Tenerife Tourism sponsored generous prizes for the best articles written by members following the Guild’s AGM visit to Tenerife in 2009.

Here Adele Evans won the award for the best article, Agatha Christie and the Dragon Tree. Here she explains:
 

Lord Nelson gave up his right arm here, many a holidaymaker has become temporarily ‘legless’ here too, but the British love affair with this island is still in one piece and has a long pedigree..

What I didn’t know was that it also had inspired Agatha Christie to pen one of her short stories, ‘The Mysterious Mr Quin’ and a festival dedicated to her. Intrigued, a handful of us ‘Guildees’ set off for the Sitio Litre, the island’s oldest surviving garden, of which the Dame was especially fond.

There we learned that thousands of years earlier, Guanches, the Stone-Age inhabitants of Tenerife drew ‘dragon’s blood’ sap from the ancestors of the garden’s ancient Dragon Tree for mummification. It has been used for centuries for many varieties of lotions and potions. And so, the seeds of a piece on ‘Agatha Christie and the Dragon Tree’ were sown and, much to my surprise and delight, Tenerife Tourism awarded me a prize for the best print feature that appeared in ‘The Lady’.

And the prize? An extremely generous 11 night holiday, including flights, accommodation in Garachico and Puerto de la Cruz and car hire. I look forward to exploring more fully ‘the surreal landscape littered with jet black basalt plains, lava streams, tortured rock formations and towering volcanic cones, described by NASA as the most comparable terrain to the Moon or Mars’. Yet again, I may just do a bit of sleuthing — when not soaking up the rays or ensconced in a whirlpool bathtub. But I think I’ll pass on the dragon’s blood sap.
 

Roger Thomas won Best Online Article prize for his piece that appeared in The Independent (both online and in the newspaper). He hired a bike and cycled to the top of Mount Teide - well almost, for while the coast basked in temperatures that put British summers in the shade, 2000 metres up resembled a misty, chilly Scottish moorland. His prize is a week for two with four days on the south-west coast and three days in the north. This time he promises to pack warmer cycling gear.