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Published: August 24th 2006
Hanz - St Georege's Beach
...with the beach all to ourselves...I had a bit of a sleep in and undertook the bulk of my packing for Greece. I had to try and jam all of it into a “small” backpack. Personally I think I did pretty well. Leo and I headed down to the Local Library at Balham to get some books out for our trip and stopped at Heidi’s work ‘The Clarence’ for a drink in the sun on the way back.
We made some sandwiches for our flight and after a quick goodbye to Suz, we ran down to Clapham South Tube Station and caught a tube to Victoria with only moments to spare.
We jumped on the bus, and managed to find two ‘empty’ seats that were vaguely close to each other. Phew!
I was sitting next to a young guy, say early 20s, who I later found out to be from Leads. (at least you’d be proud James!). He sported a typical shorts and Tee that were embrioded with “England” and the national flag. I made me fascinated that a nation can be so patriotical to a country. I pounded over this for a minute as I sat there in my new “New Zealand” Tee
Shirt that was gifted to me at my leaving party (thanks Leah and James!).
The bus ride was long and made even more unbearable by the fact that the young guy next to me had fallen asleep, and was precariously leaning closer and closer to me.
In an effort not to have someone sleeping on my shoulder for the rest of the journey, or even worse, the thought of me having to intervene. I spend most of the rest of the trip leaning further into the isle, than in my seat.
After most of the trip to the Gatwick Airport, the young guy thankfully woke up, and turned out to be quite friendly.
We arrived at the airport, and found the ‘sky break’ desk to pick up our tickets. Leo’s ticket was still under “ Mr A Rock” due to a series of miscommunications on the phone. But thankfully, it didn’t take much to change them in to the right name. We proceeded to the check in counter, once again, my luggage was overweight, but managed to get through with out too much hassle.
The x-ray machine was a little bit of fun. As usual I just
Hannah - St George Beach
... hanging with the crowds placed my bag on to the conveyer belt and walked through without a problem. However, Leo goes through the same process, but takes off wallet, coins, sunglasses, and anything else that may constitute to being metal, or part there of, and the machine still beeped at him. The only metal thing he says he had on him was the button on the top of his jeans. Which I found quite amusing considering not only was I wearing jeans, but also my watch, sunglasses and rings and earrings. Go figure!
Thankfully the plane wasn’t as small as we had imagined and the pilot sounded confident, and immediately made me feel more comfortable. Surprisingly we even got in-fight meals. Cottage pie. “yum?”. Leo ate mine.
About 2.5 hours later we arrived at Corfu airport: Kerkyra (3am local time). We got off the place to find two large airport busses waiting for us, we jumped in only to realise they were driving us all of 100m to the airport terminal. Could British tourist really be this slack??
After waiting about 1 hour for the other passengers, we were on our coach driving through, what felt like the winding back streets
St George's Beach
... with Golden Sands of Corfu heading towards our hotel.
There is some thing different about being on an island. There is a different feel about the place. I’m sure you could put the same buildings on a main land somewhere, in the same layout, and you just wouldn’t feel like you’re on an island. It was nice, and instantly relaxing.
We arrived at “Paradise Hotel” about 5am local time, and were greeted by our local rep who showed us to our rooms. Even though Leo and I managed to scrape in to get the last room available at the resort, we were pretty sure we scored the nicest room in the place.
We had two private balconies our own kitchenette and bathroom, with easy access to the pool. We were very happy. Well that is until we found out how hard the beds were!
After trying a few different ways of trying to make my self comfortable, (as comfortable as you can be on a piece of hard concrete), I fell asleep only from being so tired… somewhere around 6am…
The next day we woke up 11ish and had a dip in the complex’s pool to wake ourselves
up. We then decided to embark on a walk to the supermarket to get some food for breakfast.
A short way down the road towards the beach there was a sign saying “Supermarket ‘Anna’ 200m <-” sounded good, so off we went.
About ~100m or so later, there was another sign “Supermarket ‘Anna’ 150m. hmm. We finally reached the supermarket which was closer to 800m or so away.
We went down to the beach and brought ourselves some touristy “Corfu” towels. The beach was lovely, carpeted with golden sand, which was FAR hotter than it looked, but was littered with sun loungers and umbrellas.
It seemed like such a long time ago since I had been to the beach.
We were a little unsure about the deal with the loungers, Leo seemed to think they were as part of our package deal. We found a nice spot and threw out stuff down.
The water was clear, refreshing (but slightly warm) and very inviting. After a nice swim and a few mouthfuls of rather salty water, we made good use of the sun loungers and the hot sun beating down on us.
After a while I opened by eyes
Our Room
... all we needed plus a little bit more.. to find a man towering over my lounger starring at me.
I was rather confused, as this man said nothing but just starred. I gave Leo a whack on the arm to wake up, and then it became clear he was after his 6EU for sitting in his loungers.
We decided sand was good enough for us for the following days. But for the mean time we decided to make the most of the luxury.
We headed back to the hotel for lunch, and found that it was 5pm already. We chilled out our by our hotel pool, read books and went for a swim and had a snooze before dinner.
We managed to awake just in time to get down to the beach to watch the sunset at 9pm, which was beautiful. The water was still warm and the last of the sun’s rays glistened on the lapping waves.
We walked along the main road to a restaurant called “The Balcony” which was a nice authentic Greek restaurant. After a very filling, but enjoyable dinner, we were given our free shot of Kumquat Liquor, which tasted distinctly similar to Galliano.
Following a well needed and deserved
Our Pool
...its a little bigger than it looks rest, we went for a mission down to the beach for a midnight swim. We found a large group of people with candles etc who looked like they were having a bit of a ‘beach party’. We dumped our stuff in the sand and jumped it the water. Well, more like Leo jumped in. I slowly edged my way into the water until out of nowhere I got spare tackled!
Like all ‘significantly refreshing’ water, it was good once you got in.
There is always something airy about swimming at night. I don’t know if its because I think it would be harder to see if someone was drowning, or the fact that the only people on the beach that could save us were all drinking and would probably drown before they got past ankle-deep. I think part of me thought that sea animals maybe nocturnal, and therefore we had a greater chance of being eaten by some mythical man-eating sea creature.
And I think it was that last point that made be turn back all of a sudden once we were half way swimming towards a floating pontoon in the middle of the bay.
We got out of the water and it wasn’t long before we worked out that the beach party was in fact a large group of German high school kids on a contiki type tour for two weeks. I ended up talking to them for a while until their English and my creative light chit-chat abilities started wearing thin.
I found Leo further up the beach, he had given up trying to chat up 15 year old girls who didn’t speak much English and in turn had met some British tourists who had actually come over on the same plane as us. John, a youth worker and Kate a teacher at a local state school.
After a while, and a bit of shivering on my behalf, we decided to call it a night at about 1.30am... But still not used to these hard beds yet!
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