Greece!!!

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To paraphrase one of my favourite characters, “Allow myself to introduce… myself” You know how it is in the summer months when TV ratings are off, all the stars go on holiday, and the fill-in comes in to, err, fill in? Well, that’s what is happening here. Julie is on, umm, “holiday” (The cheek! Another holiday within a holiday!...), so younger-sister-and-occasional-travelling-partner Shani is here to fill in for this particular episode.

Life last week took us both to Greece.

And it was good.

Ha ha. No, I’ll give a little more detail than that. Greece was the result of Julie and me walking into a travel agency one lazy Saturday, and asking the agent what he had. He had a week on Kos going cheap so that’s where we went.

Kos is a little island in the far south east of the Greek archipelago, only 15km west of Turkey. It’s about 45km from top to bottom and about 10km across, though of course it’s not exactly a rectangle… We stayed at the southern end in a resort called Kefalos, which funnily enough is right next to the village of Kefalos.

The hotel was the Kordistos, which to be honest was a bit of a love-hate relationship, particularly if you’re a prima-donna like me who has gotten well used to 4* hotels and prefers to have HOT water coming out of the shower nozzle… A quick run down:

• People running the place were wonderful. They even helped us out with our Greek. Ευχαριστώ guys.

• Swimming pool was lovely. Not huge, but big enough, and very well maintained

• Location was brilliant - literally 15m from our door to the first sand of the beach

• The room wasn’t the balcony-with-view-of-the-sea we had requested. Rather, it was more like cell-block-H with no window and bars on the door. It was poorly lit, had beds very reminiscent of school camp (is Woodside missing any???), and I didn’t experience hot water until the penultimate day (the other days it was pool temperature…)

• When hotel websites declare that the rooms have air conditioning and fridges, please note that these items may incur extra charges. Per day.

Weather was great. Low to mid 30s every day. Can’t complain about that.

Other activities included hiring a dune buggy for a day and driving around the island to see the sights (mostly ruins of castles), walking up to Kefalos village, taking a day-trip to Bodrum in Turkey, and learning how to windsurf. Well, actually, Julie learnt properly how to windsurf whereas I did the blokey thing and just hired a windsurfer to play around on which was completely fine except that it was an offshore wind which means I ended up 150-ish m out when the wind dropped and was rather challenged to bring it back in. Good thing the hire place was doing a shuttle service with the rubber ducky…

Anyway, Greece was good. Y’all should do it some time.

To continue the format, things I find disturbing:

1. Literally disturbing: Julie snores. I was going to take a video, but decided I wasn’t that cruel. Next time maybe.

2. Good-disturbing: the cocktails at the hotel bar. We were asked if we wanted ‘strong’ ones - duh! However, they turned out to be three quarters rum and schnapps with just a dash of juice, making them the equivalent of 10 drinks at once. Many, many thanks to Kostas the barman for getting us tanked at a fraction of the price.

3. Funny-disturbing: the look on the face of the buggy hire dude when we walked back into the shop without the buggy. He thought we'd crashed it. Actually we just ran out of petrol 200m up the road.

4. Πίθηκος (pithikos) is Greek for ‘monkey’. I got one in my cocktail. I brought it home as a pet. Your choice as to which of these is disturbing.

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Photos

Greece 1
Sunset from the village of Zia

Greece 3
Exploring the fortress in the middle of the island

Bob the Buggy
Bob took us to the other end of the island and back. We ran out of petrol about 30 seconds after the driver (pictured!!!) said "Lets not take it back yet, let's see how far it gets"