Do As I Say Not As I Do!

On 10^th September 2008 we woke to a glorious morning on the island of Milos and after a cup of tea I walked briskly into the town to hire a vehicle to transport us around.

I found a place and negotiated the hire of a white, sport model, quad bike, but before being allowed to proceed with the hire I had to undergo a short driving competency test to satisfy the renter that I was safe to go out on the open road.  He explained that as a rule English and French people were generally ok, but Italians, who think they know all about scooters and bikes, are not so good and are liable to fall off and injure themselves sometime during the day but the Americans, who know nothing about them at all, are absolutely hopeless and are very liable to crash and cause a multiple pile-up within seconds.

I passed the test but I couldn’t help but feel a total hypocrite because I have always told my children for safety reasons not to do anything so rash as ride a scooter or a bike like this when on a holiday but I had total disregard for my own advice and was completely euphoric about driving around like Peter Fonda in Easyrider on my four wheels as I returned to the hotel.

Once on the open road the first thing that we had to do was to negotiate our way out of the harbour and this involved a steep climb to the town high above the seafront and this proved quite difficult because it soon became obvious that the quad bike that I had rented was hopelessly underpowered.  It was only 50cc and completely unsuitable for two people, the steering was light because of the weight distribution, handling was a nightmare and it was inevitable that within only a few minutes we had our first near death experience when the thing refused to take a tight hairpin bend with two of us on board and we had a confrontation with the driver of an impatient mineral lorry who was not minded to be very helpful.

I was very careful after that because the thing was very difficult to control, it was hard work, essential to keep your wits about you at all time and the slightest road undulation resulted in wobbles and panics all the way to our first stop.

With some relief we stopped at Sarakiniko beach, which is one of the famous picture postcard sites on Milos.  It was approaching midday and we walked around the sleepy village of Pollonia and up to the top to the inevitable blue domed church and an uninterrupted view of the nearby island of Kimolos.  We left and returned back along the coast road stopping frequently to admire the colourful rock formations, the pretty beaches and the excavations at the Papafragos rocks all of which were along the route.  To be honest I was glad of the frequent stops because I didn’t feel too confident about the quad bike and the way it was behaving with the pair of us, and our luggage, on board.

In the middle of the day we arrived at the main town of Plaka, which overlooks the port of Adamas below and we parked the bike and walked into the little streets of the busy town.  Next to Plaka was the village of Trypiti that had restored windmills and Christian catacombs that were sadly closed due to excavations and an ancient Greek amphitheatre that we missed because it looked like a long way to walk in the blistering heat of the afternoon.

After a couple of Mythos I was much more confident about the quad bike so we left the high level towns and returned again to the beaches on the north of the island and then we had our second near death experience when we stopped for a photo opportunity and I left the bike in reverse and when I started off again almost tipped us backwards into the deep ravine that had provided the backdrop for our dramatic biking pictures that almost proved fatally to be our last.

Later we rested and recovered from our biking experience and debated whether to use it again to return to Plaka for evening meal, but after we had reflected on the earlier dangerous incidents we decided instead to leave it safely parked up and stay instead at the harbour.

Terror Drive in Naxos

This morning we had to come to terms with our rash decision of the previous evening and after breakfast on the terrace we set out for a planned full day drive in our hire vehicle.  This wasn’t a regular car or a jeep or even a quad bike but rather a sort of easy-rider roadster dune buggy.  It looked cool and it looked fun but this was to be a full day of terror.

I would not advise anyone to hire one of these vehicles and these are the reasons: to begin with the driver only has about 10% control of this vehicle, the rest is down to pure chance.  There is no suspension so it vibrates through every bone in your body, which is an experience that I can only liken to driving a washing machine on full spin cycle.  There is very little steering control and no effective turning lock so to do a simple turning manoeuvre almost always requires a three-point turn.  In the event of an accident there is no protection from very serious injury as the seat is only a few centimetres from the road surface and your knees are effectively the front crumple zone.  Hit something in this and if you are not killed outright then you face many long painful months recovering in hospital.  In a Greek hospital that is!  Death would be preferable.

To hire one is relatively straightforward, you need three bits of documentation, a driving licence, a credit card and a letter certifying that you are clinically insane!  And then you are completely on your own!

We were heading for the Temple of Demeter somewhere in the centre of the island and it was quite difficult to locate.  This was because it wasn’t a very big site and there was only enough to see to provide thirty minutes or so rest from the killer vehicle and soon it was time to return to the buggy and continue our adventure.  This time Kim decided she would like to try to drive and this, if anything, was even more terrifying.  It is comforting to be in some sort of control but to be in the passenger seat as we flashed past dangerously adjacent rocks and vegetation as she clung to the edge of the road where the tarmac gave way to pot holes and and loose stones, was a complete nightmare.

After a while I resumed driving duties and we decided to drive south back towards the coast and the small map that we had for navigation purposes indicated a straight road through to the beach at Agiassos, which looked like a good location for a lunch time drink.  The road was ok for a few kilometres and then the paved surface suddenly ran out and was replaced by unmade shale road and a big sign saying that the new road was under construction with the generous assistance of EU funding. We had a short debate about whether to continue or turn back and as other people seemed to be using the road we foolishly choose to go on.  Foolish because most of the other people were using proper vehicles – usually four by fours!

Although the buggy had been hard enough to drive on a regular road that paled into insignificance now that we started to drive down this gravel highway because now it was like trying to drive a fair ground dodgem car over a frozen lake.  The loose shale was like ice under the wheels and we skidded uncontrollably as I tried to negotiate deep potholes that could have rendered enormous damage to the underside of the vehicle.  There was no protection from the dust and the stones that were thrown up by other passing vehicles and just to make driving even more difficult it was necessary to close my eyes every time someone went by in the opposite direction or overtook us.  We were being shaken like a vodka martini and the road surface seemed to be deteriorating with every kilometre that we went on.  Eventually it became so bad that we stopped and turned around even though there was about ten kilometres of sheer hell to renegotiate.

As we stopped to take a breather a young couple in exactly the same sort of buggy pulled up and asked for answers to the same questions that we were asking ourselves, ‘where are we? what are we doing here? Will it ever end?’ Of course we couldn’t help but we took comfort from being able to share our ordeal with someone else and when they announced that they were pushing on to the coast we turned around again and intrepidly followed them.  Soon we did arrive at the coast but this did not bring any respite from the wretched gravel road that just kept on going and going and brought unending agony.

Eventually we chanced across a taverna next to the beach at Pyrgaki and we had no hesitation in pulling in and getting out of the vehicle for some recovery time.  My whole body was shaking, especially my hands and arms because of the severe vibrations that came up through the front wheels and the steering wheel, I felt like Shakin’ Stevens and it took all my concentration and considerable effort not to wobble my beer glass so violently that I didn’t distribute the top half of the contents of cold mythos all over the fresh check tablecloth.  It took a good thirty minutes and another glass of beer to stop vibrating and return somewhere towards normal.

The bad news of course was that we had to return to the vehicle because there was still a long way to go to get back to Agios Prokopious but fortunately very soon after this we thankfully returned to a paved road and we came across a nice beach at Aliko which was an attractive bay with cream sandstone cliffs and ochre red rocks and fine sand.  There were some big waves in the sea and we enjoyed cooling down and cleaning off in the water that’s for sure as we swam and washed the dust from our cracks and crevices.

There was a final thirty-minute journey back to the hotel and I was so pleased to get back.  On the way we stopped to refuel the vehicle and the man at the filling station squirted about half a litre of fuel in the tank and enquired if we liked driving small cars.

‘No we just made a big mistake OK!

The Kingdom of Greece and my Greek Travels

Following the War of Independence a protocol signed on May 7, 1832 Greece was defined as an independent kingdom. The Ottoman Empire was indemnified in the sum of 40,000,000 piastres for the loss of the territory. The borders of the Kingdom were reiterated in the London Protocol of August 30, 1832 signed by the Great Powers, which ratified the terms of the Constantinople Arrangement in connection with the border between Greece and the Ottoman Empire and marked the end of the Greek War of Independence creating modern Greece as an independent state free of the Ottoman Empire.

I am glad about that because Greece is my favourite place in all of Europe.  For me the very best way to see the country and the islands is to hop on a ferry and drift between them setting down now and then to enjoy the history, the people, the food, the ouzo and the Mythos!

These are my journals about the places I have visited:

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/greek-islands/

Which one would you choose?

           

Athens and the first Modern Olympic Games

Our plan was to go first to the Acropolis and the city guidebook advised getting there early to avoid the crowds. We did as it suggested and got there early (well, reasonably early) and it was swarming, I mean really swarming! Obviously we weren’t early enough. I can’t imagine what it is like when it is really busy!

We visited the hopelessly inadequate Acropolis Museum; It was small, hot and stuffy and overcrowded with lots of pushing and shoving, and there were so many treasures to show but it was smaller than a corner shop; later we saw the buildings where the famous marbles used to be before Lord Elgin pillaged them for the British Empire 200 years ago, he just hacked the statues off the buildings with saws and sent them back to the England where the 56 sculpted friezes, depicting gods, men and monsters are kept at the British Museum. Elgin was the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who ruled Greece at that time and the Turks gave permission for the removal without consulting the Greeks.

We walked past the city museum but didn’t have time to go in and then to the original Olympic stadium of the modern games which opened on April 6^th 1896 and which looked perfectly useable to me. I don’t know why they had to build another one in 2004 when this one was completely adequate. And that gave them a lot of trouble as well because they nearly didn’t get that finished on time; what a good job they didn’t need the Acropolis for the 2004 games!

In the afternoon we went to the temple of Dionysus, another unfinished building and there wasn’t much going on there either. What the Greeks need are some builders from Poland to come over and get the jobs completed. Everyone says that that the Poles are the best builders in Europe at the moment with fantastic productivity, I’m sure they would have this placed finished in no time.

The day was really hot by now and the afternoon temperature in the city was rising all the time but we carried on as best we could. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that! I specialise in speed sight seeing but even I was beginning to flag and I had a bit of a sweat on now but hopefully no one had noticed? Around the back of the Parthenon we walked through a collection of interesting whitewashed sugar cube houses, that looked curiously out of place and resembled those on the Cyclades and we read later that they were in fact built by workmen from Santorini who came to Athens many years ago to find employment during a building boom in the city.

We arrived at the Greek Agora, which is the equivalent of the Roman Forum in Rome, but we had been walking now for almost six hours and really couldn’t do much more so we had to give up after only seeing less than half of it. Sally had a bit of emerging sunburn with vivid white strap marks but Charlotte was well protected under all that factor 30! We took some shade and applied some cream and then we walked back to the hotel stopping off at a little shady pavement bar next to the Roman Agora, another Mythos for me and iced tea for the girls.

On the way back I bought a cheap bottle of local red wine from an untidy little back street mini-market and we returned to the hotel. No one wanted to share it with me so I had to drink most of it myself but couldn’t quite manage the full bottle all in one go. We changed and went out again into the Plaka to eat. This time we choose a taverna adjacent to the first in a picturesque tree lined square. I had probably my best meal of the holiday, a lovely grilled chicken with fresh vegetables with especially memorable baked tomatoes. The girls had salad (again). And there was Greek music and dancing including our first Zorba of the holiday, which was really good.

A Life in a Year – 10th September, A Quad Bike Against All Advice

On 10^th September 2008 we woke to a glorious morning on the island of Milos and after a cup of tea I walked briskly into the town to hire a vehicle to transport us around.

I found a place and negotiated the hire of a white, sport model, quad bike, but before being allowed to proceed with the hire I had to undergo a short driving competency test to satisfy the renter that I was safe to go out on the open road.  He explained that as a rule English and French people were generally ok, but Italians, who think they know all about scooters and bikes, are not so good and are liable to fall off and injure themselves sometime during the day but the Americans, who know nothing about them at all, are absolutely hopeless and are very liable to crash and cause a multiple pile-up within seconds.

I passed the test but I couldn’t help but feel a total hypocrite because I have always told my children for safety reasons not to do anything so rash as ride a scooter or a bike like this when on a holiday but I had total disregard for my own advice and was completely euphoric about driving around like Peter Fonda in Easyrider on my four wheels as I returned to the hotel.

Once on the open road the first thing that we had to do was to negotiate our way out of the harbour and this involved a steep climb to the town high above the seafront and this proved quite difficult because it soon became obvious that the quad bike that I had rented was hopelessly underpowered.  It was only 50cc and completely unsuitable for two people, the steering was light because of the weight distribution, handling was a nightmare and it was inevitable that within only a few minutes we had our first near death experience when the thing refused to take a tight hairpin bend with two of us on board and we had a confrontation with the driver of an impatient mineral lorry who was not minded to be very helpful.

I was very careful after that because the thing was very difficult to control, it was hard work, essential to keep your wits about you at all time and the slightest road undulation resulted in wobbles and panics all the way to our first stop.

With some relief we stopped at Sarakiniko beach, which is one of the famous picture postcard sites on Milos.  It was approaching midday and we walked around the sleepy village of Pollonia and up to the top to the inevitable blue domed church and an uninterrupted view of the nearby island of Kimolos.  We left and returned back along the coast road stopping frequently to admire the colourful rock formations, the pretty beaches and the excavations at the Papafragos rocks all of which were along the route.  To be honest I was glad of the frequent stops because I didn’t feel too confident about the quad bike and the way it was behaving with the pair of us, and our luggage, on board.

In the middle of the day we arrived at the main town of Plaka, which overlooks the port of Adamas below and we parked the bike and walked into the little streets of the busy town.  Next to Plaka was the village of Trypiti that had restored windmills and Christian catacombs that were sadly closed due to excavations and an ancient Greek amphitheatre that we missed because it looked like a long way to walk in the blistering heat of the afternoon.

After a couple of Mythos I was much more confident about the quad bike so we left the high level towns and returned again to the beaches on the north of the island and then we had our second near death experience when we stopped for a photo opportunity and I left the bike in reverse and when I started off again almost tipped us backwards into the deep ravine that had provided the backdrop for our dramatic biking pictures that almost proved fatally to be our last.

Later we rested and recovered from our biking experience and debated whether to use it again to return to Plaka for evening meal, but after we had reflected on the earlier dangerous incidents we decided instead to leave it safely parked up and stay instead at the harbour.

A Life in a Year – 4th September, Terror Drive in Naxos

This morning we had to come to terms with our rash decision of the previous evening and after breakfast on the terrace we set out for a planned full day drive in our hire vehicle.  This wasn’t a regular car or a jeep or even a quad bike but rather a sort of easy-rider roadster dune buggy.  It looked cool and it looked fun but this was to be a full day of terror.

I would not advise anyone to hire one of these vehicles and these are the reasons: to begin with the driver only has about 10% control of this vehicle, the rest is down to pure chance.  There is no suspension so it vibrates through every bone in your body, which is an experience that I can only liken to driving a washing machine on full spin cycle.  There is very little steering control and no effective turning lock so to do a simple turning manoeuvre almost always requires a three-point turn.  In the event of an accident there is no protection from very serious injury as the seat is only a few centimetres from the road surface and your knees are effectively the front crumple zone.  Hit something in this and if you are not killed outright then you face many long painful months recovering in hospital.  In a Greek hospital that is!  Death would be preferable.  To hire one is relatively straightforward, you need three bits of documentation, a driving licence, a credit card and a letter certifying that you are clinically insane!  And then you are completely on your own!

We were heading for the Temple of Demeter somewhere in the centre of the island and it was quite difficult to locate.  This was because it wasn’t a very big site and there was only enough to see to provide thirty minutes or so rest from the killer vehicle and soon it was time to return to the buggy and continue our adventure.  This time Kim decided she would like to try to drive and this, if anything, was even more terrifying.  It is comforting to be in some sort of control but to be in the passenger seat as we flashed past dangerously adjacent rocks and vegetation as she clung to the edge of the road where the tarmac gave way to pot holes and and loose stones, was a complete nightmare.

After a while I resumed driving duties and we decided to drive south back towards the coast and the small map that we had for navigation purposes indicated a straight road through to the beach at Agiassos, which looked like a good location for a lunch time drink.  The road was ok for a few kilometres and then the paved surface suddenly ran out and was replaced by unmade shale road and a big sign saying that the new road was under construction with the generous assistance of EU funding. We had a short debate about whether to continue or turn back and as other people seemed to be using the road we foolishly we choose to go on.  Foolish because most of the other people were using proper vehicles, usually four by fours!

Although the buggy had been hard enough to drive on a regular road that paled into insignificance now that we started to drive down this gravel highway because now it was like trying to drive a fair ground dodgem car over a frozen lake.  The loose shale was like ice under the wheels and we skidded uncontrollably as I tried to negotiate deep potholes that could have rendered enormous damage to the underside of the vehicle.  There was no protection from the dust and the stones that were thrown up by other passing vehicles and just to make driving even more difficult it was necessary to close my eyes every time someone went by in the opposite direction or overtook us.  We were being shaken like a vodka martini and the road surface seemed to be deteriorating with every kilometre that we went on.  Eventually it became so bad that we stopped and turned around even though there was about ten kilometres of sheer hell to renegotiate.

As we stopped to take a breather a young couple in exactly the same sort of buggy pulled up and asked for answers to the same questions that we were asking ourselves, ‘where are we? what are we doing here? Will it ever end?’ Of course we couldn’t help but we took comfort from being able to share our ordeal with someone else and when they announced that they were pushing on to the coast we turned around again and intrepidly followed them.  Soon we did arrive at the coast but this did not bring any respite from the wretched gravel road that just kept on going and going and brought unending agony.

Eventually we chanced across a taverna next to the beach at Pyrgaki and we had no hesitation in pulling in and getting out of the vehicle for some recovery time.  My whole body was shaking, especially my hands and arms because of the severe vibrations that came up through the front wheels and the steering wheel, I felt like Shakin’ Stevens and it took all my concentration and considerable effort not to wobble my beer glass so violently that I didn’t distribute the top half of the contents of cold mythos all over the fresh check tablecloth.  It took a good thirty minutes and another glass of beer to stop vibrating and return somewhere towards normal.

The bad news of course was that we had to return to the vehicle because there was still a long way to go to get back to Agios Prokopious but fortunately very soon after this we thankfully returned to a paved road and we came across a nice beach at Aliko which was an attractive bay with cream sandstone cliffs and ochre red rocks and fine sand.  There were some big waves in the sea and we enjoyed cooling down and cleaning off in the water that’s for sure as we swam and washed the dust from our cracks and crevices.

There was a final thirty-minute journey back to the hotel and I was so pleased to get back.  On the way we stopped to refuel the vehicle and the man at the filling station squirted about half a litre of fuel in the tank and enquired if we liked driving small cars.

 ‘No we just made a big mistake OK!

A Life in a Year – 7th May, The Kingdom of Greece and my Greek Travels

Following the War of Independence a protocol signed on May 7, 1832 Greece was defined as an independent kingdom. The Ottoman Empire was indemnified in the sum of 40,000,000 piastres for the loss of the territory. The borders of the Kingdom were reiterated in the London Protocol of August 30, 1832 signed by the Great Powers, which ratified the terms of the Constantinople Arrangement in connection with the border between Greece and the Ottoman Empire and marked the end of the Greek War of Independence creating modern Greece as an independent state free of the Ottoman Empire.

I am glad about that because Greece is my favourite place in all of Europe.  For me the very best way to see the country and the islands is to hop on a ferry and drift between them setting down now and then to enjoy the history, the people, the food, the ouzo and the Mythos! 

 These are my journals about the places I have visited:

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/greek-islands/

Which one would you choose?

A Life in a Year – 6th April, The first Modern Olympic Games

Our plan was to go first to the Acropolis and the city guidebook advised getting there early to avoid the crowds. We did as it suggested and got there early (well, reasonably early) and it was swarming, I mean really swarming! Obviously we weren’t early enough. I can’t imagine what it is like when it is really busy!

We visited the hopelessly inadequate Acropolis Museum; It was small, hot and stuffy and overcrowded with lots of pushing and shoving, and there were so many treasures to show but it was smaller than a corner shop; later we saw the buildings where the famous marbles used to be before Lord Elgin pillaged them for the British Empire 200 years ago, he just hacked the statues off the buildings with saws and sent them back to the England where the 56 sculpted friezes, depicting gods, men and monsters are kept at the British Museum. Elgin was the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who ruled Greece at that time and the Turks gave permission for the removal without consulting the Greeks.

We walked past the city museum but didn’t have time to go in and then to the original Olympic stadium of the modern games which opened on April 6^th 1896 and which looked perfectly useable to me. I don’t know why they had to build another one in 2004 when this one was completely adequate. And that gave them a lot of trouble as well because they nearly didn’t get that finished on time; what a good job they didn’t need the Acropolis for the 2004 games!

In the afternoon we went to the temple of Dionysus, another unfinished building and there wasn’t much going on there either. What the Greeks need are some builders from Poland to come over and get the jobs completed. Everyone says that that the Poles are the best builders in Europe at the moment with fantastic productivity, I’m sure they would have this placed finished in no time.

The day was really hot by now and the afternoon temperature in the city was rising all the time but we carried on as best we could. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that! I specialise in speed sight seeing but even I was beginning to flag and I had a bit of a sweat on now but hopefully no one had noticed? Around the back of the Parthenon we walked through a collection of interesting whitewashed sugar cube houses, that looked curiously out of place and resembled those on the Cyclades and we read later that they were in fact built by workmen from Santorini who came to Athens many years ago to find employment during a building boom in the city.

We arrived at the Greek Agora, which is the equivalent of the Roman Forum in Rome, but we had been walking now for almost six hours and really couldn’t do much more so we had to give up after only seeing less than half of it. Sally had a bit of emerging sunburn with vivid white strap marks but Charlotte was well protected under all that factor 30! We took some shade and applied some cream and then we walked back to the hotel stopping off at a little shady pavement bar next to the Roman Agora, another Mythos for me and iced tea for the girls.

On the way back I bought a cheap bottle of local red wine from an untidy little back street mini-market and we returned to the hotel. No one wanted to share it with me so I had to drink most of it myself but couldn’t quite manage the full bottle all in one go. We changed and went out again into the Plaka to eat. This time we choose a taverna adjacent to the first in a picturesque tree lined square. I had probably my best meal of the holiday, a lovely grilled chicken with fresh vegetables with especially memorable baked tomatoes. The girls had salad (again). And there was Greek music and dancing including our first Zorba of the holiday, which was really good.