Living It Up At The Hotel Kyparissia

Yes, ten days in the hotel kyp and we are thinking to check out. But as almost the only guests we are now practically a part of the Greek/Albanian/ Bulgarian (???) extended family that seem to have taken over running the place for the winter, now that the proper managers have all dispersed to whatever limbo hotel managers go to in the off season. Actually trying to check out might appear insulting to our Balkan hosts and make us subject to one of their vendettas, with the usual honour killings and all that sort of unpleasantry, so its probably easier just to stay here until the money runs out and they kill us anyway.

Two Days Later- Onwards to Kefalonia

What a difference a day makes! Well in this case, two days, of wildly differing and contrasting experiences.

There is a man wearing tight trousers and a cheap, dressy shirt, with a big bulging belly and a big belt, into which he hooks a thumb, while swigging beer from a bottle with the other hand and rocking back and forth on his heels, looking around and seeming very pleased with himself in a proprietorial kind of way, as if the bus station is his grand domain, and we are all his invited guests at a splendid house party. This is at nine in the morning.

And there are a sprinkling of ordinary Greek travellers, who I have noticed, go into a sort of state of mournful despondency at the prospect of travel on public transport, and then, once they are on the bus, draw the curtain across their window and fall asleep as quickly as possible. We board the dimly curtained bus, occupied by many narcoleptic travellers from one purgatory to another and begin our journey to, appropriately, the big town/city of Pyrgos.

In Pyrgos we have a plan! We are going to catch a bus to the nearby coast and spend two or possibly three days in Katakolo, a place the Rough Guide describes as an “interesting, ramshackle old port”.
We catch the bus, half an hour late, but who cares by now, and sweep out of Pyrgos and through the lush countryside to Katakolo, where it becomes obvious we have made a terrible mistake.
First we see the massive edifices of cruise ships looming over the town, like very bad 1960s social housing, and then we see whole streets of shops selling exactly the same cheap tourist crap as one another and hordes of aimlessly milling ‘shoppers’ from the ships, gormlessly going from one crap emporium to another, as if to try and discern a difference.

It seems that the “interesting ramshackle old port” has been repurposed as a stop at the lower end of the cruise market.

We make an instant snap decision to get out on the same bus that we came in on. As we forge our way back to the bus, desperate in case it should leave us in this depressing consumer hell for a minute longer, we are asked by a man in cruise wear “is this the bus to the ship?” The ship is about one minutes walk away. A female of the cruising species stands in front of the bus, peering up at the front Πύργος, complaining loudly in peeved English “how are you supposed to know what it says?”

Once back in Pyrgos we have to regroup and reformulate our strategy and we decide to push on to Kyllini, the ferry port from which we cross to Kefalonia, described dispiritingly in the Rough Guide as “cheerless little Kyllini”. The bus journey goes pretty much as all the others. There is an overpowering smell of sweaty feet and shoes which later on, in the hotel, I realise are mine. The trip is only enlivened by a large, voluble gypsy woman boarding the bus at some town accompanied by her huge amounts of baggage and rolled up stuff in blankets, all the while shouting in Greek what I assume were curses and damnations on all of us.

We arrive in Kyllini tired and emotional and book into the first hotel we come across which is a somewhat overpriced Greek version of a grand business hotel with neoclassical elements and painted out with thick Dulux in cream, cappuccino and mocha. It is run by a tiny Greek elderly lady, who, even though we are, as far as we can tell, the only guests, refuses to drop the price at all, even though I wave cash under her nose, which usually works in Greece. Respect.

It is difficult to describe this hotel. If Miss Haversham had pulled herself together, seen a business adviser and got the decorators in, that might be somewhere near. Or if there had been a Nazi version of ‘The Shining’ in which ghostly Hitler youth roamed the long curving corridors of a large, deserted, somewhat Fascist neoclassical building, on tricycles, then that also would describe the feel of it. Somewhere between the two really.

Day Two

What a refreshing change!
We make the 10.30 boat on time, have a breezy, on deck, crossing to Kefalonia, where, due to a strategically decisive phone call of mine, we are met on arrival at the port of Poros by a charming Greek woman and presented with a brand new, shiny red, Seat car. We complete the paper work on the spot and for the sum of ninety euros for five days we have the car to go where we like and then leave at the airport. Bliss. And kiss my arse public transport.