My first voyage ‘round the world, part 12

I don’t recall much about our stop in Tenerife, except that we might have rented a car one day by pooling our per-diem money as we had done in Sicily, but I’m not even sure.

Suffice to say that the entertainment aboard the Galileo Galilei was every bit as good an option as going offshore and getting slammed by the burning sun, under the island tropical, semi-arid climate.. 

What I recall is that it was in fact better on board the ship. Santa Cruz was a big city of several hundred thousand people, second only to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, and it sat just 130 miles off the coast of Africa, but fairly far from mainland Spain that was 810 miles away, which explain why we didn’t see any Spaniards or Portuguese getting onboard our ship. 

The place was still under Franco’s dictatorship, and the large port was a major hub between Europe, Africa and the Americas, with ships arriving from many nations. 

Soon we would be headed south, into colder austral winter weather and presumably rougher seas...