La Palmos

Tour leaflet for the Hop-On, Hop-Off Bus

Las Palmos is a beautiful warm island.

We decided to take the Hop-On Hop-Off Bus.

The tour operators had a clever idea on the dock to capture the people on board the ships.

A pair of comedians, one of them on stilts, stood on the sidewalk and entertained the people standing in line.

I was there for 40 minutes, not irritated at all, for the show was good, the comedian's bathroom plunger did not land on my head, as it did on the heads of many of the tourists who walked by, and though the line didn't move, a bus was there, so it seemed that something was happening.

A life-time first for me was seeing bananas growing on trees.

 ...Wyona, getting ready for the bus to move ...

We are serious bus tourists.

The headphones are carefully wrapped around our necks.

We get our earphones plugged into the right station and then, with a poke or two in the back, we tell each other if the dialogue is going on or turned off.

The maps of the bus routes are laid out on our laps.

We tell each other ahead, how many round trips we are going to make and when is the last possible moment we can get off the bus and still make it to the ship.

I don't know why I take a shot at a pink house, with an orange tile roof against the background of a white high rise.

I am not used to look at the word from the second deck of a bus, even though I have been travelling there for a while.

I like the feeling of going by trees and having them whip by us, brushing at the very least against the rails of the bus and sometimes against our bodies.

And being so close to the tops of the trees and the flowers that are growing on their is another surprise for me.

I do love the May Day trees and the lilacs at home, and even the tiny cones of the Larch trees when they are in flower.

But we never see the vivd colour or the large blossoms on our trees at home.

Doesn't this just look like a surreal painting -- not a real photograph.






The perpendicular and horizontal lines and the regularity of these buildings surprised me.

No washing hanging from the balconies. And no irregular lines -- the colours of the buildings, all from the same palette.  The sameness of the buildings.

Every trip is a new feast for the eyes.

Arta