Disembarkation Day 20 Monday 8 December 2025
🌤️ Lots of sunshine, dry 20°c + today
Awake and up at 0715h as usual. After breakfast at 0800h I had just an hour to finish my packing and get my luggage on deck. We were leaving it on deck for the morning and returning to collect it with a taxi at 1200h. Meanwhile we walked to the bus station to make sure we had the Bay number, bus number and times correct. 59, 112 and every 30 minutes with 1h 03 minutes journey time. Next stop was a return to the Art Museum, truth be told we needed a coffee but decided to take in a couple of exhibitions, one of erotic paintings and another by a number of different photographers called The Vertigo of Images which was about the use of AI in manipulating media. The introductory text in the gallery was a turn off straight away 'Images and their potentials configure a territory of realities and experiences as vast and heterogeneous as it is difficult to define.' I lost the will to live after the first sentence and decided it WAS time for coffee and a pastry after all. Once that was fixed, we walked slowly back to the taxi rank by the liner terminal to find  taxi to take us to the ship to collect our luggage and on to the bus station. The driver at the front of the rank didn't speak English so with the help of his mate and the translate app on my phone, we managed to get back to the ship to load up our bags. While we were there, we had a quick hello/goodbye to Gerben who was taking over as Captain for the next leg of the voyage to Cape Verde. Our driver dropped us off at the bus station OK. When the bus arrived we were a long way back in the queue and our luggage had to go on the 'wrong' side of the bus but the driver retrieved it for us at the stop in Los Cristianos so we didn't have stand in the middle of the road to get it out. The journey was very fast with no stops through very dry and sometimes bleak areas of lava fields. We arrived at 13:30 with plenty of time before our 15:00 check in, so we stopped at a cafe to have some lunch and a welcome beer (it was quite warm for December). Just after 14:00 we set off to find a taxi to take us to the Paradise Park Hotel. Not our usual type of hotel but it was just for one night and close to the airport. We checked in a 14:30 and waited 15 minutes for our room to be ready. The room was nice, and we repacked our bags for the flight home tomorrow. We had a lie down but no sleep. The activities by the pool were a bit noisy. We went for supper at 18:30, reasonable food, and a lot of choice. The only fly in the ointment was being charged €2.10 for a bottle of water. While at breakfast, water is  included in the range of beverages on offer. I made my displeasure known in my review!
A selection of iPhone images taken in the old town of Santa Cruz. I have included the introductory text to THE VERTIGO OF IMAGES exhibition. It was this kind of dense rambling verbiage that was the final nail in the coffin of my photography degree. Wading through stuff like this while studying Critical Theory took all of the joy out of my photographic education.