Bikepacking Alone in Tenerife Spain | Cycling El Teide

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ENGLISH
This is my first international bikepacking film. A solo winter bikepacking adventure in Tenerife in Spain, more specifically the Canary Islands. I flew from Manchester Airport to Tenerife South with my bike and filming gear and based myself in Icod De Los Vinos in the Drago Nest Hostel. I camped up Mount Teide and visited the likes of Masca, Santiago Del Teide and La Orotava and Puerto De La Cruz. I also attempted to visit Punta De Teno, which didn’t go to plan!

ESPAÑOL
Esta es mi primera película internacional de bikepacking. Una aventura de ciclismo de invierno en solitario en Tenerife en España, más específicamente en las Islas Canarias. Volé desde el aeropuerto de Manchester a Tenerife Sur con mi bicicleta y equipo de filmación y me instalé en Icod De Los Vinos en el Drago Nest Hostel. Acampé en el Teide y visité lugares como Masca, Santiago Del Teide y La Orotava y Puerto De La Cruz. También intenté visitar Punta De Teno, ¡lo cual no salió según lo planeado!

Places to camp – https://centralreservas.tenerife.es/?a=5

Feel free to follow me on Facebook, Instagram and Strava.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Cycling366
Strava: https://www.strava.com/athletes/3702013
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cycling366/

What gear do I use?: https://www.cycling366.com/

Routes here:
Day 1: https://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/4675727614
Day 2: https://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/4675749289
Day 3: https://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/4675806847
Day 4:https://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/4675809919
All music licensed with MusicBed

#bikepacking​ #tenerife #cycling

Time stamps:
0:00 – Intro
0:35 – Day 1 Santiago Del Teide, Masca and The Corona National Forest
2:05 – Day 2 Icod De Los Vinos to Teide
3:45 – Camping on Mount Teide
4:15 – Day 3 To Teide summit and down
5:37 – Route Summary and BTS

It’s been over two years since i’ve left the uk because of covid after several failed attempts because of quarantining rules i was finally able to fly from manchester to tenerife in the canary islands for a winter bike packing adventure my favorite volcanic island So So So So Do Thank you very much for watching my film i hope you enjoyed it if you did please consider subscribing to the channel give this video a thumbs up and any comments or questions stick them in the comments box so this is my first international bike packing film

On this channel it’s been a very long time since i’ve been abroad and it was such a relief to escape the cold british weather just for one week and enjoy the sun in tenerife it’s been such a long time coming and i’m really glad i did it so i

Flew from manchester to tenerife south and i brought my bike with me it’s about 50 pounds each way to take a big bike box on the plane i was flying with easyjet it might be a little bit more with other providers but it’s something i’ve really enjoyed doing over recent years because it

Allows me to have all of my stuff with me stuff that i’m familiar with you know the brakes are on the correct side when you go to different countries sometimes they switch the brakes which can make things very sketchy i know the bike’s going to fit me and it’s a lot cheaper

Than renting a bike and of course it can carry all of my stuff as well because it’s got the pannier x on there i got that bike box for like 100 quid or something several years ago and because of its size it allows you to pack all

Your clothes in there as well and for me i think it’s the best way of taking your bike abroad the only issue you’ve got with it is that once you’ve unpacked the bike you’ve still got the box and you’ve got to do something with it so you’ve either got the option of

Trying to store it somewhere or in my case booking a hostel for a whole week and kind of using that as a base so when i arrived in tenerife it was lovely and warm it was in the low 20s which is just right for cycling in my opinion

But there was a slight issue with the weather in that they were having something called the kalima it’s like a phenomenon that happens um quite regularly to be honest it can happen at any month in the canary islands and what it effectively is is it’s the sand from the

Moroccan desert the sahara desert that gets blown over the islands and it causes quite a lot of haze and it doesn’t make for easy breathing either it can affect the air quality quite a lot so the visibility wasn’t great but the weather was so i had planned to stay in a hostel

It was the drago nest hostel which i’ve stayed in before a couple of times actually pre-pandemic of course i use that as a bit of a base to be honest because i flew my bike out there i had all my equipment in it my camera equipment as opposed to finding somewhere to store

That i thought well i’ll kind of kill two birds with one stone i’ll use the hostel as a place to store my stuff but i’ve also got a base then to kind of come back charge my batteries and if i want to sleep there as well i’ve got

That option obviously because i paid for it the hostel is really really nice it’s incredibly cheap as all hostels tend to be but you got breakfast included in it as well so it’s somewhere that i keep coming back to i’ve had a great experience there the staff are always really friendly

And for the price you pay i think it’s fantastic it’s on the north west of the island so away from the tourists you tend to get a lot of british tourists in the south because they just want to go for the sunshine and it’s always sunnier in

South but the north in my opinion is some of the best parts of the island because it’s much more lush much more green and fewer uh foreigners so i just get the locals it just feels a little bit more spanish so it’s somewhere i absolutely love and i can’t wait to go

Back so day one i did a little bit of a loop my plan was to go down to santiago del tady which is just on the edge of the road up to mount tady which is that prominent volcano that you’ll have seen throughout the film it’s quite

Obvious it’s you can see it from pretty much any canary island uh it’s very very large one of the highest volcanoes in europe in fact so it’s um yeah you can’t miss it the weather started to turn a little bit on the first day it was

A little bit chillier than i expected it was quite windy and there was the threat of rain and eventually it did rain as i got in to the woodland funnily enough the woodland was called the corona forest which was a bit ironic however the trails in there are fantastic i’m

Really glad i did that i did make the mistake of running quite thin tires compared to what i normally run they were 32s which probably isn’t enough there were slicks as well to do those sort of trails so in hindsight i wish i’d brought some fatter ties just

For that um or if i was going to come back and just do those trails i would recommend getting some larger gravel tires if you can because i was a little bit reckless on the trails i ended up getting a puncture on day one and then

It was raining so i felt like to be honest that day wasn’t as good as i was hoping but i made the most of it and it’s definitely a place that i would like to visit again so on day two my plan was to cycle up the volcano mount tady

I’ve done this a couple of times before it’s very very hard it’s incredibly uh long ascent it can be 30 35 miles depending on which way you go but continuous uphill i think i did something like 7 000 feet of climbing in 30 miles which is

Double what i would consider to be a challenging ride so it was a long day in the saddle i was carrying all my equipment as well so i did pace myself the great thing about going up mount tadi is you kind of get varying landscapes as well so you start off near

The sea level where it’s it’s quite warm and then as you work your way up you start to see lava formations pine forests and it’s just different depending on which way you go up and eventually you start to sort of go above the tree line and the

Altitude um definitely starts to kick in so it’s something that you just got to be aware of i was struggling when i got to the top i drunk all my water pretty much pretty much ate all my food as well even though i kept filling up on the way up

So when i eventually found somewhere to camp uh i was a little bit dehydrated to be honest and it made the the journey the last couple of hours up a little bit strenuous so you aren’t allowed to fly a drone in the tady national park so i

Didn’t do that it is illegal you can get fined i think it’s 6 000 euros which seems a bit excessive to be honest but all of that drone footage that i took was just outside their borders i made sure of that obviously uh would have been quite an

Expensive holiday if i’d have got that wrong so i made sure that all that footage was outside the park there are also some good places to camp up mount tady and in and around that location there are some kind of wild camping spots that the spanish government has outlined and you

Can book them they’re completely free you just need to make sure you’ve booked them in advance now the one i was planning on staying at it wouldn’t let me book for some reason so my plan was to kind of just rock up and and hope that someone would let me stay seeing as

It is free and i just had a small tent it’s just me but i got to the gate and they were obviously doing refurbishment because it was completely shut you couldn’t get in at all so i ended up having to wild camp just off there in the forest or out the way

Now as a side note mount tadi is one of the best places in europe to take photos of the stars because it’s so high up there’s very little in the way of light pollution so you end up getting a fantastic view i’ve been up there a couple of times

Before at night it was one of my favorite places to visit to take photos of the stars and my plan was to do the same on this trip but as i got to the top the winds really did pick up it was incredibly windy at the top and

To make matters worse i set up the camera and because you’ve got to leave the shutter open for quite a long time to take good photos of the stars the uh wind makes it wobble slightly on the tripod and then you end up with blurry shots but like i said to make

Things worse the moon then appeared and it was incredibly bright it was a full moon and it kind of washed the stars out of the picture so it ended up not being as good of you as i would have liked i was hoping to get a really magnificent

Star lapse before bed but unfortunately one of those things you can’t control and i didn’t get the opportunity right so day three i woke up really early because it hadn’t been an easy night’s sleep i’ll be honest the wind was making sleeping quite a challenge it

Was quite a breeze in the tent even with all my gear on it’s quite cold up there even it’s you know it’s a warm country but up there it’s incredibly cold so i packed up and then i carried on to the very peak of mount tadi as far as

You can get on the road anyway because i was quite dehydrated like i mentioned it took me a lot longer than i would have hoped um i was crawling going really really slow maybe like five miles an hour at times with all that stuff i happen to see a lot of professional

Cyclists up there it’s quite a common place for professional cyclists to train i saw the whole of fdj which is a french cycling team and they were training up there they’re all really friendly actually i think everyone was a bit confused as to why i

Had so much stuff and i climbed up that volcano they probably thought i was mad but it was really nice to see them um on their really nice expensive bikes and once i finally got to the top i stopped off for a bit of a a rest at the hotel parador which is

Where again a lot of the professionals train because it’s at altitude once i’d done that it was a lovely long descent down to where i was going i went down to la orotava and from there i carried on so through um the little villagers down to eco de los venus which is where

I was staying in that hostel so the following day my plan was to cycle to the most westerly point on the island and it’s a an old lighthouse called punta de tenno and it’s famed for its incredible sunsets because it’s on the west and because it’s kind of on a

Rocky landscape you get incredible coastline as well so it was something i was really looking forward to going to i’ve tried going there before but the road in recent years seemed to have closed and i can’t seem to work out why if you do know

Put it in the comments i’d love to know you can’t drive down there so the last time i was there tried to drive all the way there is a road but for some reason they weren’t letting cars pass so i thought well i know you’re allowed

To walk down there so surely i’ll be able to cycle there but when i arrived to the final point just before getting onto that road there was a big sign saying they were doing some sort of works and bikes walkers anybody couldn’t use the road so i was a

Little bit disappointed i was really hoping to end the film with a fantastic sunset time lapse and drone flying along the coastline but unfortunately again it’s one of those things you just can’t control um i’ve had to miss out on that i hope you enjoyed that film it’s something i want

To do more of this year hoping that travel restrictions keep on easing got a few more in the pipeline as well as lots more bike packing adventures here in the uk i hope you enjoyed that video please share it with your friends if you did

Give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you like my videos thanks for watching and i’ll see you in the next video