Kalymnos to Agathonisi
After two days in hectic Kalymnos port we are now languishing hotly on Agathonisi, a speck of land in the northern Dodecanese where the temperatures are hitting forty plus (nearly as high a number as the permanent population) and, today, I can smell the paint burning on the houses caught up in the forest fires raging along the coast of Turkey, ten kilometres away.
We arrived on the boat called the Nissos Kalymnos, Google it if you want a picture of your authentic Greek Island rust bucket commuter bus. It sailed at six in the morning and cost twelve euros a person for a six hour boat trip, subsidised by the Greek state, and was truly wonderful. A Greek guy working as a waiter in Kalymnos told us that locally it is known as the love boat because it takes so long to get to Samos that if a guy can start something with a girl by the time the boat gets in they will very likely be getting a room or even married. I am thinking of a travel business called something like ‘nostalgic journeys’ where couples get to act out their Humphrey Bogart/Kathryn Hepburn, African Queen fantasies. (One would be aiming mainly at the pink pound/euro/dollar here).
So we managed a few hours walking this morning by starting at six thirty, a very novel experience in itself for our Jane, and have just had a swim on a very hot beach next to a Greek orthodox priest, (long black beard and hair, a sort of, ‘Christian fundamentalist’ look), with some Greek kids, bought some food and water from an amazingly sparsely stocked shop and walked up a steep, searing, tarmac road, (forty one degrees Jane’s phone says), to our gaff and are now hoping to siesta away the rest of the day until it cools down enough to drink ouzo and eat octopus and goat. Night time, that is.
Agathonisi to Fourni
The heatwave has dissipated slightly but our skins look like expensive handbags from some endangered species of reptilian creature and can only be made less Jurassic by the guilty application of liberal quantities of whale based products.
We left Agathonisi on the trusty Nissos Kalymnos, for Pythogoreon, on Samos, which was full of sleek, healthy, glamorous and sophisticated young people, terrible for us so we left after one day and came to the island of Fourni which is really Greece in the nineteen fifties where a large proportion of the population is either very fat, or bent double, or has crap teeth and hair, or all of the above, so we feel fabulous. We think it is probably the most unpretentious, authentic Greek place we have ever been. Love it ! And all the locals seem to assume we are either Italian or French, which of course the northerner in me found totally outrageous but given Brexit and all that we decided to keep nodding and smiling and take it as a compliment.
Its a small, very irregular shaped and indented island with a few hundred people and almost as many fishing boats ( and no yachts, hence, no yachties, smug bastards!). There are quiet little beaches all over the place and you can eat octopus and fish without the feeling that your wallet is also about to be gutted and filleted.
But Jane has stopped getting up at six thirty in the morning, so no more proper walking , too hot. We have had to hire one of the three hire cars on the island and, no, it isn’t a rage-buggy.
P.S. Additional item on the unpretension/authenticity here on Fourni. There was a local guy in the Kafenion this morning wearing his catheter bag on the outside of his clothing. Too much?
Lots of love, see you all soon, Rob and Jane