In the first quarter of the year, Andy and I spent seven weeks away from home. Three of these were on Tenerife, four on the Isle of Bute. Whereas the Bute trip was to dog-sit the cutest canine in the land while my sister was on holiday, and also spend more time with my mum, the Tenerife trip was work. Having decided to breathe new life into our Real Tenerife products, we needed to spend time there to gather information with which to bring them up to date.
An example of our walking guides.
Our Tenerife Guides
We have five different guides related to Tenerife – downloadable walking routes; downloadable town & city guides; a walking guidebook; a series of driving routes; and a travel guidebook. Most require updating. The walking guidebook needs a complete redesign.
In theory, updating guides that already exist should take less time than writing new ones. Our experience of over a decade of writing Slow Travel guides for Inntravel taught us this isn’t always the case. Making any changes can be like pushing over one domino at the start of a line of them. A tweak in one place prompts another tweak elsewhere, and so on. This was especially the case when the source document had been written by someone else, so the style and tone may be different as well as the content. As a result, in many ways writing a travel guide from scratch is easier, and also more satisfying. Similarly, updating travel guides for guidebook publishers can be a real pain in the bahookie, especially as the financial rewards aren’t great, even from the big guidebook publishers. This is one of the reasons we publish our own. Another is, we couldn’t have published a travel guide like our Real Tenerife Insiders’ Guide for one of those publishers as most have gone down the bite-sized snippets and sets of lists road, and those aren’t the type of guides we believe add value when anyone can pull that sort of information from Google in minutes.
We probably should change the cover, but it does catch people’s attention.
On the ground
Whereas in the past, compiling information for Slow Travel guides would be covered by the company who commissioned us, doing it for ourselves means we have to foot the bill for all travel costs. That means a decent outlay. However, we’ve been doing this sort of work a long time. Anyone booking the sort of holiday which would include a programme like the one we planned would pay three times as much for the privilege. For us, it’s a worthwhile investment. Plus, and this is no different from the work we did for Inntravel, when travel writers don’t have to rely on tourist boards or PR firms to ‘sort out’ travel, accommodation, meals etc, there is no obligation to just write the nice things about a destination. That freedom is immensely satisfying.
Thanks to the first-hand knowledge we built up of Tenerife over the years, there were never going to be major fundamental changes to the content of our guides. Traditional towns are traditional towns because their character develops over centuries. Restaurants come and go, new museums open, but places like La Orotava and Garachico remain much the same. Similarly, paths which were historic trading routes or transhumance trails are unlikely to change.
The devastation caused by fires in 2023 is still evident.
But things do change
With walking routes, the weather can have a major impact, especially these days. The forest fire which devastated a great swathe of the upper parts of Tenerife’s north west slopes in 2023 still impacts on walking routes there. On official sites, the extent of the damage is shown as a huge red blob, a no-go area. And yet on the ground it doesn’t quite match up, which is why it was essential to walk it for ourselves. Some parts which were shown as being outside the worst affected area were difficult to navigate because of the extent of the damage, while others inside the red zone were much as they were the last time we walked them. The bottom line was that changes to our current routes in that area were required.
The approach to Santiago del Teide. It will improve with time.
In Santiago del Teide, human intervention caused problems. The final stages of the Anillo Insular (a ring road making travel from south to north via the west easier) has caused chaos in the hill town of Santiago del Teide. Currently, it is a mess, with tall metal fences and mountains of discarded earth blocking ancient paths. We even witnessed hikers finding themselves imprisoned at the end of their route right on the edge of town. Again, we had to devise new paths. Ironically, this resulted in a better route.
Sometimes changes are for the better. The redevelopment of the seafront in Santa Cruz has made it a much nicer place for pedestrians, vastly improving first impressions of the city for cruise passengers while warranting a major rewrite of our Santa Cruz city guide.
Where there were once cars in Santa Cruz.
Other adjustments were more minor. But they all add up to a lot of work.
Below the tip of the iceberg
And that’s what happens between now and the start of Tenerife’s main northern European season. Basically, we have spring and summer to update and, in some cases, redesign all the guides. Plus, the Real Tenerife website needs a serious makeover. As we do all the design/website work ourselves, it is a major project, and one which is slotted in beside the other writing projects we have on the go.
After the research and writing comes the design work.
Then there’s Bute. Over four weeks on the island, I saw parts I’d never seen before, learned about many things I didn’t know, and basically sailed away with a suitcase full of fascinating information. The question is, what do I do with all this juicy stuff?
