So you want to buy a house?
La Gomera. Not heard of it? You’re not alone. It’s the second smallest of the Canary Islands, famous for whistling shepherds and impassable mountains. I came across it while frantically googling “good places to live spain good scuba diving no drunk tourists” as part of a plan to find a house to buy and do up during lockdown, giving me a project and somewhere new to live. Before the world went mad I worked in music as a tour manager, living a not-so-glamourous lifestyle involving lots of international travel and tightly packed together groups of people – something that is quite difficult to do from home in the midst of a pandemic, it would appear.
So – La Gomera. Arriving with a good friend Rose to go house hunting, everything looked promising on the way to the first house – our trusty rental car made it up and down mountain after mountain, we wound our way through a rainforest in constant awe of watching the clouds coming through the trees, and arrived at the first house on the list to view.
At first glance, it looked promising. An old building in the middle of being restored, with a liveable area but a fair bit of work needing doing. Gorgeous views? Check. Nice and quiet? Check. Basement? Unusual, but check.
And it was in this basement that the woman showing us the house (we’ll call her Gertrude to protect identities here) got stuck. Halfway in and halfway out of the trapdoor leading down to the basement (which she kept telling us her father had hidden from invaders in), she got stuck as she didn’t have the arm strength to pull herself out of the hole. We tried to help, only to be shouted at – “Don’t come near! Coronavirus!” – which would’ve been fair enough had she not tried to kiss us both on arrival.
While Rose and I are exchanging wild looks the police turn up looking for “Gertrude.” I tried to explain in my abysmal Spanish what was going on, while Rose tried to help somebody out of a hole while socially distancing. Eventually Gertrude’s out of the hole and talking to the police and I’m trying to work out what’s going on, eventually deciding just to leave as we needed to get to our AirB+B and check in.
As I’m checking in later, I realise in all the hole-related confusion I put my bag down while trying to help Gertrude out of the hole, and of course it’s got one of my passports, all my cards, my money… I text Gertrude. Radio silence.
The next day, while I’m trying not to lose my mind at the lack of bag/contact while also viewing houses, she gets in touch! No problem, she says, she’s going back to Tenerife but she’ll leave my bag with the ferry people at the port. Obviously I was slightly bemused at this but agreed. An hour later, she texts to tell me that she forgot my bag but has left her house key at the port…
So, we drove to the port. To put this in context, everywhere you go in Gomera takes 49 minutes to get to and you’ve got to drive up and down a mountain to do so. But success! The ferry company had the house key, so the next day Rose and I set off on a 49 minute drive to Gertrude’s house to collect the bag…
… only to find a giant steel bar on the door (which the key absolutely did not fit) and a note on the door saying, “Gertrude, stop breaking into our house or we’ll call the police.”
Right. Rose and I are trying to get into the house, failing abysmally when the neighbours turn up, and tell me that if I want to get into the house, I need to speak to the people in the yellow house up the hill. I scrawled a note with my number on the back of the ‘stop breaking into our house’ note and headed to the yellow house, where predictably there was no reply. Good.
The next day, I dropped Rose at the airport and made my way to the police station on my way to catch a couple of ferries to meet Rose in El Hierro. In my broken Spanish I attempted to explain the bizarre story, and the (rather unbelieving) policeman called a police station on the other side of the island near Gertrude’s house, then started writing a report for me. Mid-report, he gets a phone call from another police office somewhere else, saying, “We’ve got Felicity’s bag! We can meet her in the roundabout in the national park to give it to her.”
Of course. So, with barely a moment to spare before the ferry I drove to the roundabout, only to get a phone call saying, “Actually we’re sorry, we can’t make it. You’ll have to collect it another time.” By this time, I’m about to miss the ferry and I’ve got all Rose’s stuff in the car, and there isn’t another ferry until the next evening. I had a spare passport so I decided the bag would have to wait until another time. I was the last car onto the ferry, armed with Gertrude’s house key, and as the ferry was pulling out of the dock I had a phone call from a lovely German couple.
“Is that Felicity? We gave your bag to the police. We’re really sorry, Gertrude sold us the house a few years ago and every so often comes back and tries to sell it to somebody else…”
Welcome to La Gomera.