Walking the length of Lanzarote

During December 2009, I had fun doing a walk across the length of Lanzarote, from Orzola in the North East to Playa Blanca in the South West. I took seven days to do 122K (about 76M).

The seven walks are roughly shown on this map. On my first day, I went from Orzola (the North Easterly town) to Haria. The next walk is Haria to Teguise. Then Teguise to Arrecife. Arrecife to Puerto del Carmen, Puerto del Carmen to Uga (near Yaiza), Uga to Fermes. And on the final day I went from Fermes to Playa Blanca (the most South Westerly town).

Each day, I caught a bus from my hotel in Arrecife to the start, did the walk and then took a bus back to my hotel. Because of the bus timetables and because some days were too wet to walk, I had to do a few of the walks out of order.

Although there were only a few buses a day to the outlying villages, virtually all the buses I caught were on time. I had copies of the timetables that are available at www.arrecifebus.com. However, these timetables only give the time for the start of each journey. Since I've got back, I've discovered there are other web pages at www.arrecifebus.com that give the times of the buses from some of the major villages. That would have been very useful. I'm not sure whether these pages are new or whether foolishly I didn't spot them earlier!

I mainly used walking routes from the book Walk! Lanzarote. I also used the companion map: Lanzarote: Tour & Trail 1:40000 Scale Super-Durable Map. Both are described at www.walking.demon.co.uk/lanz.htm. I found these to be excellent.

Although the book doesn't offer a route all the way from Orzola to Playa Blanca, most of my route was derived from routes in the book or routes in the book done in reverse. I just had to provide my own route for three small sections.

The gps traces of where I went were recorded by a Garmin Forerunner 305 watch. I used SportTracks to read a day's walking from the Garmin and generate a gpx file. The photos were taken with a Canon 350D camera fitted with a a cheap 28mm to 300mm zoom lens (Vivitar Series 1). I uploaded the photos to flickr using iPhoto (on a Mac). I then used each of the gpx files with gpstagr in order automatically to geotag any appropriate photos in flickr. (I like gpstagr as it's so easy to use.) I've put the data of each of the gpx files into a database. When you access kml on this page, you are using some software I wrote that generates kml from the appropriate gpx augmenting the kml with a placemark for each photo that was taken along the route. This software uses the flickr api to find the appropriate photos. Two other credits: the embedded maps on this page use Google Maps. The ones below also use the information on the reviewmylife blog.

The book has gps waypoints, i.e., it provides latitude and longitudes for various points along each route. As my Garmin watch has a screen to show the current latitude and longitude, I was able to check occasionally that I was in the right place. My watch also allows me to find the current elevation. I found comparing this with the map another useful indicator for checking where I was.

Below there is a lot more information about what I did each day. Essentially there is a map of my route and some photos. If you are using Internet Explorer, the maps may take some time to load.

Here are three ways of viewing this information.

• If you just want to see the photos, you could click on the slideshow links.
• Instead, you may want to follow the route using the maps given below. The start of a day's walking will either be at the top of the map or on the right hand side of the map. Zoom in on the start of the walk and then follow the track seeing thumbnails of the photos that I took along the way. If you click on a thumbnail, it will show a larger version of the photo.
• Alternatively, if you have Google Earth on your computer, you could click on an kml link, wait for Google Earth to load and then do the same sort of thing, i.e., zoom in on the start of the walk and follow the track to see thumbnails of the photos that I took (clicking on a thumbnail if you want to show a larger version of the photo). Note: Google Earth is available for Linux, Macs and Windows.