Mamma Mia - Skopelos

Skopelos day 2

A beautiful morning dawned on Skopelos. Since it gets quite warm very early here in the Greek Isles, I woke up feeling a little bit dehydrated at 7am. I had a glass of orange juice and a litre of water, with a morning cigarette, and contemplated my good fortune at being where I was. I headed back to bed for up a brief nap, and got up and prepared myself for the day at about 9am.

I was scheduled to meet Lapzang and Dr Doolittle at 11 to catch the bus to Milia beech, which was the spot where the recent movie Mamma Mia was filmed. In the time while I was waiting, I headed into one of the bakeries and found a custard filled croissant that rather took my fancy. I sat out on one of the port-front tables, eating my croissant and a berry iced tea, and once again contemplated how lucky I was to be here. I felt like I had really found a little piece of heaven on earth, and decided to text my dad to let him know. He responded that some family friends were over, he had relayed the message, and they wanted to tell me that they were green with envy, and to get a real life. Hehe. Jealousy is a great thing… when you’re the one people are jealous of.

Lapzang and Doolittle were late, as they had slept in and missed their breakfast at their hotel. They grabbed a bite to eat when we met up, and caught the midday bus, as busses around the island ran like a vegetarian on fiber pills - very regularly. The bus trip lasted for about an hour, and there were some amazing views out the windows. This was truly a spot where if the cars and scooters were taken out of the picture, you could imagine yourself anywhere back in time from 500 to 2500 years in the past.

I should probably take this opportunity to mention the Greek style of driving. People here are willing to park their cars and scooters wherever they like, and so traffic has this viscous style of flowing around any obstacles… even if it means taking the driver onto the wrong side of the road with oncoming traffic. There was one point where a car overtook the bus and just managed to get back into the correct lane before being sandwiched between the bus and an oncoming car. Being over here has certainly revised my view of what Democracy was founded on – individuality and the freedom to do what you wanted, as long as you were willing to cop a mouthful of abuse from anybody that you infringed upon.

The bus dropped us off at a turn in the road, and we were unable to see anything resembling a town, or a beach. There was a road heading downwards, and after the 20 or so people who got off the bus shared a look, we all headed down this road, as this was the most likely location of the beach. Lappzang, Doolittle and I were tempted to follow half of the group who walked down the concrete driveway of a pension, until the pension owner came out and started abusing everybody. He got extremely fired up when somebody back-chatted him, and we decided to follow the road, rather than take the shortcut.

A little further down the road, we rounded the corner and came to a taverna, which had the most amazing view out onto the Aegean sea and a beautiful pebble beach. There were hundreds of deck-chairs along the beach, with umbrellas, and we were tempted to take a few, until we saw that they came at a cost of 6 Euros each. We opted against this, moved a little further down the beach, and dropped our towels and bags in front of the deck-chairs, leaving us a very short but uncomfortable bare-foot travel to the water. The water was amazingly clear, and within 2 feet of the water starting, a stretch of concrete about 6 feet wide led deeper into the water, before dropping off to above head height in depth. The water was an exquisite temperature, and as you kicked, you would bring up waves of the cooler water closer to the bottom. WOW!
We spent about half an hour in the water, until we noticed a few larger waves coming in – previously there had only been very small waves. We commented on this to each other, until we noted that the waves were getting closer and closer to our towels and bags, filled with our cameras. I swam for shore to rescue the bags from the waves, and even though I set a personal best time, our towels got soaked, but fortunately, due to a combat roll on my behalf, I managed to pick up our bags before the waves had had little more than the chance to lick at the corners and wave their frothy fists in thwarted fury. There was no way I was going to let the Aegean ruin MY camera!

After our swim, we went up to the taverna to have some lunch. The service was pretty crap, but they had the most amazing fried peppers and zucchini. Mmmm-mmmmm. There were all these cats running around, feasting on the left overs. A couple of little ginger ninjas made friends with us, but they didn’t like our food as much as we did. And the Rose was great here. 1 litre for 3 Euros (~$7).

We went back for a swim after lunch, and I took a heap of photos, which I will have to show you all – truly amazing spot. Doolittle tried to climb up onto a large rock sticking out of the water, and had an urchin spike one of her toes. It’s been numb for the past couple of days – she doesn’t think that it will have to come off, which is a relief, and stop we hope she doesn’t get the leprosy from it.
While Lapzang and Doolittle were swimming, we heard a whistle being blown furiously. I went to investigate, and it was the Skopelos Fuzz coming along to book people for parking illegally. As the whistle was blowing, about 2/3 of the people on the beach fled to their cars to move them. It was an amazing sight. At least the polizei here give people warning before they book them.
We headed up to the bus stop at the top of the hill to travel back to Skopelos town, and were beset upon by a swarm of wasps, whose nest was right above the bus stop seat. Everybody was cowering on the other side of the road, until the bus arrived, when we swarmed (like the wasps had on us) onto the bus.
After a refreshing shower upon our return, we went for a wander along the port, and decided to have dinner at one of the restaurants. I ordered lamb chops, wanting to see what they were like here in Greece, and Doolittle ordered cuttlefish, and was told that it wasn’t available. She then ordered squid, but was served cuttlefish anyway. A waiter came across to apologise for the delay in our meal being served, and brought 1 beer across, which stumped us, unsure whether this was supposed to be an apology beer or not. It turned out to be for the Americans on the table behind us who were looking angrily at us (we originally thought this was because they were English and we were slamming the Poms). I brought the beer situation to the attention of the waiters, who took it to the Yanks, but they ended up leaving only having eaten half their meals in disgust. I can’t really blame them, because the service was pretty average.
In fact, the best part of the service was a little fat kid, who came along and took our photo (and laughed, because he had managed to get a street light behind my head and capture my true angelic glory). After that, we noticed him going around rectifying the other waiter’s mistakes. We tried to give him a 5 Euro tip, but he ended up sticking it in the tips jar. Well, we thought, no tip is being left with the bill now! Oh, and we drank another 3 litres of Rose. Hehe. It just goes down so well in these balmy conditions.
We went for another wander to walk off the dinner, and stopped by the internet café to check up on our accommodation at our next stop, Alonissos, which we were heading to the next day.
Another great day. : )

As a footnote, I must apologise here for my delay in updating my blog. Things have been hectic, and the down time has not had internet access available. I am currently about 4 days behind (I’ve lost track of what day it is – I think it’s a Thursday?), but will attempt to get up to date before we leave here on Sunday.

Hope you are all well, feel free to drop me any messages you’d like to pass on.

S