Day 6 P&O’s Azura’s next port of call - Tenerife.

It was still quite dark as we arrived in port in Tenerife, the second of our Canary Island stops. That meant photos of the port would have to wait until we were leaving.

Today our itinerary was scheduled to be a very full one, as we had booked the whole family to go on one of P&O’s all day excursions. It was called, the Beauty of Mount Teide and was set to take about 8 hours.  An early breakfast was therefore called for up in the Verona restaurant, before heading down to the dock side, to board our coach. Although getting on and off coaches using crutches isn’t the easiest thing to do, P&O have a system of reserving the front seats of their coaches for those with mobility problems, so that helped getting on and off the coaches during the day.

The journey started by the coach snaking up through the Esperanza Forest, full of tall pine trees only native to the Canary Islands.

The landscape suddenly opens out from the trees in to light shrub land.

This in turn quickly changed to a landscape of lava, long hardened leaving a much more barren and sparsely vegetated terrain.

Our first stop was at the Ortuno Viewpoint, where we got our first good look at our destination, Mount Teide.

Mount Teide is the third highest volcano in the world with a height of 3718 metres (12,198ft) above sea level.

We continued on in our air conditioned coach higher and higher before stopping for some mid morning refreshment at the Restaurante Bamby, in the shadow of Mount Teide.

The coffee was lovely and Mel and the girls said the Hot Chocolate was really thick and creamy and very, very nice.

The tour continued with the guide giving information about the islands history, it’s people and culture, as well as its peculiar climate. All whilst we continued to climb through the dramatic landscape around Mount Teide.

We passed through to the inside of a massive volcanic crater presided over by the still domineering Mount Teide. The whole of the area inside the crater is now the National Park of Las Canadas.

If you want to get to the very top of Mount Teide then you need to use a cable car which unfortunately this tour didn’t have time for as it would have added another two hours to the day, just in queuing.

Instead we went just along from there to a spectacular viewpoint, where we could get out and take some pictures looking down into the crater or up to the volcano.

As you can tell there was a lot to see and do on this tour, too much I think for one days blog, so join me tomorrow for the continuation of our tour on Tenerife.