Above Puerto De La Cruz is an historic town called La Orotava which has several grand houses (now turned into tourist places) which are stopping off places for the maturer tourist such as ourselves. We looked around several including the Tenerifian famous house called the Casa de los Balconies from 1622.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_de_los_Balcones
The first two photos are from that Casa (I think - you can definitely see a load of balconies) with the stags-horns ferns and a big Arum in the courtyard. This time it's not Colocasia esculanta - taro doesn't produce that long stem above the ground it only produces the corm underground). This big plant - well over 2 metres tall- is what the rotumans call swamp taro - i.e. only very poor people eat it (my wife said dismissively) or I guess anyone will in times of hardship. Swamp taro is probably one of the Alocasia which are closely related to Taro but not quite taro. Wikipedia confirms this so it must be true (ha!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alocasia_macrorrhizos
The whole stem can be eaten (actually an extenssion of the corm that form the root) but only after a lot of boiling. Like rhubarb, taro and several other plants leaves Alocasia is chock full of oxalic acid which gives you an itchy mouth and can lead to hallucinations among other symptoms. We won't be trying it soon - especially as it won't grow in Tipperty and needs far too much water for libya.
Also in the Casa de la Balconies was a mini musuem that I don't remember anything about about and a lace workshop and shop. I remember leaving Jiurie to wonder around the lace shop - there is a lace training school there too - very interesting.
As i said yesterday everywhere has their website nowadays and here it is... http://www.casa-balcones.com/ingles/index.html
Below is a photo taken at a companion Casa across the street from the Casa de la Balconies. This was the Casa del Turistas and we were touristas alright. We looked at everything. There were displays about the native garaunches (pre European contact Berbers - thought here must have been contact with the Romans who got out this way), sand painting and pottery etc. I'm sure we bought tiles and numbers for the house from there - which still haven't been put up after 2 years.
Now when we go on holiday I don't bother to pretend that we are above the tourist status - that we are somehow bewtter than everyone else because we are "indepeendent" tourists - I just go with it and be a tourist - I look at the museums, I look at the shops, I look at the tourist places and enjoy it because that is just what we are - tourists. I mean I can't even pretend that we have stumbled across a place because I read the tourist guides and the pamphlets and then drive around looking for something I/we've picked out - now sometimes we do find places that we weren't looking for but they are still tourist places deliberately set up to attract people like us even if we weren't looking for them in the first place e.g. the high cafe near Masca, or the view points at the sides of roads. We may not have been looking for them and so we have stumbled across them but they were set up with tourists in mind so are not exactly hidden treasures.
Okay not sure where that rant came from but it came.
Actually I'm not sure if this photo was from there or from another Casa further down the town - the one with the wedding Marquee in the back...
Anyhow you can see the big Echiums that are towering above me and the quite lush vegetation up in the valley of Orotavia in Tenerife.
