-
From The Volcano To The Butterfly: Astypalea
Past the uninhabited island left shining white by the mining of pumice, the Dodecanese Pride catamaran powers on across the waters towards the first stop at Kos Town. Out here on deck, the wind rushes, the sun shines and the fountains of pure white surf make furious patterns in our wake, and we are thankful that the crossing isn’t quite as rough as we were told it might be. Until, that is, after Kos, when we are all shepherded inside as the next stage of the journey will be too lively for passengers to stay on deck, and what follows is ninety minutes of rocking and rolling and lurching over…
-
Nisyros And Its Amazing Volcano
Tilos has been wonderful, our best stop so far, and it’s not without sadness that we board the cool looking Stavros ferry and leave whitewashed, bougainvillea dotted Livadia behind. But we always say…move on while you still love a place, so we’re being true to our travel principles on this one. Unusually for islands in the Dodecanese, Tilos has a comparatively flat centre between its spectacular peaks, through which the main road of the island runs north to south. This fertile plateau was created by a gigantic fall of pumice and ash belching from a volcanic eruption of enormous proportions on the neighbouring island of Nisyros, our next destination. Nisyros…
-
Tales From Tilos
Last night’s cocktails soon morph into drenching sweat as we haul ourselves up the steep mountain behind Megalo Chorio, the parched plants crackling beneath our feet, some brittle enough to turn to dust, others springing back upright, resilient to our footfall. A late night cocktail bar may not have been the best preparation for a climb like this, but the beautiful island of Tilos is taking us into its arms in every possible way. As ever, the climb is worth the effort. The views across the deep blue Aegean to neighbouring islands are matched by those back across land, the stark white buildings of the village tumbling down the hillside…
-
Karpathos: The Windy Island
As the early morning ferry leaves its white surf wake in a curve away from Siteia harbour, we bid farewell to Crete after a varied and interesting two weeks on the island. It’s just over a month now since we left the UK and the island hopping that we had envisaged to be earlier on this journey now begins in earnest: if our plans don’t change we are due to call in to at least ten islands in the next four weeks. Our last night on Crete is in Siteia, which we thought was just a port town but turns out to be so much more. Our one night stay…
-
Crete: More Of The Western End
Dawn is greeted at our apartment in the same way as it is throughout Hania, with the cacophonous rasping of a billion cicadas, in all our travels we haven’t ever heard a day-long chorus at a decibel level such as this. But dawn also heralds consistency: August in Crete is a delight of clear blue skies throughout the day, we are yet to see our first real cloud in seven days here. Mercifully though the heat is less intense than during the heatwave on the mainland: days here have varied between 32 and 38 but the cooling Meltemi wind blows in each afternoon to make every day just simply lovely.…
-
Crete: The Western End
We’re sure lots of travellers do this, but we have a tendency to give nicknames to bars and cafes rather than call them by their real name. This nickname may be governed by the location (bus bar or corner bar) or by what we ate or drank (fish bar or aperol bar) or something we saw or heard there (dog bar, tree bar, reggae bar). So we begin our last evening on Serifos at Ugly Woman Bar, gazing out over the evening waters and wishing we were staying longer. But events outside of our control have brought about a rethink and we are off to a new destination. Our journey…
-
Serifos, And A Rethink
The first inkling we get that our calculated risk may not pay off is when we disembark the ferry on Serifos at just after 9am. Backpacking on the Greek islands is easy out of season, but this will be our first attempt at it during August when the islands are at their busiest. Not knowing what the effect of COVID travel restrictions will be, we’ve decided to risk it and see how it goes on the first island and make our judgments from there. And then we get that first clue: not a single room hawker on the quay waiting to meet the ferry. The lady in the office marked…
-
One Night In Piraeus
One night in Piraeus, is like a year in any other place…. You are a serious rock music aficionado if you know that the above line is a plagiarism of a song by English 70s band 10cc, and that in the original lyric it was Paris, not Piraeus. But our one night in Piraeus, sandwiched between Korinthos and our first island of this adventure, manages to almost live up to the line. The smooth running, punctual, air conditioned train from Korinthos pulls into Piraeus dead on time, and we step out into the searing heat to trudge to our one night stay, backpacks on. Piraeus station is conveniently positioned very…
-
Cleared For Take Off….?
It’s beginning to look like we’ve got lucky. We do seem to get lucky quite often, but this one is making us smile. If you read our post the other day, you will know that we booked flights a couple of weeks ago with the intention of getting away for the rest of the summer, but with travel restrictions of all kinds still prevalent there were some decisions to make in terms of destination. It soon became clear that Greece currently has the least amount of restrictions on visitors entering from the UK, comprising just proof of double vaccine and a passenger locator form, so we went with our instinct…
-
Photographic Memories #22
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #22: Folegandros We all have a liking for photographs of old buildings, dilapidated walls, tumbledown doors and the like, and pretty much all travellers have a growing collection of such shots. This one captures something slightly different for, as you can see, the building is for the most part well maintained, but has a down at heel section which oozes considerably more character than the…
