Greece 29 - Parga / a water taxi and taxi ride home/crepes and ice cream on the waterfront /Enjoy Lyknos Camping squeezed into a corner

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It is not a million miles from Prevetza one seaside town to Parga another.Suzy is going to overnight on the beachside campsite called Enjoy Lyknos camping.


Now the title of the campsite gives the clue away I think. It is big and brash and part of a much bigger complex made up of holiday homes, a night club and loungers on the beach. It is an ACSI site and is terraced on the hillside. Rows upon rows of spaces for campervans. The beachside plots are almost all taken by German motorhomers. It feels a little like the towel on the sun lounger before breakfast. It is really not the sort of campsite we enjoy being on.


We are struggling to find our type of campsite up here so close to Igoumenitsa the port we sail home from. Reception is right at the bottom of a long hill. The receptionist was friendly and helpful . She showed me the mini market , explained she could bring me bread in the morning and gave me a guided tour of the sanitary blocks . Her English was near perfect which made me smile. That strange man Junkers from the EU has said that English is redundant as a language. No-one he said speaks English. Come to Greece Mr Junkers – the lorries are written up with English, the shops sell items with English translations and we have had no problem with any ancient site or campsite as everyone seems to have a grasp of English. In every campsite the Greek speak to the Dutch, the French and the Germans in English. It is the universal language .

Wifi is free but the quality of it is rather slow and poor. This too seems the norm for Greece . It has been free at all campsites but whether it worked or not was rather in the balance.


We ask about getting to Parga. We were told that we could get a taxi for 8 euros and the receptionist would order one for us when we wanted to go in. We knew that there was a water taxi but she did not mention this to us. So we guessed it only ran in the summer season. We parked up in a quiet corner wedged between a swiss van and the wall. At night the nightclub came to life the sea changed colour to the beat of the music.

After a while I noticed the boat on the beach was starting to fill with people. I walked down to the boat “Are you going to Parga?” Yes was the reply – they were leaving in 15 mins . Just time to go to Suzy,pick Glenn up and return to the boat. The skipper was a grumpy old soul . One hand on the tiller and a bare foot on the accelerator he made his way round the coast skirting the rocks closely for the 15 minute journey to Parga. Arriving we disembarked searched out how to pay and asked about times they returned. It cost 10 euros and the Parga Water taxi Union were not going anywhere now as they were closing. It seems they go to Lyknos Bay in the morning for the sun worshippers to get on the beach and pick them up later in the day. We were going the wrong way round.

Parga is set in a horseshoe shaped bay with rocky islets off its shore. It has a venetian castle on the headland in a pretty poor state of repair and enough restuarants that would allow you eat out twice a day for a week and not eat at them all. Parga as been owned by the French, the Russians, the British and the Venetians over the years. The Brits sold it to Ali Pasha a guy we would come up again with in a few days time. It is a pretty place with small backstreets full of tiny shops. The Greeks love it too and make it a both a weekend and a holiday destination. We sat in a café – all had shouted us in – we picked crepes and ice cream before we searched out the taxi rank. Easy to find they were all sitting round waiting for pickups. I wondered why such a small place had so many taxis but it became clear when we realised that they do the airport runs at 90 euros a time. Our 8 euros fare 5 mins up the road seemed like chicken feed to them.

We didn’t sleep that well and made the decision to move on again tomorrow. It is only Tuesday and we have started counting the hours down to our trip home . 57 hours to kill. Another campsite tonight and a side trip to Ioannina. We had not pencilled this in to the trip as we did not have time on the way down to Athens. Now with all this time on our hands we could do it and take in a bit of Turkish Greece and leave us with a lasting memory of the country. Sadly the lasting memory was not going to be Ioannina but something rather more annoying and frustrating. That's a story for another blog. We were going to come down to earth with a rather nasty bump.

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