Alonnisos Day 7 – It’s the final count-down

Despite yesterday being such a stinking hot day, a nice cool breeze had blown in over-night, just as I was getting into bed, so my open doors had made the room nice and cool over night. I was feeling very refreshed, although once again I had had very vivid and surreal dreams.

I showered and headed down to my favourite café for a light breakfast of toast, OJ and coffee, and was joined by Lapzang and Doolittle, who both looked mighty refreshed after our booze-free-day yesterday. I admitted that I had been naughty and had a night-cap, but they thought it was a good idea, as detoxing can be quite painful sometimes. Hehe.

We jumped in the car and decided to go for a drive and see some of the parts of the island we hadn’t been to yet. We headed to a beach called Agios Domitrios, which was amazingly beautiful. Like all of the other beaches, it was a pebble beach, but was so perfectly formed around a small wetland, that we were sure that it had to be man-made. Lapzang wet his feet, but we decided against going for a swim as we wanted to do more driving and didn’t want to return the car with any water-damage to the seats.

Leaping back in the car, we thought another Colin McRae off-road would be good, until we saw the road, and it wasn’t just the Atos that thought that road was a bad idea. We had seen a road a little bit further down that we had originally thought was someone’s driveway, but decided to give it a crack. It was a very new road, and in the heat the tar was melting. We had some amazing views of Agios Domitrios as we drove over the spine of the island, and halfway along the road drove past a dude on a steam-roller – still compacting the road! We were unsure if continuing would be a good idea, but our common sense didn’t prevail, fortunately, as the road was just a little bit sticky all the way to the main road up the guts of the island. I’m sure that we probably had a good portion of the road stuck to the bottom of the car with tar when we left it.

We had decided to head to the end of the island, to a place called Garakas, and continued on to our destination. Along the way there were some truly amazing views, as we drove over the highest point of the island, and, being an island, there was nothing to obscure the views way out into the Aegean. We were almost run off the road once by a very large dirt-moving truck (as I mentioned in an earlier blog, the roads are only a little bit wider than a single Melbourne lane, and big truck + small road + high altitude = long drop off the side of the road). The truck had been heading from a new road that was being built (although we were unsure where this new road would head to) that was being funded by the Greek government and the European Union.
The road down was a long and had a good angle, so Lapzang was able to pretty much just roll the car from the top of the island to Garakas.

We arrived at Garakas, and saw a single food truck, a decent pebble beach, and half a dozen boats moored out in the bay. It was a very beautiful area. We approached the food truck to get Doolittle and myself a beer, and a coke for Lapzang. The old gaffer in the truck asked us where we were from in fluent English, and we said Australia. “Where in Australia?” Melbourne. “Where in Melbourne?” We looked at each other, and told him the suburbs we were living in. He said “I spent 11 years in Oakleigh from 1964-1975.” We were amazed that we could head to a tiny little island off the coast of Greece that has a population of 5000, drive to the furthest point of the island to where you arrive, find one family living there, and have the patriarch say that hey lived for a period in our city on the other side of the world. We could certainly understand why he would retire there, as it was so beautiful. He then told us that the reason he had returned to Greece was because in 1975 there was some strife between Greece and Turkey (which I will have to look up to understand exactly what happened), and he joined the army to help out. We were rapidly learning that there is no love lost between the Greeks and Turks, so when he asked us where we going next, we said “Russia and Asia”. With many “Jesus Christ”s and “Bloody beauty”s, he let us know that he was very impressed with our (well, Lapzang and Doolitte’s) travel plans. He headed off to have a siesta while his daughter prepared us a few gyros, and spent the afternoon skipping rocks with his grandkids. As we were leaving, he returned and shook our hands, and we could see his son-in-law stalking out of the water with a spear gun in hand, apparently telling him that our skipping rocks had scared off a fish THIS BIG. We were glad to make our escape when he did, as the son-in-law had a speargun and looked like he knew how to use it.

We drove back to a beach whose name I never learnt, but we had dubbed ‘Rightos Galios’ as you turned right to go here, and left to go to Leftos Galios (that was the beaches proper name). ‘Rightos Galios’ was a little cove that had a large island about 100 metres off the shore, and amazingly clear waters. We could see the bottom super-clearly, even though the water here was probably 10-15 metres deep. We had fish swimming up to us to investigate, and as one of them swam around me, I slowly rotated in the water and kept eye contact with it the whole time. Amazing!
Doolittle left the water early, and Lapzang and I decided to be ‘beached as, bro’ and sat in the shallow waters. Lapzang started piling up the large rocks under water and tried to make ‘Mount Willy’ emerge through the surface, although the waves had other ideas. I lounged there bring up handfuls of the smaller pebbles under the rocks, looking at the pretty patterns in the small pieces of marble. While we were lying there, Lapzang and I had small fishies come up and swim around us, which we thought was very cute, until they started trying to make us their dinner and taking small bites out of us.

Lapzang and Doolittle dropped me back at Patitiri, where I had a shower and freshened up after our swim, and they headed back up to Chora to pack their bags to bring them down this evening, as we had to return the car. They came back down about an hour later, fortunately this time we didn’t have to run the gauntlet of the land-lady’s evil stare.
We had a couple of beers at one of the port-side cafes, and while we were doing this, a large group of people marched along the port road. They were mostly women and children, with a few of the moored ship’s captains, and we gathered that this was a remembrance for those lost at sea. All off the boats hooted their horns three times, and people sitting in the cafes stood up, walked to the street edge and placed their hands over their hearts. It was a surreal experience, and showed us that there was a strong community here, and that the Greeks had a strong and wary respect for the Aegean ocean surrounding their country.

We ducked up to a restaurant called Mamma-Mias, which was an Italian pizzeria and restaurant. We thought it would be nice to have some food that wasn’t Greek for one night, until we looked at the menu and saw that they only had 3 pizzas and not a great variety of food, none of which appealed to us. We rock-paper-scissored off for who was going to lead our escape out of there, and fled as quickly as we could.
We then chose to go to the Ilias pub, at the start of the street that my studio was on, and were blown away by the food there. Doolittle ordered an octopus dish that came with 2 salads, Lapzang ordered the mixed grill that had several types of meat, and I ordered the King Prawn kebab. Wow – the prawns were fantastic, there were 5 of them, and it was only 11 Euros, or 19 Aussie Dollars. Try finding THAT in Melbourne for that price. We washed our dinners down with a carafe of rose. A 1 litre carafe of rose. Several 1 litre carafes of rose. Mmm-mmmmm.
Our waiter was a very friendly chap, who was more than happy to help us and chat with us. I only mention this here because I made a very big gaffe with him the next day.

I saw Lapzang and Doolittle off on the bus back to Chora, went for another quick beer at the café, and then headed to bed to get a good night’s sleep before leaving the beautiful Greek isles the next day.