What are we up to in Tenerife

The marina is in the centre of Santa Cruz although it is still a 10-15 minutes walk into the town, it is quite odd being in such a built up area with the noise of cars and ferries all day and night.  After a couple of days we had a hire car booked to enable us to see some more of the island, sounded easy to pick it up from the North airport as only 25 minutes away on the bus but wasn’t so straight forward as Gold Car is a bus journey away from the airport and we waited over an hour for our car! No more complaining just a word of warning.

We visited Puerto de la Cruz which is a quite a nice tourist resort, with some old buildings mingled in with the new tat touristy shops.  Seemed to be full of German and British tourists quite busy even in November.

Mark in Puerto de la Cruz

On our way back to the boat we stopped in Decathlon (sports shop) which would have been great apart from the car was broken into in the carpark, again I only mention this as a word of warning as this was a well lit busy carpark and they broke in both front and boot and managed to unlock and lock the car!

The next day we were up at the crack of dawn to visit Loro Parque, this was originally a bird park when it was open in the 1970’s but has grown  closer to a wildlife park.  Although we often avoid the tourist attractions because of our budget constraints but I have wanted to visit Loro Parque for years to see the birds so this was a bit of an extravagance but worth it!  Loro Parque donate a large amount of money to conservation mainly around parrots but also in other areas such as Gorillas and there was a great Gorilla enclosure.

There are also some really good marine life shows, I still have very mixed feelings about the animals being kept in captivity but the shows were pretty spectacular.  During the dolphin show we were impressed how high they jumped, over 6 metres which would have been plenty high enough to jump over Magnum!

Dolphin show

The killer whale show was also very impressive although still a bit upsetting to see such huge animals in such a small pool but they did seem to enjoy jumping around.

Yes that really is a killer whale!

There was also an impressive penguin house which was snowing, with various different species including the Humboldt, Emperor Penguin, Rock hoppers. 

Humboldt penguins

Emperor penguins

The also had a small enclosure for Puffins, we love these birds and have spent years hoping to see one in the wild but it was almost as nice seeing there little happy faces.

Ahhhh a lovely little Puffin

Also very impressed by the number of different Macaw species, more than we have seen at any other bird park – Hyacinth, Scarlett, Blue & Yellow, Yellow fronted, Military, we were there for a while whilst Amanda said hello to all of them.

Hyacinth Macaw

Avery full of young Macaws

We had a great day out and it was worth a visit, look at how much fun Mark with his pineapple head is having.