The Magical Island of La Gomera | Motorcycle Road Trip | Part 1
Good morning from a road trip special 7 30 in the morning clear blue skies we are riding towards the pink sunrise we're now in los cristiano so we are 45 minutes from getting not this very lucky because it's heading off 45 minutes away from getting the ferry to la gomera a tiny island with a population of 22 000 people and it is the island of christopher columbus the final stop before he headed off to discover america i cannot tell you how excited and this will be an almost completely unspoilt island we've got two days of exploring there we're fully packed up we've got a bag full of clothes this time i actually did bring waterproof so i'm fully set up i even brought a screwdriver just in case two pennies fully loaded bag with the essentials wallet passport things like that we're just gonna sit here maybe grab a coffee indescribable how excited i am this is it this is our ferry it's just so nice with the sun rising there so that is of course directly east that way towards the capital of tenerife sun just rising over this mountainside here and then comes our ferry so perfect time for little rundowns so cost from tenerife to lagamera return ferry ticket for a motorbike and two people 150 pounds sterling although the interesting thing is if you come by car i think it's only about 10 pounds extra so it doesn't really make much difference from a financial point of view whether you come from a car or go on a motorbike but residence resident discount is gigantically cheap i think it's about 30 pounds or something as opposed to 80 pounds so huge savings if you're residents it's a really nice ferry coffee two coffees with soya milk two pounds twenty for two one pound ten each brilliant value we've got about 40 minutes left actually probably only about 30 minutes left the weather looks brilliant and both of monica and i had no idea what to wear because it says the forecast is 16 degrees in lagomera but it's beautiful sunshine i've had to take both layers off so with the canaries you just have no idea what to expect is it going to be flip flop weather or do you need a jacket but it if you pan over there i don't actually be able to see it the sea couldn't be stiller and the sky couldn't be bluer it's perfect hmm so now do you know what let me make this dramatic welcome to the island of lagamera that right there in front of be careful the volcano antennae 3750 meters high this island is the third smallest of the eight main canarian islands and it's also got the third smallest population as well with 22 000 people you can probably see it's quite windy it's just absolutely stunning though it's beautiful weather it's december it's warm i actually had to take my main sweatshirt off because it's so nice i think that's our ferry as well that's just headed off there and if you just come down this dirt track you can see an amazing road just snaking around there onto the top of that little mountain side okay our plan we're going to head off directly from the east side of the island all the way to the west we're going to go straight the way through the middle monica's found a great little spot that we can have a bit of food and then we're going to do some exploring probably first day of the north of the island and then second day of the south of the island but it's magical it really is magical let's get going this is just mind-blowingly spectacular it's got a really really special feel to it this island we've been riding around this spectacular road here that snakes around and you can see all of the mountain sides these old farms the the terraced farming scattered and scarring the landscape all the way along in fact i say scarring but it actually looks beautiful and dotted between them you've got all of the palm trees down there and you can see here because it's so dramatic the scenery the guanchas the original people had a whistling language so they could communicate between the different mountain sides and lagamera is the only one of the canarian islands that still has and uses this whistling language that they inherited from the original people the quenchers before the spanish conquest and they rate it with such importance that in the schools in lagamera they still teach this whistling language and you can just imagine it's six seven hundred a thousand years ago the granches tribes whistling from mountainside to mountainside that's a special place oh even up here actually just before i get monica to pan off you can see here as well all of the farming just terraced the whole way along here as well it said the whole place has evidence of farming going on whether whether it be now or in reality this is probably maybe a few hundred years ago because these have long since been used as farms oh um there's please so yes i can't believe it we're down at 23 degrees and now it goes up to one and a half kilometers high and i think we're over a kilometer high next it's got a lot colder these forests they're very very special you can see the light shining through and all the mist we're right in the clouds and that's special because something about vertical rain or something meaning everything is constantly getting a very light covering of water vertically hitting it sorry horizontally hitting it all the time so it's some kind of horizontal rain not vertical and everything you can tell everything is completely saturated and everything is covered in moss it's it's cold here it probably is about 14 degrees now we've come up high i'm it's just magical absolutely magical here thank you it's five minutes out of the thick lush wet and cold forest it's still windy but it's it feels like it's about six degrees warmer in the space of about five minutes riding something like that and we've just seen our first couple of cave houses here which uh right here you see the door there just built into the caves and i think the way they work in on the canaries is if you own a cave house you're allowed to dig into the cave as much as you want so if you feel like oh i need an extra bedroom and let's do an ensuite over there and you just keep digging into the cave and it's legal and that's legally yours however far you want to dig in really nice looking buildings here and little beautiful kind of church courtyard place very traditionally styled we've gone past a few really nice looking what your classes traditional canarian looking buildings what you'd expect i mean a lot of the kind of 1980s onwards canary buildings very simple just boxy not the most beautiful but those older canarian buildings really beautiful and you've got a few of these old stone ones here as well very nice looking village here if you're wondering what outfits should i wear when i come to lagomera simple you need summer gear when you're on sea level and you need proper winter gear when you're up in the mountains nice and easy my guess is it was probably built in 1974 because i've just seen two bells on the side dated 1974 so possibly 46 year old church something like that 47 year old church see now because we've been learning spanish we know that's a wine shop we're about to go in but have a look at this on this side what a location if you just come past the fencing bit here i hope the camera can pick this up of course out of this world scenery look at that cave there a really big cave can can it pick it up and also just above the cave two houses there with what must be the most spectacular view just with the palm trees around it and the road to get to those houses is just along the right hand side you actually around this big mountain top there around to the back i i cannot imagine how incredible those views are and then if you see right in front of here monica everyone here here vineyards for growing wine and here vineyards for growing wine and they're a wine shop apparently lots of wine growing and they have dates and or figs that they grow here and different types of cereals as well loads of stuff grows here because apparently it's very well very well watered and they've got lots of natural lakes that keep everything really good for for growing crops that's really good here and well maybe this is local wine so this is all local wine all from lagumara and i can see her like a mirror all of this here brilliant oh you have to get a bottle yeah 100 ah fantastic oh wow gracias okay we've just been told all of this from nagamera this one so these two here are from actually right here exactly bang on in this spot and you can't get them in a supermarket so we'll take them um the new wine from right here cannot get that in the supermarket how can we resist no oh okay it's cash only so this is a brilliant place definitely come here if you're on a road trip here tienda del vina we will come back and that was actually the last bottle of white from the 2020 batch that they've got right it's literally from these vineyards here you can't get it in supermarkets but cash only so i have to go and get cash and you can see where we are we're definitely not near a cash point so we'll save this location come back and grab a bottle at the start of that tunnel it was cold get just through that tunnel this is the difference it makes and now it's warm t-shirt weather and here i'm actually going to i'll take the camera off monaco in a second because this right here is an old abandoned farm you can see the old little farmhouse set and all of the terraces and you can imagine i don't know a hundred years ago or so just this this farm before this road i'm sure it would have been way before this road just the farmer there complete isolation almost without these stunning roads oh damn me we got no beetle here oh that's a good sight that's on a tenerife plate meaning that it would have been first registered in spain in tenerife la palma or lagumar or el hierro so it's probably spent its whole life there okay i'm going to take this off monica and show you the remains of what one of the old farms would have been like in nagamera it's actually very interesting to see how they do these staggered kind of terraced farms that you need when the ground and the landscape is so dramatic and steep so they just pile up lots of big and medium-sized rocks and they stagger it all the way down to the outskirts of their land down here so if i go along here you can see oh wow i don't know what birds they were you can see one of the the old farmhouses here this this has got to be very old to be this kind of wow to be this kind of construction and actually you can see there they've got a great view and you can see all of the different terraces that have been built there and here we are wow wow the ruins and the remains of the farmhouse well with that spectacular room you can imagine it before this road was built here just it probably a dirt track 50 years ago or so when someone was living here fifty hundred years ago there'd be nothing more than a dirt track here i'm sure if there's anyone from lagamera who knows the history of that farm how old it is what they used to farm here let me know and i'll pin the comment to the top we're not getting anywhere because there's too much stuff to see every time we said it should have been an hour to get to our lunch but i think it's so far taken us about two and a half hours and we're still 20 minutes away it's i can't say how spectacular is anymore it's so unbelievable these terraces with the houses just in between all of the terraces and how high those terraces go and imagine how hard work it would be to actually farm those terraces and this is the road here that we've come from snaking up and you can see now i've had to i think four times i've taken a sweatshirt off put it on layering the key to biking god i'm boring myself do wow well here we are we finally reached our lunch spot and we're sitting down for food at five past two this is called osso oso and we'll put obviously the name of the place in the description because it is a very good find by monica sea is about 150 meters behind us and the heat before we left we saw that it was 16 degrees on la gamer that's what it said it was so we assumed okay we're going to have to dress for waterline winter weather it's about 28 degrees right here it was about 14 degrees up on the top of the mountain it is so changeable so right now it's december we're on the coast it's about 28 degrees it is stinking hot look at the food looks absolutely brilliant i think it is a german guy who runs this place and food looks incredible i actually think there's quite a big german population here because i've seen so many people walking back and forth speaking german it's really interesting actually we're going to tuck in now and then head down to the beach after this because we are on the absolute far west coast of the island pretty much bang in the middle of the island now that place was incredible i was just speaking to the owner and he said that not big headed at all but i do actually believe him he said that people come to gumera and specifically go to this place because it's so good whether you're a vegan meat eater fish doesn't matter brilliant place and i never would have guessed it existed monica took us down this what looks like residential street kind of holiday let's hear and i i thought monica's taking us to a just a kind of holiday area and then this place yeah actually this is how it looks just from the outside this place here never would have guessed absolutely brilliant but we're gonna head down now monica has made a big mistake with the clothes she's wearing she's got let me just show you this this this is monica and she's been overheating quite badly while eating have you cooled down no i haven't boiling hard basically you need every type of clothing just for the just for one day in nagamer but we're going to head down to the beach because it's so safe here should put the jackets on the back there's i'm tempting fate here there's absolutely no crime here we just leave the helmets the jackets we're going to go for a walk no chance of being stolen we actually wish we were staying longer here it's it's way nicer than we thought and there's actually it's not there's a population 22 000 that's tiny but it's there's more to do than you thought there'd be actually from such a tiny island it's really nice and feels really livable and look at this this is come let's run across come because this is i've heard about these like one of these just kind of enclosed pools on the seafront completely safe and actually cut off from the rest of the ocean this is a really nice promenade we've got another restaurant there and behind us just have to show you these buildings really nicely designed buildings along here i do feel that i said in when i was in the restaurant everyone's german here absolutely everyone this is like mini germany right here if you look for example at places in adej in tenerife it's it's mini england everyone's british here this is where the germans go you know what it's like it's like tenerife before the tourists came i i don't know if this you know will ever explode in population because of tourism i know that in the past 11 years or so i think the population's actually gone down a couple of hundred and nagamera but it really does feel like a place that's just just before being discovered by tourists it's very unique to come somewhere like this that's so nice it's winter sun it's stunning it's the eu so obviously it's super easy for everyone in the eu to come here to holiday here you get the sun all year round it's absolutely stunning it's safe it's spotlessly clean it's got brilliant roads yet it's so quiet and it feels so genuine you know what i could leave no one's taking it we'll come back for it but but look okay okay to prove a point it's just being stupid this is paradise it's just almost impossibly rare to find somewhere that is so upmarket and feels undiscovered and is so so safe that you could leave your wallet on a table or on a chair and nothing would happen to it how do you know um because i get that feeling and that's all i'm basing it on but i checked on google and said it's extremely safe that's good enough for me it feels so bad it does feel very doesn't it yeah i don't have you ever been somewhere that feels like this oh cool i'll go well if you're wondering where to stay in lagamera valley or valley i never know how to take the two elves maybe by or vale gran rey right on the west coast right here absolutely stunning we're finally enough staying on the other side of the island and i hope we've made the right choice because this looks completely unbeatable the canaries have honestly what feels like a limitless budget for making breathtaking roads example this road is clearly a relatively new road that's been tunneled through the rock and the amount of projects they've got going on are recently done where they're tunneling through rock huge projects with massive budgets and if you pan over here monica look at this paradise location down there is where we were and look at this breathtaking road snaking around all the way around the mountainside huge budget huge money and of course this now it all feels incredibly civilized but look at what we just found we're just coming around here i had to double back this is a glimpse into what lagomere would have been like let's say 40 years ago maybe even 30 years ago this is the original road they wouldn't have had i guess the budget to be making these maybe pre-eu for example they wouldn't have had the budget to be tunneling these huge uh tunnels and look at this imagine in the 60s that they built the roads around the side like driving in a little citron 2 cv in 1960s or something this this is the original road and these roads i guess would be all around all of the canarian islands but now the budgets are so big they're building these breathtaking new roads that are like race tracks but what an amazing glimpse into what the roads used to be like and they just get left here it's incredible i can also imagine you know with the surface you see these old pictures from spain the canaries in the 60s it genuinely would have been like this the actual surface as well wow oh wow oh monica you have to come up this way it's incredible so here i've now learned from a few locals of tenerife if you see these caves on the side it's often where the workmen dig a hole and they can keep their tools and stay overnight for example something like that so you've got one of those there this looks like something out of i don't know a film or something it's incredible look at this old road completely blocked off snaking around there oh yeah that's incredible and you realize actually how how deep that valley goes that's that's scary we're making our way back to the hotel now and maximum 10 minutes after leaving the 28 degree heat of that beautiful area on the west coast we're back to proper winter gear now and it is so dramatic look how steep it goes down there and you think before roads it would have taken forever to get anywhere in lagomera i mean imagine trying to cover proper distances with this type of terrain must have been ridiculously fit pre-cars and pre-roads around here you thank you this is a perfect example we've got here of why this forest is so unique it's because of the horizontal rain and if you can see it here monika i don't know if it can pick it up but basically what we can feel and what we can see is a very very thin constant incredibly light hazy kind of rain that's going from our right all the way to left and you see why all of the trees are covered in thick moss because there's a constant thick kind of cloud-like air just going from right to left all the time here it's really unique i'm not sure if i've ever been anywhere like it and that's why the trees have such a thick covering of moss everywhere it's almost eerie thank you oh ten minutes away from our destination for my final stop for the night that is the corner of tenerife los gagantes ahead of us there and just before we get to our accommodation for the night i had to show you this because as we were snaking around this road i saw the skeleton of what would be the most spectacular dream villa that construction clearly stopped on it so it would have been i'm guessing a very very wealthy individual who got into some financial difficulty and had to stop building their dream villa i'm guessing it could be a dream holiday home that never never materialized this is the driveway coming around here and you're met i don't know if someone is in here so we'll leave that alone there but you're met with this view here and then of course they were in the process of building so this would be the driveway here and then in the process a moniker do you want to come or should i take it off you take it okay right so just picture the scene that's the view there with the road snaking down to where we need to get to come down here this of course would all be beautifully made and paved walk round here oh that was me slipping and here it is okay come down here i wonder how long this has been abandoned for and then round here wow the top of the house here and this this is the view that you get or that you would have got if they could have carried on construction that view of tenerife and the ocean what a place this would have been i'll see if i can just get a little bit lower look look at these gigantic windows and they would have been looking out onto that i mean that's incredible look at that can i zoom in there that is ridiculously localized rain there in the middle of the ocean but imagine that if they would have actually finished this and if it would have been if it would have materialized with these huge windows that incredible living room there and a terrace with a view like that oh wow foreign hotel room tour for the night but actually first i'll give you an idea of our surroundings we're in the middle of we're not exactly sure if it's a village or town but it's a beautiful area and this our hotel here he cancer will include a description and a link but it's a very colonial style building 150 years old and it's been renovated twice in the past 10 years but here we are in the little village square with the church in front of us really nice old buildings here as well just with the palm trees beautiful old buildings i love the dark wood so nice this this really is very colonial with the inside it's actually got an open top there and a kind of balcony that wraps all the way around okay so this is an open kind of terrace area you can have coffee in the corner seating area here and then a little kind of lounge chilling library room with a range of different books on lagamaera stuff like that really nice placement look look at this this is so interesting look at the ceiling with the old wooden beams and then these are just loads of of uh branches off trees just horizontally crossing and outside we've got i mean just look at these with the wooden shutters all of the key features have been kept right let's go upstairs a little snug area here you can grab a coffee yeah just chill out coffee and i think that's the square where we just were showing the wedding there and that that's this building isn't it yes it is yeah wow oh this is this is the floor of our room it's such a great view this is so classically colonial with this balcony that wraps all the way around in wood dark wood and open air right next right next to the church that's a beautiful setting and you can see clearly tenerife just in the distance there los gagantas of tenerife there with the church right there absolute prime location and here in fact this is all the hotels as well they said they got some banana trees and some other exotic fruit trees as well and you can walk all the way up to the terrace bit up here too this this is ours that's our terrace do you want to go in first monica so sympathetically done it's beautiful dark wood ceiling everything's been done i said it's been renovated twice in the past 10 years it's immaculate they've kept it so true to what the original building would have been and this is the special bit oh should i show the bathroom yeah okay first time i've seen it actually oh with a window there the nicest ceilings what do we think it's really nice isn't it okay monica you go first for this oh just before we go out our private terrace you can open i love these open like that and then to shut out the light just oh so nice so classy okay imagine okay first off imagine having a coffee in the morning waking up to that view well done monica well done well done it's a great spot in fact it's it's hard isn't it place at laguma that you've never been how do you know where to stay and how do you know what type of property to stay at because this place i think reminds me of one two six a night with full breakfast euros 126 euros for the night but it comes with breakfast so i think it's 26 euros for breakfast for two people and it's got an incredibly good reputation for breakfast this place like really really special breakfast you go when you check in we basically said the rough idea of what we want and they said great come down at the time you wanted me said 9 30 i said great we'll be ready for you and they apparently make a very very high quality breakfast especially for you so we can't wait to see what that's like but it's a really nice place yeah i think it also has a jacuzzi somewhere yeah it does actually doesn't it's got a jacuzzi that's interesting actually you're right we'll go to the jacuzzi later and they did say let us know when you want to use the jacuzzi because we will actually take the top off the jacuzzi for you because there's been a huge amount of ash from la palma so they have to put the cover on the jacuzzi so they don't get too much ash in the actual jacuzzi and they said if you come a few weeks ago almost everything was covered in ash but then they had a lot of rainfall that was apparently very lucky and that washed away a lot of the ash but she's the the lady working reception said you're still going to see a lot of traces of the ash and actually now i look at it i guess you probably can see it on the roof of that taxi shop and possibly that's what the black is there on those terracotta roof tiles possibly in fact monica i can see it on these terracotta roofs you can see all of the black ash on it yeah yeah um and just take my word for it you can see it should we wrap it up have i missed anything okay wrap it up because tomorrow morning well i think basically what we've done i i may have said this is the east side of the island but i was actually completely wrong this is more around the north of the island so tomorrow we're exploring the south of the island and everything to do with christopher columbus so we're going to head off chill out go and find a restaurant to go and find a restaurant to eat at for the night thank you so much for coming along with us today please do give the video a like subscribe to the channel we'll see you in the next one you
2021-12-07 14:37
