Ugly Resorts on Gran Canaria

In the morning we discovered that the El Dorado offered a fantastic view of Santa Cruz from our balcony. We walked over to the ferry after checking out, but discovered that we were too early. We ended up walking to find breakfast, then driving the car to the ferry after more walking around. The port entrance is awkwardly placed far from where we expected, but we were excited to get on the way to the next island.

The excitement of arrival in Gran Canaria was equal to the disappointment of arriving in Puerto Rico, the resort area where we had arranged nearly a week of nights through RCI. We'll never, never, never do that again.

The western coast of Gan Canaria is beautiful. There are awesome mountains with vegetation that changes from lush Mediterranean to arid cordilleran to... none. Some of the volcanic rocks showed gorgeous colors and textures. The views of Tenerife and the countryside were great.

After a 2.5 hour winding, hot ride, we arrived in vacation Hell, also called Puerto Rico. The surrounding countryside is beautiful with bare rocks and interesting ravines. The resort is terrible. You can't see the countryside under the several hundred resort buildings. It's a barren cartoon of a vacation paradise. My comment to Jeanette was that it was interesting in a Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not sort of way. The best thing, of course, was that although we had even called the day before to confirm our reservation, they were about to give our room away when we got there (mid-afternoon) and the only room they had was about 40 feet from the busy highway that circumnavigates the island. Joy.

We moaned for a bit, then went down to find a beer. We had a drink with a view of the sunset and checked out the beach. It was just a mess of tourist junk. We asked a British shop owner about places to eat and she recommended an Indian restaurant nearby. We tried it and the food turned out to be very good, if not incredibly spicy.

We returned to the room and I briefly went down to email our friends. This was the only perk to the place as it turned out that not even the laundry room was available while we were there. On the way back to the room, I stopped by the hotel restaurant and brought Jeanette back a Crema Catalana that was yummy. We still have the little clay cassole in which it came.

At this point, we decided already that we would take a loss on some of the days of our prepaid stay in Puerto Lame-o and head to Lanzarote or Tenerife after only two or three nights in Gran Canaria.