Don’t Forget Your Hotel Vouchers
With Mr Black safely on the plane, we flew for about 4 hours into Gran Canaria. Apparently it was going to take a bit longer because of the strong head winds, but as our pilot assured us “It’s okay, I’ll just fly a little faster”.
Straight off the plane into the first available taxi, and trying to explain where we were staying to a confused looking taxi driver who had never heard of Parque Luz Apartments. That’s okay though, he has a radio. 35 euros for a trip from the airport to the apartments, and visiting a few other places on the way that might be the place we’d want to stay as well. Bargain.
The real fun didn’t start until we got to the reception desk though. I spoke my first Spanish beyond “Gracias” to a real Canarian… “Do you speak English?” …. I’ve forgotten what it is in Spanish already, something about englees, but check me out, conversing with the locals like a real…. Spaniard.
“Do you have your booking printout?”, we were asked. “Ummmm, no”, we replied. And after 10-15 minutes chatting with the guy over how we had an electronic copy, but no printout – and where could we find a printer (at 9pm) to print it out for him. He called his friend, and spoke Spanish a lot. Ali’s face drooped even further when he said we could stay on the beach. There are worse places to spend the night on the beach, I’m sure – but we might go see the sand dunes tomorrow. He eventually decided to let us stay anyway though, and will call our travel agent on Monday to make sure we’ve actually paid. What a nice Reception Man 
We’ve been for a wander around the immediate area, in order to find some water and the nearest supermarket (across the road!). We also came across what Ali refers to as a crap English seaside resort. A big amusement park style area with a big wheel, dodgems, and here’s the best part – an empty bar with a single employed DJ singing karaoke apparently to himself.
But huzzah! We’ve arrived. And I read a little bit about the history of Gran Canaria starting at 3000BC with the Cro-Magnon inhabitants, and the colonisations from Portugal, Spain and Italy in 1496 – 1525.
See, and suddenly the blog is transformed into the wealth of travel knowledge that I know you all love, rather than ramblings of the crap British Travellers who didn’t print out the booking voucher. Not that we HAD a booking voucher, at least not one that said “print this invoice, you’ll need it”. Yeah, I blame the travel agents
