Corralejo; Friday, 11 March, 2022

I had an early breakfast as I had two tours booked for today, with the first one picking up at 9am. Pickup was on time and a short while later I was filling out the liability insurance forms and health declarations to be allowed to go on an eBike tour to the volcanoes.

The tour lasted nearly 4.5 hours from when we set off and headed out into the volcanic landscape to the south of the town. The first stop was at a small volcano a mile or so out of town where the sides have warn down and you can walk into the crater itself. We stopped here for a few minutes before moving onto the uphill parts of the tour.

The advantage of the eBikes are that they do help take quite a bit of the work out of the hill, but they don’t do all the work and by the time we arrived at the second stop, after a couple of still climbs, everyone was looking a little out of breath – so it didn’t help that at this point we had to go on a 15 minute walk to another volcano, this time the last 5 minutes being a very steep climb up the side of it to reach a viewing platform on the rim on the caldera.

From here the views were spectacular across the north part of the island from East to West coast and across the sea to the southern part of Lanzarote.

After the second volcano stop the path was mostly downhill as we made our way to a refreshment stop in the town of Lajares which was very welcome, before a 25 minute cycle downhill to the coast and the picturesque popcorn beach, so named due to the small fragments of coral that wash up on the beach that do look just like popcorn.

From the beach stop it was a gentle cycle back to the centre of town and the end of the tour, where we were shuttled back to our hotels. I took advantage of a 90 minute gap before my next tour pickup to have a shower and change my t-shirt to a slightly less sweaty one.

The second tour of the day turned out to be with exactly the same company so at least I knew which minibus to be looking out for. My second tour was a Segway tour of the town, my first experience of using a Segway and it would turn out likely to be my last.

Before the tour started we had a quick lesson in control the device and then we set off into town. For the first 30 minutes or so everything was going well, but then I managed to hit a pothole and ended up on my side with the Segway on top of me and a very impressive gouge down the side of my leg. Patched up we headed on to continue to tour taking in the main promenade, and then riding out across the sands to the other side of the natural harbour before making our way back to the end point.

A few hundred yards before the end point we went over some very rough terrain and this time I fell backwards off of the Segway, adding some cuts to my shoulder to go with the injuries to my leg. I decided at that point that perhaps Segway wasn’t for me and I very slowly nursed the death trap machine back to the end point.

Tour over I headed back to the hotel to have a stiff drink and clean myself up, again, and then stayed in the hotel complex before it was time for dinner.