shift like a desert at sea.

The Canaries are not merely islands. They are a threshold between continents, a living testament to resilience, and the place fate chose to overlap my story with Percy Maelock’s.

For our adventure, we undertook a ten-day pilgrimage across the islands, hopping first to Tenerife, then Gran Canaria, and finally circling back again.

Day 1 – Santa Cruz Awakening
We landed on Tenerife, weary but eager, and found refuge in a boutique hotel nestled in the heart of Santa Cruz. The city pulsed with a laid-back rhythm, streets lined with palms and plazas spilling over with conversation. We strolled along the oceanfront, pausing to marvel at the gleaming white curves of the opera house, a seashell of modern architecture perched at the water’s edge. Dinner was Italian—astonishingly good Italian—and only the first of many lessons that the Canaries are as much crossroads of culture as they are of geography.

Day 2 – The Long Coffee and the Longer Walk
Morning began with a revelation that could shake the very foundations of a caffeine-addled traveler: in Spain, coffee shops do not rise with the sun. Groggy and desperate, we finally unearthed a tiny café where we sipped even tinier cups of espresso that seemed to laugh at American notions of "grande." Then came the ferry to Gran Canaria, where, like fools, we decided to walk three miles from the harbor to our Airbnb in Las Palmas. Our reward was Playa de Las Canteras, a sweeping golden beach, and our first taste of European seaside life—umbrellas, laughter, the scent of sunscreen, and the Atlantic curling endlessly into the horizon.

Day 3 – Into the Dunes
Southward we rode, chasing the sun to Maspalomas, where the dunes rise like a desert flung onto the edge of the sea. Rolling waves of golden sand stretched to the horizon, each crest shifting with the wind. It was here, on the far side of those dunes, that we stumbled into the peculiar case of the Abominable Swimsuit Model—an encounter too bizarre to forget, and too surreal to fully explain. Some things, perhaps, are best left half-believed. But this was a true turning point as this was, alebeit from a distance, our first glimpse of Percy Maelock.

Day 4 – Peaks and Percy
Gran Canaria is no flat island—it is a fortress of stone peaks and valleys, where roads coil upward into thin air. With only a few days, we quickly came to the conclusion that a guided tour would be the best way to see as much of the island as we possible could. Hopping on a bus and making fast friends with fellow tourists from the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and one Canadian taking a year off after finishing college, our tour carried us through mist-wreathed mountains and terraced villages. We saw the massive echo of a volcanic crater atop Pico de Bandama at an altitude of 569 meters, walked the colorful streets of San Mateo as the residence recovered from a weekslong festival, laughed at wild chickens at Roque Nublo, ate one of the finest lunches we’ve ever experienced in the village of Tejeda, shopped to our hearts’ delight in the village of Teror, and still made it back in time for a lazy evening at star-spangled, Hawaiian bar run by a charming Swedish giant living his retirement dreams.

At least, we had thought it would be a lazy evening until we looked down the bar and saw a familair face. A face we had seen just the day before scrambling out of the ocean with the abominable swimsuit model in his wake. This was my very first meeting with Percy Maelock.

And even though our encounter was only a passing moment in our international advenure, the rest of our journey bore a sharper edge, as though myth had stepped out of hiding to walk beside us.

Day 5 – Back to Tenerife
We ferried back across the Atlantic swells to Tenerife’s southern side, this time discovering to my absolute horror and the amusement of my fiancée that seasickness is practically unavoidable for me unless the water is smooth as glass. But my stomach and mind were put at ease when the world seemed to transform overnight into a resort paradise. Adeje greeted us with wide promenades and the buzz of Playa de Troya, a beach made for sun-seekers and wanderers alike.

Day 6 – The Foam Party
It was a day of relaxation and soaking up the sun. Night fell and with it came chaos of the most joyful kind: a foam party. Imagine a tide of soap rising higher than your head, a crowd swallowed whole by suds, dancing in white froth until the line between person and bubble blurred. It was absurd, intoxicating, and oddly cathartic—like being baptized in laughter.

Day 7 – The Stars of Teide
If Day 6 belonged to chaos, Day 7 belonged to silence. We ascended the slopes of Teide, Spain’s highest peak, for a stargazing tour where night unveiled a cathedral of stars for us and twenty other new friends. We bussed into the Parque Nacional del Teide, stopping along the way at many icon photo opportunties, several of which featured in major Hollywood blockbusters. Our tour guides then provided us with an astounding dinner and more champagne than any could have needed, our guide refilling any glass that could be remotely considered “empty” as if a dry glass were a capitol offence.

Then night properly swept over us and, so far away from city lights, the sky became impossibly vast. We lay beneath constellations so sharp they seemed to hum, feeling very small and very infinite at the same time. Powerful telescopes likely worth more than my car were set up for us to look up at the moon, Jupiter, and Mars. My only regret is the presence of the full moon kept the Milky Way from shining out in its full glory.

Day 8 – Arona and the Southern Shores
Arona welcomed us with beaches brushed by turquoise waves and a hum of resort life that seemed determined to never sleep. Between swims and strolls, we found ourselves lulled into the island’s rhythm of sun and siesta, pleasure and pause.

Day 9 – The Northern Pilgrimage
When I tell you that it was a busride through Hell to reach destination, I am not being poetic. To begin, we took a bus from our resort to the small village of Santiago del Teide and then, partially because of our own unshakable belief in our GPS and partially because of poor signage, we missed the next bus. Thus we were stranded in a town with no open shops or cafes for the next hour and a half. What were we to do other than find a nearby hiking trail and begin a casual exploration. For the briefest if moments, we considered following the path over the mountain and down the other side, but the sun and our overall lack of water shut down that idea almost immediately.

When the next bus (which was little more than a van) did arrive, we launched into a series of perilous switchbacks looking down pertifying cliffs. To add insult to injury, the air conditioning was also broken, sending all of us into a sweat and fit of car sickeness that would make the Devil proud. But our driver was a master of his trade and made the drive a smooth as any man could make. At least we had the beauty of the Buenavista del Norte to kepe us company as we twisted our way through the mountains finally down the island’s edge where it met the ocean’s embrace. Here at last we arrived at Playa la Ballenira and stood in the shadow of the lighthouse at Punta de Teno. The views and the spray of the sea very much made the challenging journey worth it.

This was the Canary Islands at their most raw and elemental, where land and ocean seemed locked in eternal struggle.

Fortunately, our busride back to the resort was not nearly so dramatic. We had AC and fine weather and even made a friend in the seat behind us. He’d come to the Canaries from Iowa, looking for adventure and a chance to flex his talents with the Spanish language. He told us a few stories of villages he’d visited and food he’d enjoyed and hikes he would recommend should we have the time. There were even a few other mentions of strange characters he’d run into on the island of La Palma and one man he’d met at a club in Gran Canaria only a few nights earlier, claiming to have survived a shipwreck and to have outrun the fury of a woman scorned. It wouldn’t be for several months that I’d come to know it was Percy Maelock our new friend had encountered, and I’m not sure I’m any better for knowing it.

Day 10 – Closing the Circle
The final day returned us to Adeje and the beaches of Las Américas. Resorts, music, and sunburnt travelers swirled together in a farewell chorus of salt air and laughter. Our circle was complete, though something lingered—the sense that something from these islands were not done with us.

Day 11 – An Unexpected Tenure in Madrid
We woke at three in the morning, stumbling bleary-eyed into a taxi bound for Santa Cruz. Only later did we realize—too late, of course—that there was an airport on the southern side of the island with a near-identical flight home. Instead, we threaded through the dark roads of Tenerife like fugitives from our own poor planning, bound north for departure.

From Santa Cruz we flew into Madrid, expecting nothing more than a brisk connection. Fate, however, had other plans. We boarded our plane, settled in, and sat two long hours before the captain announced the news: a mechanical error that no one could mend. Disembark. Wait. Try again. Thus began our penance in the halls of Barajas Airport.

For three hours we drifted from gate to gate, chasing phantom announcements across the terminal, until finally a “definitive” location was declared—though our new flight was not to depart for another nine hours. Nine. Hours. The kind of stretch that bends time, frays patience, and makes you question every decision that led you to this fluorescent purgatory.

It was then, in the midst of this exile, that we saw him. Percy Maelock, seated at a restaurant table as though he had been waiting all along. He recognized us at once, his grin half-amusement, half-conspiracy, and beckoned us to sit. Over plates of indifferent airport fare, he spun a handful of stories from his own wanderings in the Canary Islands—tales half-true, half-mad, but entirely captivating. Just as suddenly as he appeared, Percy rose and announced he had a flight to Rome. Whether he truly boarded that plane or slipped once more between worlds, I cannot say.

At last our own flight was called. After more than twenty-five hours since that first cruel alarm in Tenerife, we touched down at home. The world outside was the same, yet we collapsed into bed with the quiet certainty that something had shifted—that in the Canary Islands, and in the strange company of Percy Maelock, we had crossed a threshold we might never quite return from.