When you travel around an island, there is always a temptation to peek into some new little corner. Islands seem to encourage this kind of thorough exploration: the space is limited, so sooner or later you start feeling that you simply have to find out what lies around every bend, beyond every hill, and inside every suspiciously interesting hole in a fence.
And so, on Tenerife, after several weeks of crisscrossing the island, we happened to discover a place we hadn’t been to yet. We left the car in a small parking area and set off for a spontaneous walk.
At first glance, it looked like a small, well-kept park in a beautiful mountain setting. There was a pond in the middle with ducks paddling around, neat paths winding between bushes and flowers — in short, everything you could want for a leisurely stroll.
The gates were wide open, and my wife said this was obviously an invitation. We hadn’t seen any signs or warning notices.
Naturally, we went to check out the ducks first. As far as I’ve been able to tell after years of travelling, ducks are more or less the same everywhere in the world, but that never stops you from watching them again. There is something deeply soothing and utterly pointless about watching ducks, which makes it particularly well suited to a holiday.
We walked up to the pond.
The ducks immediately swam away.
Strange, certainly, but who knows — perhaps we had somehow violated some international rules of duck etiquette. It soon became clear, however, that the ducks were not the problem.
The pond was absolutely swarming with fish.
And not the sort of tiny fish you usually have to squint at while wondering whether you actually saw anything at all. These were huge trout staring back at us from the water, and we suddenly felt a little uneasy: we were no longer quite sure who had come here to look at whom.
Anyway, what had looked like a pleasant little park with a pond and some ducks a minute earlier turned out to be a trout farm.
We walked on and found a series of pools where the trout were kept at different stages of their lives: tiny little fish here, somewhat larger ones farther along, and, somewhere in the depths, presumably, actual aquatic monsters.
I figured these were the monsters that occasionally made their way into the main pond to frighten unsuspecting visitors who had come here simply to look at the ducks.
We watched the fish farming operation for a little while longer until my wife suddenly noticed something important: there were no cats anywhere around.
Sure enough, the moment she said it, a cat came padding past us. It gave us a brief, distinctly disapproving look. After looks like that, my interest in cats usually disappears for about a year.
We decided not to interfere with the local inhabitants and headed for the exit. It was only then that we finally spotted a sign revealing that we had, in fact, been on a trout farm all along. Next to it was a large warning sign listing a whole range of perfectly reasonable prohibitions: no littering, no catching fish by hand, and so on.
But one of them was particularly noteworthy: visitors were not allowed to bring canned fish onto the premises, open it, or, naturally, eat it.
Why exactly anyone would want to come to a trout farm carrying their own canned fish is probably a question worthy of further investigation. But even more interesting was the fact that, apparently, this had happened often enough to warrant its own separate rule.
We spent a little time thinking about it, trying to imagine someone deliberately coming to a trout farm with a tin of fish, but eventually decided that some mysteries are probably best left as mysteries.
We got back in the car and drove to the nearest town in search of a fish restaurant. After all, interesting places are interesting places, but lunch is lunch.
@alexanderfluke's travels
for the #wednesdaywalk challenge by @tattodjay
Canon 450D + EF17-40/2.8L USM, EF70-300/4.0-5.6 IS USM, EF50/1.8 STM
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