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Published: August 27th 2023
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Today we head two hours east across the water to our next destination, the smaller island of Amorgos.
The only two wheels on one of our two suitcases have now both stopped fulfilling their only function in life, that is to rotate. We’ve been dragging that lump of lead of a suitcase around through airports and up and down narrow cobbled alleyways for a couple of weeks now, which hasn’t been doing a lot for our collective senses of humour, or our shoulder sockets. I’m now left wondering a bit how travellers managed back in the days before wheels on suitcases were a thing. I tried picking the whole dead weight up a few times and carrying it, and always gave that up as a bad joke very quickly. Maybe people just packed less back then ... or had slaves to do the work for them.
Yesterday I prowled the back streets of Naxos Town and managed to find a replacement. So now we have to abandon our old faithful suitcase, and the saddest thing about that is that it’s covered in some of Issy’s priceless artwork. She created these masterpieces a few years back to make our luggage
stand out when we were trying to get it off baggage carousels. She’s now worried about the hotel having the hassle of disposing of it, but I’m much more concerned about the loss of potential earnings. She didn’t seem at all interested in my plan to cut the artwork off and try to sell it. The new suitcase is plain black and looks a bit bland and boring. But I doubt that’s going to be a problem. I’m here with thirteen Rembrandts for the next eighteen days, and they’re all champing at the bit at the chance to slather paint on any bare surface ….
We’d never heard of Amorgos before, or the tiny island of Donousa that we stopped briefly at on the way here. Maybe that’s not all that surprising. Greece claims to have more than six thousand islands, which leaves me wondering what exactly constitutes an island? Is it a small rock sticking up out of the water a few metres offshore? What about a bigger rock a few hundred metres offshore? The ever-reliable Wikipedia states that “there is no standard of size that distinguishes islands from continents, or from islets”. Well that just plain sucks. Apparently Australia claims to have 8,222 islands, but how do we know that they’d all still be called islands if someone moved them to Greece … or maybe there’d be even more. And to make matters worse the ever-reliable goes on to talk about “de-islandisation”. That’s when someone builds a bridge, or a causeway, although if you can’t drive across the causeway at high tide the “thing” it connects to might still be called an island, assuming it was called an island in the first place. And some islands are still called islands even after someone’s built a bridge, because it would be too confusing for everyone to change the name. I think I need a drink.
Amorgos looks absolutely spectacular. It’s steep, high and rocky, and almost totally devoid of trees. We dock at Aegiali, the northern of the island’s two ports. From there it’s into a couple of buses for a ride halfway up one of the mountains to our hotel in the tiny village of Lagada. The views down over the rocky countryside to the coast are stunning, and I can see a few of the Rembrandts starting to salivate. Maybe now might be a good time to bring out our new suitcase?
We dine on the hotel terrace overlooking the valley and the coast. The sunset is stunning, and as we leave we can see that they’ve lit up one of the massive cliff faces. There’s a tiny church halfway up with a steep narrow path leading up to it. I think I know where I’m going to be headed tomorrow morning.
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