Independent travel
Independent travel gives you the freedom to move on when you are ready and not tied to a single hotel. Its fun fending for yourself and finding accommodation when you arrive at a new destination. It enables you to travel off the beaten track and away from the crowds, it is a liberating kind of travel. Mingling with the locals, eating their food, learning about their culture is an important part of travel. Travelling independently ensures that your money goes directly into the local economy and not to national or international businesses. The easiest way to experience independent travel is in Greek Islands where it is easy to travel between Islands
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Thomas, King Of Katopola
All we knew when we first made contact was that our next host was named Thomas and the apartment was in a building known as Thomas Villas On The Beach. Maybe this should have been a clue. Our logistical problem on arrival on the island of Amorgos was going to be the fact that the ferry sailed at 5:15am and made port at Egiali at 06:40, far too early for anything in Greece to be open. And our apartment was booked for Katopola, some distance from Egiali. Thomas offers a solution via WhatsApp. “I can organise a hire car at very good price”, he texts, “you can collect at Egiali”.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Chalki: Less Wind, More Chill
Sophia and her friend, the Greek islands’ answer to Mrs Brown and Winnie McGoogan, are sitting on the steps chatting, as they usually are, as we say our goodbyes and head off to the ferry port. “Always take your key”, she had told us when we arrived, “because I never know what time I sleep”. Such is island life. After the Greece mainland, the large island of Crete, and the pleasant buzz of Karpathos, we are now looking for something more remote, more peaceful, so with our first glimpse of what lays before us as the ferry pulls into the tiny island of Chalki, the smallest inhabited island of the…
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Towards The End Of Crete
We do like to mix it up a bit when it comes to accommodation on our travels, and aim for a bit of variety. Large hotels with small spaces and big prices aren’t really our thing, but pretty much anything else is fair game. So after apartments in Hania, Thessaloniki and Korinthos, a small family hotel in Delphi, and an “aparthotel” in Agios Nikolaos, we both find ourselves beaming from ear to ear as we drive up the steep unmade road to our next base in the village of Palaiokastro, just a short drive from the eastern coastline of Crete. For the next few days we are based in a…
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Agios Nikolaos: Lepers & Lotus Eaters
About 50 years ago in the early 1970s, I used to watch, with my parents, a TV series called The Lotus Eaters which I recall as being very watchable. That series was set here in our next base, Agios Nikolaos, towards the eastern end of Crete. I figured I was one of only a handful of people to remember the programme, yet on our very first walk around the town upon arrival, we find the very bar where it was filmed, still with a commemorative board at its entrance. The title of that series is actually taken from Greek mythology, whereby those who ate the fruit of the lotus lost…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
