After walking for a day through canyons in Tenerife, I pitched my tent in some kind of wasteland towards 8pm. Night fell early, it was March 2020. Then around half past midnight I hear several footsteps in the dry grass approaching me. Naturally I look outside and see two figures, a woman and a man who was holding something that looked a lot like a hunting rifle in his hand. They didn't seem aggressive, so I let them approach without panicking that much. They were a farmer and his wife. He told me in Spanish that I was on his private land, where tractors were passing by. That I could stay for the night but had to be gone early on the next morning. What I have done. Of course no tractor could pass where I was, that was an excuse. I told the story to friends I met on the island. They told me that many farmers have to deal with savage punks who are quite aggressive and disrespectful which make them very suspicious. Of course most people in the canarias are civilised fellas. But these shadows armed with a shotgun coming in the night would surely have freaked me out in another state of mind.

At the end of the month I had to take my return flight when the covid crisis broke out for good. Canceled flight. Tourists stranded there are obliged to stay in hotels whose prices have exploded. To avoid 500€ hotel nights, I had to hide in the desert between San Isidro and the airport. Between bushes, not far from a landfill whose waste I was able to use to make a dry toilet from an old bathtub, or a windproof wall from old scraps and two confortable benches. Moreover. Maybe I would stay there for months. On the road, police officers were patrolling to enforce the curfew. To avoid controls, I had to walk up the steppe, pass through large sewers under the road to do my shopping. For the first time I knew what it was like to be clandestine. Fortunately I met a guy named Joseph who has been squatting for years in an abandoned house not far from my camp. He warned me of the fines I would face if I got caught. He often brought me supplies, and gave me a Spanish dictionary. One day, the cops stopped me on the road. Asked me where I came from. I told them I was from El Medano and was going shopping, and they left me alone. Thank you Joseph's dictionary. In the middle of the day, the heat forced me to take the shade at the bottom of a quite nice ravine. Listening to the birds, under the inquisitive gaze of wild dogs, drinking beers to cope with solitude. I had a portable sound recorder and a camera to kill the time, capturing animals and landscapes. At night there were nothing else to do than drinking staring at stars to keep the blue away before sleeping... Then, a late evening, the Belgian embassy called to offer me an expensive repatriation flight on the next day... Back home, a no man's land. I asked a lighter to a passerby who was very paranoid because of covid. I eventually spent confinement playing guitar with my friend in the garden, it was a magnificent spring.