Holiday Snaps: Loro Parque, Tenerife

Tripping to another island

The day trip to Tenerife is now a constant feature of my holidays to Gran Canaria where I have the choice of visiting Loro Parque or just doing a tour of the island.

The port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is just a 70 minute boat ride from Puerto de las Nieves on the north-eastern coast of Gran Canaria, but this all takes a lot out of you.

I felt going to Loro Parque was essential especially for my friend who was having his first package holiday at a seaside resort. At least to prove the point that there was more besides sun, sea, sand and sometimes sex.

We had already visited Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, the capital city of the island of Gran Canaria and between fable, legend and truth, gone to the Christopher Columbus house purportedly resided in, which is now a museum. The view is that most trips to the New World as it then known passed through the Canary Islands.

Off to Tenerife

For Tenerife, we got a wake-up call at 5:15AM having been out most of the night, we were somnambulists for the hours that followed. Though we had planned for an early breakfast at 5:30AM, we had no stomach for such.

The shuttle bus to take us to the port arrived around 6:20AM and the sooner that I got in my seat, I attempted a half slumber and for the journey between Playa del Inglés and the Las Palmas, the chaperone allowed us some peace to catch some shut-eye.

I noticed a few changes to the scheduling, the trip was better planned, we were given hints to what shows to see and the best order to maximise the usage of our time at Loro Parque. The ferry was an hour earlier and it also meant we returned in enough time to make dinner back at the hotel.

Our chaperone was a chatterbox extraordinaire, he switched between 4 languages with ease and repeated his advice in as many ways possible that the stupid would be highly enlightened, yet there were times I wished I had travelled with my ear plugs, for I was on the verge of telling him shut up for a nanosecond and give our eardrums a rest from the din.

The shows

The sea was calm, the journey easy and we were at Loro Parque just before 11:00AM, and we made for Orca World where we were to see killer whales in performance. Though the show as to start at 11:30, the arena was quite full some 15 minutes to the start.

The orca whale is really not a whale, it is a dolphin and yet apex predators. These creatures are huge and could measure up to 6 metres long.

The handlers do not get in the water with the orcas as they do with the dolphins that are much smaller or even the lion seals.

Though Loro Parque was created for parrots, parakeets, cockatoos and birds of that family group, it is essentially a zoo, but one of significance for the rarity of the animals, their conservation efforts and the documentation that accompanies their exhibits.

And then

We attended the orca and dolphin shows, but decidedly missed the sea lion show, at the dolphin show, I learnt something new, how to determine the sex of dolphins and what to do if I encounter a beached or stranded dolphin.

The service at the publicised restaurant for which we had vouchers for a discounted price for a set meal was perfunctory to the point of almost appalling.

The waiters at Patio del Loro looked like if they smiled they might have a terminal cardiac arrest, even I could not wish a smile for them, lest it became an emergency. I left a tip, well the tip was, please find ways to smile. As for the bill, it was not a penny more and not a penny less than what the bill said.

Much as literally every venue in Spain displays the WiFi free logo, nothing is as annoying as to find that the service is poor to the point that you could not connect. My view was that Loro Parque did not add enough capacity to handle the crowds that throng the place. I would rather they did not have the service than have signs everywhere and yet not deliver.

To Tenerife - Loro Parque

To Tenerife at last

Visiting Tenerife today was a thrill, after all my fuss, it was still a day out to the zoo. The pickup to Agaete where we boarded a ferry was 10 minutes late but I must say that this trip was organised by the same company that cancelled the trip for Tuesday, late on Monday evening.

I would suppose there are empires in that organisation where one excels at incompetence whilst another department strives to make things happen – somehow booking direct and booking through a hotel tour representative can make a whole lot of difference, I still never found out why the tour was cancelled.

At a bearing from 310 degrees we set sail for Santa Cruz de Tenerife and it was all over in just about 70 minutes.

Loro Parque

On disembarking we boarded a bus and headed for Loro Parque on the western side of Tenerife, it was established in 1972 as a parrot aviary but has grown to include a larger variety of animals and it is the home all sorts of endangered or threatened species.

There is such a fascination for watching sea lions and dolphins perform, but we also had the added fun of watching orca whales. When we arrived in the Orca Ocean arena, the cameras zoomed in on me which was beamed out to the big screen with a balloon callout 'bald is beautiful' – I could only wag a finger at the prankster.

Hard entertainment

Sometimes, I wonder what it takes to entertain us. When we watched the Diana Ross tribute performance, each completed song drew polite applause.

A few days later we watched a Chinese acrobatic troupe and as each performance got a bit more difficult we seemed to be less appreciative of the last and were slow to applaud the next.

Imagine, the man was balancing on one end of plank which was placed on top of the round side of a cylinder and was using the principle of levers to flip bowls from the other end of the plank to the top of his head. He did it with three bowls at a time and then a cup and finally flipped a spoon into the cup.

Another performance was the legs of a chair each balanced on 4 beer bottles and the man doing handstands on the back and seat of the chair, he went on to balance another chair unevenly on the first chair and still do handstands but each consequent applause was grudging, I probably initiated the most appreciation for those acts.

A lady spinning tables with her feet on the table edges and obliquely, then going on to spin a colleague on a barrel, really awe-inspiring stuff as far as I was concerned.

Fascinated more by animals

So watching sea lions, then dolphins and finally orca whales do the same acts of jumping out of the water, going through hoops and splashing around, whilst being incentivised through frequent handouts of fish was in no way boring as if humans were to do the same thing, each repeated act still drew increasing applause.

Animals do repetitive things compared to humans doing unique things and we felt better entertained by the animals.

By the time I returned to the hotel, there was great consideration on their part of offer a cold buffet, but as the saying in Yoruba goes, the late night visitor would hardly have choices for the food laid before him – a salad and a bottle of cold water, you could not complain at all.