Thank You for Flying with Us and Welcome to Dystopia

“Hello! Is anyone out there?” I shouted into the dusty void, as those watching the film shook their heads and groaned, “If there are people or creatures out there, are you sure you want to alert them to your presence??”.

Just kidding. But that’s kind of what it felt like during my first week on the west coast of the island of Fuerteventura this August. I later explored more of the island and found parts of it to be the haven I had envisioned but I wrote this before I had seen those areas:

A layer of copper dust unrelentingly coats the surface of anything and everything it can, even with the wind pretending to blow it away but instead merely refreshing that layer every so often. That, added to the volcanic rock lining the coast and the sandy camper vans dotting the landscape create the perfect backdrop to any dystopian flick.

This is the so-called dreamscape of the Canary Islands? This place where I genuinely wondered for a moment whether the rest of the world had succumbed to an apocalypse while I snoozed in a window seat 30,000 feet in the air? Maybe it’s because I come from the desert and am therefore harder to impress when it comes to desertscapes, but I feel underwhelmed. The clear turquoise-green waters are stunning and inviting but do not quite compensate for the Mad Max-esque scenery encroaching upon the town where I’m staying, which takes 20 minutes to cross by foot.

What are the other islands like? Does greenery exist there? And if it does, is it a coppery dust color, too? In a world in which we creep frighteningly closer to a dystopian reality each day, I’m not sure that I would choose to live in a place that already eerily reflects that.