Monthly Archives: July 2024

Avoiding the hordes

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I was reading an article recently in the rather dubious UK newspaper the Daily Express, and it was all about how lovely is the island of Lefkada. I had no argument with the description of Lefkada at all, and none with the idea of promoting it as a place to visit. What I did find rather too difficult to swallow though, were the words, and I quote: “Any jaunt to Rhodes, Crete, or Mykonos – three of the best-known Greek islands – will inevitably involve negotiating hoards of tourists looking to go to the same restaurants, bars, and sun spots.“

Now, as you’ll probably know, I lived on Rhodes for fourteen years, and have now been living in South East Crete for almost five. I’ll make no comment on Mykonos, since I don’t believe that it should be grouped along with the first two islands anyway. But, to read that the idea of coming to either Rhodes or Crete would inevitably involve negotiating “hoards of tourists looking to go to the same restaurants, bars, and sun spots” made me see red. Incidentally, adding to my feeling that’s it’s very poor journalism to so generalise, is the fact that the word ‘hoards’ is incorrect. If the writer was referring (and the context strongly indicates that he was) to large numbers of people, then the correct word is ‘hordes.’ Enough said on that then.

My view on how Rhodes has changed over the years still stands, and yet I can’t let that article pass without mentioning that there are nevertheless still many very quiet spots on that island where the true Grecophile can find the ‘real Greece,’ definitely away from the masses – fact. A true gem of a seaside village on Rhodes is Stegna, plus the area where we used to live, Kiotari, although having suffered the construction of a few huge A.I. hotels in recent years, nevertheless still offers quiet spots for those who look hard enough, as does the delightful village of Gennadi, just 4 km down the coast from there. Arhangelos itself, although quite a large village, is very essentially Greek, even during the tourist season, and I could go on.

Here on Crete it’s an even bigger insult to say that you’d be ‘negotiating the hordes,’ since Crete is a huge island, well over four hours from end-to-end by car and, I’d say, probably 80% of it is wild and unspoilt. Just because Crete has a number of airports and a few resorts that have become very well known as offering the kind of holiday that people who want a ‘lively’ time would look for, doesn’t mean that the entire island is crowded and noisy. Crete has too many untouched villages to even mention (among them the one where we’ve made our home, in fact) and miles of quiet coastline where you can find beaches with sparse numbers of sun worshippers, even in July and August. We’re fortunate enough to have landed in the municipality of Lasithi (there are only four such ‘counties’ on Crete, and they are Chania, Rethymnon, Heraklion and Lasithi. The first three are named after their main town, but are all primarily rural in the vast majority of their land area), and apart from a couple of tourist ‘hotspots’ like Agios Nikolaos and Elounda, the place is primarily agricultural and you most definitely won’t encounter any hordes. Lasithi is blessed with numerous wonderful beaches and coves, most of which are never overcrowded, and there are waterside tavernas, like the ones I’ve talked about in some of my recent posts, for example “Local Haunts” and “Food for Thought.”

The photo at the top of this post was taken at one of our regular summertime haunts, the “Cacao” café at the Western extremity of the village of Gra Lygia. We go there usually on a Sunday, at around 11.30am, where we order a couple of freddo espressos and stretch out for an hour or two while taking the occasional swim. That photo above was taken on Sunday July 28th at precisely midday. The ones below were also taken on various Sundays over the past few weeks…

Looking at the above shots you’ll have noticed how crowded the place is. Why, you can’t even see the surface of the water for leaping bodies (heavy irony), eh? Gra Lygia beach is a couple of kilometres long, by the way, and is populated I’d say by 90% locals. Don’t come to Crete, you’ll be negotiating the tourist hordes…

Incidentally, I read a lot on Facebook about how much cash people have to shell out for a couple of sunbeds and an umbrella these days. Each to their own, of course, and I know that some people don’t like parasols and sun beds. OK, let’s not argue about that one. I happen to love them because at my time of life you want comfort, end of story. What I definitely do not like is when they’re so close together that if you stick your arm out you can end up molesting the woman on the lounger beside yours. That’s a real possibility in places where they take the mick out of the tourists, I’m afraid. Also, they need to be sparse enough for locals and others who don’t want to use them to be able to find a decent enough sized patch of beach to ‘camp’ on with their mats and towels. In such conditions, I don’t see anything wrong with them. What’s most wonderful about our area though, is the fact that almost all the cafés who have umbrella and beds around here don’t charge for them at all, as long as you buy a couple of drinks. In other words, the beach ‘furniture’ is simply an extension of the tables and chairs further back, and closer to the building. Now that’s reasonable, right?

The majority of local Greeks do not want to spend an entire day on the beach. We too tend to do what they do, which is to turn up, order a coffee, then spend an hour or two relaxing before leaving again. If you’re gonna be charged an arm and a leg for sun beds, you’re going to find that slightly galling, right? I’ve even talked to Greeks who’ve been visiting Ierapetra from the more touristy parts of the island, and they’ve not even known that sunbeds are free on our beaches, as long as you buy a drink. A mature couple was standing beside the beach last season, evidently Greek, when I said hello while passing. They asked me, “Excuse us, but how much are the beds here please?”

I was well pleased to be able to tell them how the system works on our beach, at which the wife remarked to her hubby, “It’s a different Crete down this way Manoli!” They were residents of Hersonissos, which is only just over an hour away by car, but may as well be the other side of the planet when it comes to the ‘hordes.’

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that our drinks in those photos are not in those ubiquitous cardboard cups with those dome-shaped plastic tops, through which you poke a plastic straw. For some time now we’ve been following the ‘green’ advice about carrying our own cups and straws with us. I’m not boasting or sounding off here, but we do truly believe that if everyone did that it would make a vast difference to the amount of trash that ends up in the environment. Our ‘flasks’ are double-skinned metal ones and they keep the drink cold for ever. In fact, even if we take a couple of hours to sip our coffees to the end, the ice is still intact inside. usually in this climate in those cardboard cups the ice is long gone within half an hour and what remains of your coffee becomes decidedly tepid, yuk. Our straws are aluminium and last forever. We simply wash them in some drinking water and lick them off before packing them away, then give them a thorough clean out when we’re doing the washing up back at home. All too often the straws given when you order an iced coffee are made of black plastic, which is the worst kind. I’ve read many times that for some reason black plastic is non-recyclable, which is why garden centres are switching from black to gray for pots in which they sell new plants and seedlings. Not only that, but when they bring you your drink the straws are packed in those annoying little see-through plastic sleeves, which instantly blow away on the breeze if you put them down even for a second. We’ve found that if you proffer your own reusable cups when ordering your coffee, the staff are only too pleased to take them from you and fix the coffee in them, thus saving the café the expense of buying ever more cardboard cups and plastic tops. The cups we use cost us about €8 each and we’ve now had them for almost ten years and counting. There’s an idea for you if you care about our planet.

Returning to the main theme of this post – by all means read that dubious article in Britain’s Daily Express, but if you feel like sending them some feedback, you’ll have my vote. The moral of this post then is – don’t believe everything you read in the papers!

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Local haunts?

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I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to notice this, but the other day, as we were walking through town to get to the beach for our regular freddo espresso and a swim (tough life, I know), I read a couple of those blue signs that are usually affixed to a corner of a building and that tell you the name of the road or street that you’re on. It suddenly struck me, after 47 years of either coming to Greece or living here, that almost all of them are some person’s name.

I got to thinking, how many street names in Greece do I either see or already know that aren’t named after some dead person or other? My home city is Bath, UK, and I began trawling through the names of city streets there that I can still recall. You’ll find Barton Street, Lower Borough Walls (and Upper too), New Bond Street, Milsom Street, Wood Street, Argyle Street, The Paragon, Hay Hill, Belmont, Guinea Lane, Upper Hedgemead Road and so it goes on. Regular street/road names in the UK are things like Acacia Avenue, Hill View, Church Close etc. 

Here, though, I’d say that 90% plus of the streets and roads are called by the first and last names of someone who’s died. Next time you’re walking around a Greek locale, take a look and see if you don’t agree. You’ll see streets with names like Adelfon Hana (Brothers Hana), Nikolas Anagnostakis, Stamatis Kokinakis, Georgos Papadopolis etc., in fact they’ve almost all got both the first and surname of whoever they’re named after (occasionally abbreviated in order to fit the name onto the sign, owing to the fact that Greek names do have the tendency to be rather long and stuffed full of syllables, don’t they) on them. Seems like not many are named after females, though, wonder why?

I just thought it was interesting, that’s all. 

The top photo this time was taken on Sunday at Gra Ligia, where we’d just been for a swim. When you live somewhere like this, it’s hard to imagine what it must be like to be among the hordes in the more over-touristified places, it really is. Couple more shots from Gra Ligia (on July 21st no less!!)…

In the previous post I mentioned that we finally got to eat at the beach taverna in Koutsouras called the Kalliotzina. Here are the photos I took during our wonderful meal there on Sunday evening July 14th…

The choccy pudding with ice cream, BTW, was the freebie! Definitely going to go there again for lunch some time. The menu shot shows the system that a lot of restaurants have adopted here these days, and it works really well. Instead of them bringing you a menu from which you verbally list your order to the waiter/waitress, you get a personal catalogue on which you write the number of whichever items you want (they give you a pen), before the staff take it to the kitchen and your food gets prepared. It works like a dream.

Finally, last night (Sunday 22nd) as we sat at one of our favourite waterfront restaurants, L’Angolo, where Nikoleta who runs the place and takes all the orders knows what we’re going to order before we even open our mouths these days, all the diners were enjoying the blood-red moonrise as the full moon crept over the horizon when a vibrant thumping sound began to emanate from further down the promenade. At first we thought that the Aperiton Café had a live band in, as they often do during the summer months, but no, it couldn’t have been, because the sound was growing louder. Something was making its way along the seafront in our direction. We soon found out what it was…

It did become a bit ear-splitting when they passed right by our table, but it was great fun and all for a very good cause, apparently. The crew wore t-shirts and vests emblazoned with the logo ‘Keep the Spirit Alive,’ so I Googled it today and found out that it’s a youth movement to keep alive the memory of a local man, Giorgo Kouvaki, who was a local physiotherapist, acupuncturist, musician and photographer who died prematurely a few years ago. Details about him can be found here. Below are a few stills from the occasion too…

In the last few frames you can spot the moon between the drummers as it had by this time lost its red hue and was climbing higher into the sky. It’s also visible in this below shot of Yvonne, as we’d just left the table and begun our walk back to the car…

I’ll be rambling on about our recent coffee with the neighbours in the next post (probably!).

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Water is becoming a hot potato of an issue in Greece these days. One sign we saw recently here on Crete read: “If you want water in your taps, turn off that hose.” When we lived on Rhodes it became common in the last few years for whole villages and sections of Rhodes Town to be cut off for hours at a time a few times each week in order to conserve the water supply. Yet all the while they go on building huge hotels with multiple pools and even with their own water parks to amuse the guests’ kids while the parents sip cool beers around the infinity pool unique to their own room. I found myself asking, ‘why has everything got to be so BIG these days?‘

Back in the good old days of holiday brochures (you remember those, when we used to get home in late September, then immediately make a beeline for the travel agent to pick up a clutch of next year’s because they were already on the shelves) I seem to remember that even hotels were modestly sized. I mean we never stayed in hotels if it were humanly possible to avoid them anyway, but even if there were some in the ‘resort’ where we would stay, they’d be set in modest gardens and quite unobtrusive to the area in general. They’d have a maximum of maybe only twenty rooms. In fact, here in Greece they were almost more often a glorified collection of rooms and studios, the only thing leading them to be described as a ‘hotel’ being the fact that they had a little reception desk and they served up a continental breakfast for those who wanted it. Lots of them didn’t even have a pool, or if they did, it wasn’t much bigger than the type you see in some peoples’ gardens.

This past few decades though, it seems that (and I’d wager it’s largely down to this whole ‘All Inclusive’ phenomenon) hotels in particular have been getting bigger and bigger. Hotels in the 21st century all seem to me to resemble massive villages. They have hundreds of rooms and loads of pools, they have multiple restaurants and faux-tavernas set in their extensive manicured gardens. They have their own exclusive beaches where only people with the correct armband can avail themselves of a drink from the chic beach bar that’s set up exclusively for the use of the guests. You even see staff going around the place in golf carts, the grounds are that huge, and the buildings so many. You know what? Such edifices, such altars to mass tourism, are primarily for the making of huge profits and not for the enriching of the travel experience of the punters, that’s how I see it.

On top of that, they are a disaster for the environment too. Over the almost two decades that we’ve lived here in Greece, we’ve seen hundreds of stremmata (the Greek measurement of land area, equivalent to 1,000 square metres) which once were wild land, eaten up by these immense monstrosities. Vast car parks and turning areas for coaches create water run-off issues during the winter months too, ironically. Wildlife and wild plants disappear, and no one seems to notice. Where we used to live in Kiotari, Rhodes, we found a lovely patch of Sea Lavender growing on a sloping hillside only a hundred metres or so from the unspoilt nearby beach. Sea Lavender is a beautiful plant which grows to maybe two feet in height and, when picked (leaving the rootstock in the ground, of course), will keep its gorgeous rich purple colour long after it’s dried out in the vase. In case you don’t know what it looks like here it is…

Image courtesy of Plantura Magazine

Sea Lavender is not all that easy to find in the wild these days, sadly. The only patch we ever saw during 14 years on Rhodes was the one I refer to above. The problem was, the plants were growing only metres from the existing perimeter fence of a large hotel, and the hotel’s owners had expansion plans. We watched helplessly as the bulldozers moved in and another hundred stremmata of wild land disappeared under the newly expanded hotel complex. The sea lavender never stood a chance.

The water problem is ironic isn’t it; I mean here we are on an island surrounded by an inexhaustible supply of the stuff, yet on land the drinkable version is becoming more and more scarce. The tiny island of Halki, where we not only passed some idyllic short breaks while living on Rhodes, but I also visited several times a week during the high season in my job as an excursion escort, solved their acute water shortage some years ago now. When I first set foot there, we’d often tie up the small ferry on which my guests and I had made the crossing from Rhodes at the stone jetty in Nimborio, the only settlement on the whole island, to see a huge rusting hulk of a tanker occupying most of the waterfront. It was the water supply ship that came in from Kalathos Bay on Rhodes, stopping off at Halki and other islands too (I think Symi may have also been on the route, but my memory about that’s not what it was these days). That ship would come in a few times a week, responding to a request from the island’s mayor when they knew that supplies of drinking water were running low. It was unsightly, to say the least, and could have benefitted from a rub down with some emery paper and a good coat of paint, and it would stay tied up to the quay for several hours while water was pumped from its hold to a concrete reservoir on the hillside above the village.

Discussions began, easily more than ten years ago now, with the community of Halkiots living in Tarpon Springs, Florida USA, where more people with roots on Halki now live than actually still live on the island. These Greeks, whose ancestors had emigrated to the USA when the sponge diving industry died in the Dodecanese Islands in the early 1900’s, were always looking for ways to send financial help to their relatives back on Halki. The outcome was that, with help from the Tarpon Springs Greeks, and a 5-year loan from the bank, Halki constructed its own desalination plant in a quiet bay where it would be unnoticed by residents and visitors alike, just a couple of kilometres around the coast from the harbour. The investment was substantial, but since I got the story from the then mayor of the island, and he said that they’d pay thousands of Euros for every visit of the ‘water boat’ from Rhodes, they knew that within five years the plant would have paid for itself and the islanders would have an endless supply of good quality drinking water from then on.

I well remember the poor pressure in a Halki tap while trying to wash my hands after a visit to a taverna lavatory. I also remember that the water that came out of the taps wasn’t at all enjoyable to drink either. I was on the island one summer’s day and talking to Manoli, the Mayor and son of Lefkosia, whose taverna was named after her, when there was no water at all, for it had run out before the boat could get there. Not long after that I remember also remarking to him that I couldn’t believe how the water pressure had improved. It fair gushed out of the tap while I washed my hands. Smiling, he told me that the desalination plant was now commissioned, on-line and supplying the islanders with fresh, potable water at a good pressure. That was when he told me about the financial plan for the project.

The reason why I’m banging on about Halki is that I fail to understand how a small island like that can fix the problem, yet wealthy islands like Rhodes can’t. Decades ago there was a desalination plant installed on Symi, but it was only a short time before tourism really began to take off. If you’ve been to Symi you’ll have seen the square at the back of the bay, just behind the small bridge in the corner of the harbour. Guess what, that was where they’d installed the plant. Dosy or what? Of course, they realised very quickly once tourism began to gather momentum that it was an eyesore and so it was soon dismantled again, the parts stored away in some shed or other, and forgotten about. From that time on they resorted to ordering their water by boat from Rhodes again. Someone may correct me, but the last time I checked, Symi still didn’t have its own operational desalination plant.

Going back to the thought about holiday brochures, maybe my memory’s defective, but I’m sure that most of the accommodation on offer back then was village rooms, studios, apartments and villas. I don’t remember ever seeing huge faceless hotel complexes in them, and, of course, ‘All Inclusive’ still hadn’t been thought up. Can’t help wishing that it never had been either. Even here, in this still quiet little backwater of Crete where tourism is still a long way behind the coastal strip from Malia to Chania, things are subtly changing. A few km outside Ierapetra heading East they’ve opened a hotel that reminds me (sadly) of the ones that Rhodes is now bursting with. It seems that they always want to build them on what in the UK would be called ‘greenfield sites’ too. But the worst thing of all is, why do they have to be so flamin’ big? I know, I probably already know the answer to that one, it’s because it makes more money for the owners to ship people in larger numbers. So the planes get bigger and more frequent, and the airports become inadequate and they build bigger ones, like they’re doing right now on Crete. The new airport that’s eating up a whole stack of stremmata in the hills above Heraklion is due to open in 2027 I believe. It’ll open up the South coast of the island and slowly start to wreck the remote beauty of that whole area, I fear. It’ll turn Siteia which is still just about a hidden gem into a theme park in time, and they have their own modest airport there anyway.

We can’t go back in time. We can’t halt ‘progress,’ if that’s what we’re supposed to call it, but this relentless drive to build everything bigger and (supposedly) better does depress me. Sorry to be on a downer folks. Just trying to be realistic. Next post I’ll be as cheery as usual, promise!! I know, how about a couple of photos to cheer us up?

By the way, before we get to them, the one at the top of this post was taken on Sunday at Pachi Ammos, where it was very windy, but that was good because it helped us cope with the temperature. Now Pachi Ammos, in case you’re interested, is still a quiet, essentially “Greek” place to stay BTW. Right, here we are then…

When I sat down to write this post I had all kinds of other stuff in mind. I intended to talk about the fact that we have eventually been able to eat at the wonderful Kalliotzina taverna right on the beach at Koutsouras. A few weeks ago we’d gone there on a Tuesday lunchtime, only to find that they were closed on Tuesdays, so we’d ended up at the one nextdoor, which was pretty good anyway. I talked about this in the post called ‘Food For Thought’ which I posted on May 30th. For the first time in what seems like months we actually got around to sitting down over a Greek coffee with Angla’i’a and Giorgo the other day too. I had some thoughts too about the obsession that they seem to have here in Greece with naming streets after dead people as well. Never mind, all in good time.

I’ll return to the main theme of this post to finish off with, though. There has been a lot of talk lately in the local media here about the problem of over-tourism. It’s getting on the TV news quite often about what’s happening in Spain, where locals are demonstrating about their home towns becoming nothing but ‘theme parks,’ while they shoot water pistols at tourists eating in the local restaurants. It’s still some way from that scenario here, although there are parts of Greece where it’s a definite problem (Mykonos, Santorini, the Acropolis in Athens to name a few), but I’ll finish with a quote from a Cretan newspaper from a few days ago. It said this:

“Last year, a whopping 33 million tourists visited Greece—over thrice the country’s population. More tourism means a greater economic boost by propping up local business activities. But they’ve resulted in a disproportionate strain on infrastructure, housing and environmental resources. These are particularly pressing as Greece grapples with the aftermath of wildfires in recent years.”

Hmmm, eh? When I worked as an excursion escort I used to think that in general (with some slight reservations) tourism was a good thing. It’s far more complicated than that now though. Watch this space.

To absolutely finish this one off, definitely, with no further addenda, Here’s a photo of a fairly macho me taken in February 2014 back on Rhodes, when we used to scavenge the beach in wintertime for fuel for our stove (me Tarzan…) –

Yes, I thought that one would give you a laugh.

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Random ramblings

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Above: I’m sure a lot of people will have come across this ‘phenomenon’, but it always makes me smile. What’s wrong with the above photo? I’ll tell you, there’s pepper in the salt cellar and guess what’s in that pepper shaker. Yup, right first time, salt! This was at the Gorgona Taverna on the seafront behind the town beach in Ierapetra a couple of Sundays ago. The meal was excellent, as was the value for money, but one needed to clock what was going on with those shakers before bringing about a ‘seasoning disaster,’ right? It’s something we’ve come across often over the decades that we’ve spent either visiting Greece or living here. I’m not really sure why it happens so frequently, but it’s worth a mention, if only for the quirkiness of it.

Further to the post I wrote about the local cats, These below show just how comfy ‘Ginge’ is with our veranda as a safe place to relax, plus the same goes for ‘White Sock’ on the stairs going up to the upper garden. The little tykes…

Below: A rather nice specimen of Campsis Grandiflora, otherwise known as either Chinese or Common Trumpet Creeper. It’s quite popular in gardens around the periphery of the town and, I have to say, it does brighten up a plain-looking street…

Yvonne, my wife (in case you’ve recently come to the party), is always on the lookout for an opportunity to dance. It’s in her blood I suppose. She only has to hear the right rhythm or beat to break out into a Tsifteteli, or a Kalamatiano, it’s just the way she is. Although we have fallen in love with our new home here on Crete, the only slight downside to living here is that most live music (and almost every weekend there’s some to be had in the mountain villages around us in this area) is Cretan, not Rebetiko, which Yvonne’s much more familiar with. Cretan music is more generally based around the use of the Lyra, a sort of squat violin played vertically whilst it sits on the leg of the seated musician, who then attacks it with a bow which he saws horizontally backwards and forwards. Rebetiko is more often Bouzouki based and Yvonne is familiar with just about all of the various dances that it includes, which are listed under the subheading Rhythms in the Wikipedia article to which the above link takes you.

About four decades ago, when we first used to come to Greece for holidays, and to visit my wife’s in-laws, you could find live music, even if it was only one bouzouki player, but would often be also a guitarist and a keyboard player too, almost everywhere. Lots of tavernas would have a small space cleared for the moment when the ‘Kefi’ would take someone and they’d get up from their chair perhaps to begin with a Zeibekiko. As the decades have passed this has gradually died away as tourism has grown and restaurateurs have covered those spaces with a few more tables to maximise their income. These days it’s very, very rare to come across a taverna where there will be impromptu dancing. So, what happened to us last Saturday night was all the more pleasing.

We had occasion to stay a couple of nights at a place called Ammoudara Beach, west of Heraklion. To be honest, and not wishing to upset anyone who might like the place, we hated it. It reminded us so much of Ialysos on Rhodes, which was a place we avoided like the plague during the 14 years that we spent on the island. It’s tourism at its worst in my humble opinion, full as it is with big hotels, fancy bars thumping out loud music and souvenir shops full of tat. The kinds of tourists you see walking the pavement could never in general be described as Grecophiles, but rather those who simply want sunshine, booze and evening entertainment consisting of karaoke and the like. Each to his own, of course, but it’s not for us.

However, since we were in a small AirBnB apartment for a couple of nights, we had little choice but to wander the main street in search of somewhere to eat that wasn’t a rip-off and would hopefully be reasonably priced. Eventually we wandered into a place called Thalassini Avra (Θαλασσινή Αυρα – Sea Breeze), at around 9.00pm, just when the last of the tourists were finishing their meals. As I’ve often observed, if you go to a restaurant where the locals eat, they’ll only begin to arrive after 9.00pm and often much later. When we got there we were pleased to hear that the music being played was Laika, or Rebetiko. In fact there was a modest band playing and a bouzouki player was wandering among the tables, his instrument connected to the amp by wireless connection. There was also a female singer doing the rounds among the tables too. ‘Of all places to find something like this,’ we thought. Down where we live, where it’s mainly Greeks around you when you go out for the evening, there’s nothing, or at least, usually nothing. Here, in over-tourist-land, we found a taverna with live music, and it wasn’t Cretan. Of course, earlier in the evening it’s a good way to get the tourists in anyway, but the true test of such a restaurant is if it gradually fills with Greeks as the hours approach midnight.

Well, to cut a long story short, the place eventually packed out with Greeks, and here’s the result…

Yes, that’s Yvonne with the fancy pattern on her ‘trousers.’ Here are the photos too…

By the time I took those above, there wasn’t a tourist in the place. Life’s full of surprises, isn’t it?

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