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Published: August 24th 2006
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Argirades - The Old Village
like going back 100 years where the old lady still arrive home on donkey-back. Amazaing! Leo set an alarm for 9am, but after repetitive presses of the snooze button, it was 10.05 before we knew it. We jumped out of bed and quickly went out to the pool area for our “10am” meeting with the Med life rep, who told us about what there was to do within the area, Island and also day excursions etc. We booked a well recommended day trip on a boat to two nearby Islands, Paxos and Antipaxos, for tomorrow.
We headed towards Lake Korission at the north end of the beach, mentioned in the meeting this morning. We stopped for a swim on the way on an empty stretch of beach and I made a little shady hut out of some driftwood that previous occupiers had started to string together.
The water appeared to be even clearer, but also a little more salty over this side. It was great to have the whole stretch of beach to ourselves!
After a few swims in the crystal clear water and some sun bathing, we carried on towards the Lake.
We struggled to see the sign of any inlet to the lake against a wall of high cliffs, as the
St George's Beach
...The water was soo clear! ... map had shown. We climbed up some sanddunes and wandered through on extremely hot sand for a while. We saw the lake in the distance and decided it was too far over the hot hot sand!
The clear water below won us over and we retreated to the beach again.
We had a few more swims then headed back to the hotel for lunch.
I had a bit of a dip in the hotel’s pool and before too long we were both having a nap.
We work up about 5.30pm, and decided to have a look at the old village at the top of the hill that had been recommended to us. Apparently the old ladies still come home on their donkeys around 5pm.
We walked up to the top of the hill through what could be 100+ year old Olive groves, which in themselves were quite fascinating. When we reached the top of the formed road, it narrows down to the width of a very small car, and no more. Fun I’m told, as it is a “two-way road”!
The old village is set upon a ridgeline between two peaks. It appears the way of
life has not changed in a hundred years. Narrow walkways join the perched houses that have the typical whitewash concrete look often seen in Greek photos. We weaved our way through what left like people’s private paths and even though we felt like we were intruding, the locals appeared to all be very friendly.
We had a good look around the village and, following a roughly sketched map that we were given this morning, managed to find our way to St John’s Church on the peak of the hills. From the Church you can see both sides of the Island quite clearly, and even more so, how far we had walked up!
We headed down to the shops and found ourselves an ATM before having dinner. While we were there we bumped into our British friends from the night before, Kate and John, who joined us for dinner at a Greek Restaurant called “Sebastian’s”.
After a nice meal and finding out that we had both booked on the same boat trip tomorrow (!), we decided to have a quick drink to end the evening. We went to a lovely place called ‘Stamastis’ perched right on the edge
of the beach over looking water. A couple of cocktails later, we went back to our respective hotels about 2am, knowing we both had to get up early for the boat trip tomorrow….
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Blair
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5 stars
Hi Hanz, just wanted to say keep up the good work, I get to live life Precariously through your eyes! it makes life interesting for us old married couples... ;) Hope you are having a great time.