A mercifully short days hike today after what I consider to be the Herculean efforts of yesterday. In fact I could have had a couple of extra hours in bed I overestimated the time needed so much.
Still when I got out to where I had finished last night I was glad I hadn’t camped. It was still in the cloud and cold and wet.
I started off through a kind of forest park and then continued slowly downhill on old cobbled and sandy tracks.

It really was as if I was on a Sunday walk at home with muddy boreens and Friesian cows.

The stone walls were coated in signs of clinging damp.

The way was lined with plants both familiar from home like brambles, bracken willow and lush clover and also more exotic species that differentiated it from Ireland.

There was agave, giant cistus(?),heather trees, avocado, eucalyptus and geranium hedges. A host of other plants I don’t know the name of but am sure I’ve seen them in pots in garden centres with expensive labels attached.
I stayed up In the mist until back down in Valverde.

The path down to the ferry port was the old road where all goods arriving or leaving the island would have been taken by mule.

The end in sight it started to get sunny and by the time I arrived the island looked different.

I spotted a plaque commemorating 400 years of the pilgrimage down the road I had just travelled over the spine of El Hierro.

So now a ferry to Tenerife in order to catch a ferry to Gomera. And just to let you know I have now taken over half a million steps. 500819