Walking off the beaten track on the world’s edge

GOMERA shops offer 20 island walking guides in German and just one in English — the latter costs 14 and falls apart.

At least two concerns, one Austrian, one German, offer guided walks and, often, in the mornings, especially in winter, we see strings of ramblers following a favourite path up the other side of the valley to the villages 3,000 feet above.

We, ourselves, walk alone or with friends and, sometimes, the best walks turn into adventures whether one intended this or not. We are not hill trekkers or mountaineers; we wear lightweight boots and carry a bag with a map, a camera, binoculars, a sandwich and a bottle of water. We rarely even carry walking sticks, although these are particularly useful when descending steep Gomera paths. We regularly come across untrodden ways and enjoy the novel or nail-biting thrills of the unknown.

Thus, we found ourselves climbing up an old path, so steep as to be almost vertical, one evening last December. We had descended to an uninhabited valley hours earlier and were now taking a shorter, but steeper, older path back up to our car. We had miscalculated the difficulties; now, the light was failing fast. To return to the valley floor 2,000 feet below us before dark was impossible.

The only option was to keep climbing. But the path was so little used as to be almost undetectable. Moreover, sheer cliffs of basalt edged the plateau above.

We knew the light went entirely at 10 past six; we had only 20 minutes left to reach the plateau. If we did not reach it, we would have no option but to sit out the night on the 70 degree slope. It would be cold.

We had no flashlamps or matches; our clothes were light trousers and T-shirts and a light jacket each; our remaining provision consisted of half a litre of water, a few dried figs and an orange. As I said, we are doughty hill walkers and did not expect to be.

Happily, we had the junior son with us, a strapping youth of 15. Indefatigable, he charged ever upward, ahead, calling back reports of the terrain. Having electrified into frantic action when I realised our problem must go up, can't go down! I was, after an hour of high-speed vertical ascent, lathered in sweat and feeling my knees going.

None of us, wife, son or I, mentioned the "huddled on a pitch-black cliff for the night" words, but we all knew it would be suicide to continue once darkness fell. So, son rushed ahead, calling back to us.

It was the cliffs that baffled us. We might reach their base before the light went, but what then? Was there a path? How, without climbing the sheer rock faces, 50 feet high, could we possibly gain the plateau? Was our path simply a goat track, petering out at the cliff face.

Now, the way ahead rose so sheer that, half the time, we were scrambling on all fours; to look back, and down, was a death-defying experience.

At last, we made it, and avoided a traumatic night.The boy called back to say he'd reached some level ground. Sure enough, The path, upon reaching the cliff face, turned and ran along the base in a stone-paved metre-wide gallery, looking down on a 500ft drop. Soon, it climbed gently through a copse of sweet-smelling Canarian pines. There was still light enough to see but, five minutes later, as we reached the car, darkness fell. Our timing was impeccable, as we gratefully said.

THESE July days, cochineal covers the plate cactus prickly pear with a powder-like dry ice or the bloom one finds on the terminals of car batteries. It is slightly fibrous, woven with webs. Inside, the match head-size cochineal, grubs go about their business.

Soft and very vulnerable, they are the source of a brilliant red dye, once widely used for colouring foods sweet cakes, confectionery and foodstuffs of all kinds. Now, with synthetic dyes, they are no longer collected and crushed, and thrive undisturbed on the cactuses, now in flower.

The prickly pear, also called 'nopal', was brought to Europe from South America by the conquistadors, but the beetles were not imported until the 1820 when the industry started. Cochineal is still harvested in Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, but principally in Peru, which produces around 640 tons a year. It takes 130,000 pregnant cochineal grubs to make a kilo can it really take 130 million to make a tonne?

The cactus is now sometimes a nuisance. It will grow almost anywhere and an amputated leaf, left on the ground, will begin to sprout new shoots, the spines soft at first, then hardening, and the parent leaf sending roots into the earth, or gravel, or fissures in the rock.

Years ago, building a house on a steep slope in La Gomera, our first task was to remove the cactus; we had no idea of what we were letting ourselves in for when we bought the site. The cactus had been there for years for a hundred years, possibly since it was first planted on the island, and had trunks as thick as one's thigh and as tough as a tree. We attacked it with machetes, axes, sachos and chain saws; we tied ropes around it, and attached these to a winch to try to pull out the roots.

Eventually, these had to be burrowed under and excavated. We could not leave the smallest segment on the ground upon which we poured cement, otherwise, in time, it would break through.