greece

Island hopping in Greece

After a few days in Athens, we drove to Naflipo, in the Peloponnese region of Greece. After driving through some reasonably nice landscapes, though ones devoid of ooh’s and ahhh’s, we start to see the Greece that travellers coo about. One minute it’s olive groves as far as the eye can see, then a hill starts to resemble a mountain and views become more like a greatest hits package. Everyone in the car starts staring out the windows left and right so as not to miss anything. Familiar names crop up like Corinth (ancient history town), Kineta (the first film by Yorgos Lanthimos), Olympia (all the sports) Argos (famed for its catalogues) and in heading to Nafplio I find out that it was the capital of the First Hellenic Republic and Kingdom of Greece until 1834. It has a population of just 34,000 today but still has an air of elegance and status about it.

We stayed at Pension Marianna, which is outstanding. As soon as we arrived, we felt welcome and were given some orange juice and are told our rooms were ready. A bugbear I have is arriving at hotels and finding that some unforeseen disaster has befallen my room such as moth attack, exploding lamp or an unforeseen and aggressive haunting, so it’s such a delight when all is smooth. The room was cosy and as we were perched at the top of the town, we had windows that opened out onto a magnificent view below, stretching out into the bay. The Marianna somehow under-promises and overdelivers from its excellent location to the quality of the breakfast.

Just above the hotel, you can walk to the Akronauplía castle ruins, where some parts of the wall date back 5000 years. History feels like a part of the fabric of Greece but until I found out that the walls were this old, I just looked at them and thought “these are nice walls” as I gazed out into the sea. From the viewpoint, I was able to see the curve of the bay and the Argolic Gulf, a view so peaceful I went there every morning to watch the few people in the sea as well as some fishermen and I urged myself to visit the sea more in England, something I have magnificently failed at doing.

When I first ventured into the town, it was a treat of marble pavements, wall-to-wall bougainvillea (the only plant I seem to be able to identify) and cats lounging stylishly. Entirely delightful streets full of things I didn’t need to buy stretched out everywhere but I spotted Mediterraneo wine and deli that had everything I wanted; a place to sit, read my book and have a glass of wine. A holiday read in a relaxing spot is the best kind of read, one where you don’t have to quickly feel you need to do anything but turn pages once in a while. Michel Faber’s Under the Skin might not appear to be a great holiday read but it’s worth a shot. It’s not too long, it’s deeply immersive and has a pace that makes you want to read more. Plus, the book features British weather and I had escaped all that.

Later, when my friends came down from the hotel, we took a long walk along the seafront, stopping every now to sniff the sewage and then to take photos and marvel at the quality of the light that may well have been organised by a cinematographer. It all felt a little unreal. Over the water, a castle perched on a rock and beyond that, hills caught the last gasp of the sun, with an army of wind turbines doing their thing. We headed back to Mediterraneo for a bottle of wine before dinner and after this, pleasantly fuzzy in the head, we walk to a couple of restaurants, who all politely laugh at our entreaties to be fed.

Hunger growing, we walk around the town some more and have a drink at the Aiolos Tavern’s Wine Bar before we are seated. What follows is an absolutely enormous meal of anything and everything at Aiolos Tavern. We were hungry, but the sheer quantity of food was ludicrous. That said, it was excellent and when you find a restaurant with a great atmosphere, it feels totally fine to just eat endlessly and laugh a bit too loudly. The orange cake was good enough that we visited the following day to get some more. Even typing orange cake gets me thinking about how much I want more of this. Somehow, after all the food expanded our stomachs and ripped our clothes like we’d become the Hulk, everyone wanted ice cream, so just like children, the ice cream part of the stomach was activated.

As we were in Greece, an island day was required so we drove from Nafplio to Ermioni, via a route that in some will produce terror and in others awe. A turning on a gentle corner quickly became a scene from a Bond film where he’s chasing someone and they end up in a ravine, on fire. Luckily, we arrive in Ermioni without anyone catching us. From there, we take a floating lawnmower disguised as a boat to Spetses, an island that can’t help but charm with its houses built very recently for Instagram. On some of the new estates, you could see influencers knocking chunks of the new homes with a sledgehammer, all for the vintage vibe. The vistas were engineered for hashtags. It is like arriving on an island designed for lifestyles lived online, with yet more glorious sunlight adding even more to the beauty.

As easy as it is to forget it’s a real place, people do live here and their bright white houses are perfectly set against the deep, luscious blue of the sea. We stop for an iced coffee at Balkoni, with views out to the water where I write a few smug “hahaha, you’re not here and I am” postcards to friends back home. Inevitably, I never found a stamp and these postcards ended up being sent when I was back in the UK. I may be one of the last people sending postcards, and even I’m doing it badly.

Caffeinated, we head from the centre towards a church on a peninsula and we walk past small beaches, clear water and fishing boats that lie dormant. On the island you can sense the season is drawing to a close; bars are closed or open for brief parts of the day. The warmth is very deceptive; it’s nearly 30c so you expect that sitting on a terrace for a beer will be a remarkably easy feat but it’s not. It’s nearly November and instead of enjoying the weather, we should be panicking a little. To put the weather into context, if this were the UK, shops would be filled with Christmas trinkets yet here I was applying sunscreen.

We only had three hours on Spetses so could just about scratch the surface of the island. There are woods that beckon in the hills, coves to explore but we simply don’t have time so we loop back towards the centre of town via a parliament of cats, getting down to the serious business of hanging around on benches. Just before we board the ferry for the next island, we pass a fairly grand old building in some state of disrepair with a notice board out front advertising their events. One was a 30^th anniversary workshop for Aston University. In three years of university, I never had a lecture or meeting off campus, let alone on a beautiful Greek island.

One thing I’ll always remember about Spetses that is both fascinating and terrifying is the endless streams of grannies whizzing by on scooters. They were always at a pace and nothing had a chance to get in their way. In the moment, I felt very much that I wanted to be a pensioner on a scooter later in life. They looked so mind-bendingly happy.

Hydra was our second island and it’s perhaps more beautiful than Spetses, but the differences are slight. For one, it’s less wooded but the upside of this is that there are more unobstructed views to be had. The island is entirely free of cars, which gives it a different pace and we didn’t have to duck and cover every few minutes. Donkeys, with BMW and Peugeot badges are the only form of transport on the island other than your own legs. We have five hours in Hydra but even so, we don’t get far from the main town but we do pass Leonard Cohen’s house which he bought when he was 26. Impressively, none of us realise at the time but Google timeline reliably informs me that I took a photo outside it. Naturally, I was taking photos of yet more cats.

According to Google, these cats are outside Leonard Cohen’s house. I think otherwise.

We need feeding, and it’s late afternoon on a Greek island in October. Google maps tells us that a few places are open, when they clearly are not. We go to a restaurant that has glowing reviews, knock on the door just in case and a startled topless man comes to tell us they’re definitely closed. After a while we do the activity that exists only when on holiday and lacking choices; we get picky. Anywhere will do, but not the place with the tables that look horrible, and certainly not the place with the ugly door. Eventually, miraculously, we find a place that only has one flaw. Flies. Herds of flies that are everywhere. We peer at the food, which looks delicious, and we try to look beyond the flies nesting on every piece of it. When lunch is bought over, new flies divebomb us and our arms flail enough to create a cooling draught for the customers next to us.

Post-lunch and fly larvae, we stroll along the cliffs and take in the views, accompanied by big contented sighs. Some of the trees on the path were bent at angles that suggest fierce storms and above us we spotted a few stone windmills. Some of these are barely recognisable as windmills while others are now used as accommodation and look gorgeous. As we amble towards a bar, we pass Leonard Cohen’s bench which this time is noticed by us. It’s not so much a bench as a three sided stone wall with a plaque, but with a view that would lighten the mood of any Cohen fan.

We spend the rest of our time in Hydra near the harbour, where I try and paddle in the water but find myself unable to trust the slippery look of the stones leading to the ladder. So instead I continue to look out on the water before we have a drink at Spilia café and bar and here, my mind wanders. Why is the sea so calm so often? How come water flows quite evenly and doesn’t jut out of the sea at random angles or arrange itself in a vertical tower of water? How come gravity doesn’t stop? Why didn’t I do well in my GCSE Science? This goes on for what seems an eternity and is a sign that I’m relaxed enough for my mind to start rearranging the world. We face the sea, looking at the sun slowly dipping down for another night and I’m glad water wasn’t doing anything untoward because, for one, it’d ruin the view.

A food tour…of Athens

If I had been counting calories in my time in Athens, I would have swiftly realised I was pregnant with triplets. The food was endless and almost all of it was gooey, yummy, delicious and with enough vegetables to trick the mind into thinking it was healthy. But healthy food has never tasted as good as the food in Athens. My friend, Rokos, had planned a day of doing little but eating and doing some walking between food stops to give us the illusion of exercise.

Part 1: We started at one of his favourite places, Stani. It’s one of a dying breed of dairy bars in the city and is in a neighbourhood that has seen better days. This isn’t an austerity comment, as most of Athens looks and feels like a normal functioning city but Omonia just looks tired. Watch your step as you could trip over some jagged pavement, avoid the overflowing bins and eventually you’ll arrive at Stani. It’s tiny and looks like it hasn’t changed in decades, which is exactly how it should be. The offering is simple and excellent; we had sheep yogurt with honey, a cake containing custard that oozes out when you break the pastry as well as coffee. The first mouthful was so good that suddenly the surroundings became palatial and glorious.

Part 2: Our second stop was Loukoumades Ktistakis, which sells very little but the eponymous fried honey balls. There are a few tables inside but this is the sort of place where you order, eat in one mouthful, make a face that is close to the face of someone that’s just seen God (and when he does return, he’ll go there and do the face of god when he tastes these). This is food that cracks open into a gooey mess, but it gets a thumbs up from everyone.

Part 3: The central food markets. This has the potential to go either way, once you enter the meat and fish section. As someone who has mostly given up meat, walking through a giant hall filled with flesh of every kind being cut up wasn’t very pleasant. Even the beaks and hooves on display didn’t fill me with joy. So I learned that I’m further along the vegetarian marker than I’d realised but not quite there. But the markets don’t just do meat, they do anything you could imagine and I always find a large array of brightly coloured vegetables really soothing. The real pleasure I get from them is seeing ingredients I don’t usually come across, which gets me thinking about what I’m going to cook next. It’s the same when you see spices piled high; reminding me of a middle eastern souk. The markets bring to mind a time before everything came pre-measured, in a glass jar or plastic pouch and I foresaw my past-self going round the stalls, haggling over prices before stopping off for a quick coffee. In this past life, I almost certainly had a wheely trolley full of the day’s shopping.

Part 4: The Mediterranean Grocery store is a superb deli that instantly made me want to live in Athens so I could pop by here all the time. Holiday mode does this to me; we have these sort of deli’s in London and even in Walthamstow, but still. I was in love. Aisles stacked high with every sort of olive oil imaginable, biscuits, different types of pasta, pickled things, wine. It all just looked so enticing and I cursed my lack of hold luggage on the flight back. Consequently, my phone is full of photos of Greek produce I’ll always be on the lookout for.

Part 5: Nikita’s. After various bites across the city, it was time for a big meal and Nikita’s has a great atmosphere of ‘home-cooked food by mum’ plus an outstanding cat having a snooze on one of the outdoor chairs. In my world, this is as good as getting a positive Jay Rayner review. At Nikita’s, we ate as much as the table would hold, from moussaka, to dolmades to vegetable stew and saganaki, all washed down with beer.

It got me thinking about the food of my childhood which was in no way as rich and varied as this. It was more of a traditional British meat-n-two-veg household, the kind of place where boiling a cauliflower until it’s a limp and soggy tragedy was deemed blanching. We didn’t eat cheese, ever, and adventures in seafood went as far as cod in a parsley sauce. It wasn’t battered! Watch out Heston. When I lived with my Nan, she somehow decided I was a maniac for lamb chops and chicken chasseur and even twenty years after her death, I still fondly think of her getting on the bus – the number 18 in Birmingham if you like buses – to go to the butcher’s so she could get the meat. But still, no cheese.

After all the food and reminiscing, we needed some perking up to stop us all falling into a food coma so when we found Dope Coffee we were all delighted. Not only do they serve great coffee in a very (I hate myself for saying it) Insta-friendly backdrop but more importantly, some superb cinnamon buns that were so good we found additional space in our already-distended stomachs for them. Hands down, one of the best cinnamon buns I’ve eaten in my life. It poses a threat to everything Scandinavia holds dear, it’s that good.

God seems to figure today with the holy dough balls and the holy bun, so it was obvious that we needed to follow this up by going to church. And so we walked to the Metropolitan Church of Athens which is pretty enough, but in its shadow is the very cute Church of Virgin Mary Gorgoepekoos and Saint Eleutherius, bringing some 12^th century swagger into the heart of modern day Athens. Inside, it is a showcase of what churches do so well; it feels intimate and calm while also as chintzy as you like. Cracks in the walls indicate the damage earthquakes can have on the city.

Next up was Syntagma Square, which I am familiar with from the austerity riots and also that time that Jason Bourne ran through the square mid mayhem to do something in a film. It is a becalmed place now, featuring the mighty Evzones guarding the President. Let’s take a moment to admire their uniform. A cap with a tassel, a shirt with flared sleeves for that Studio 54 look, stockings made of wool, clogs with a pom pom on and a gun. The clogs, presumably, are for kicking as they weigh 1.5kgs each and the pom pom is for fun. The gun is to shoot people dead. It is endearing for nations to keep these ridiculous traditions, and the world would look far less interesting without them. Take off the bearskin cap of the British Foot Guards and not only would they be able to see, but they’d just look boring. Anyway, my main point is that the military really embraces a camp aesthetic and should be applauded for how progressive that is.

On this whistle stop tour of the foods and sights of Athens, we still had more to see and so we walked through the national gardens which featured palm trees that rivalled those seen in LA, or perhaps it should be the other way round. The National Garden is a pleasant park though fairly tiny place at just 38 acres but it’s a green haven in the city with its own set of ancient ruins (to be honest, it’s hard not to find an ancient remain in Athens) and leads to many more sights such as Zappion Gardens and the Panathenaic Stadium which held the first modern Olympics. As stadiums go, it’s so simplistic in form and a beauty to look at. However, I can’t imagine it’d be too pleasant to sit there for many hours in the sun, roasting slowly.

As we headed closer to sunset, we took a cab to Mount Lycabettus, taking the cable car up 227 metres, meaning we were the highest people in the city. It got me thinking about exactly how high it was up there, and the Shard reaches 300m so there’s a little fun fact for you. When you reach the top, there’s little in the way of space as you’re on a small peak and there is a restaurant, bar, church with neon lights and a spectacular viewing point. Everyone is crowding for the best spots but with some patience, you’ll get the shot in the end. Most people tend to choose the cable car to go up and to walk down, savouring the sublime views of a deep red sky filtering over the top of the city and seeing all the lights spread out for miles. Having never been to LA, I reckon that LA looks like this from up the highest points in the city.

In theory, walking down the hill is an excellent idea but my friends and I took a wrong turn at some point and ended up walking down the hill with phone torches as our only light and coyotes hungry for our blood. Maybe it was a cat. It wouldn’t have been great fun to trip and break a leg here and dear reader, I didn’t. We eventually fell off the hill and into sight of this gorgeous modern building that was like a little slice of Zaha Hahid with its gorgeous curves and immaculate finishing. Back in civilisation, we found a bar, we found wine and we found more food to eat. It was glorious.

A trip to…Athens

I knew I was going to like Greece, because I was going to Greece. Everyone loves Greece. For years, I wondered why I had been to so many places and yet still hadn’t explored a country absolutely heaving with culture, history and food. Now that I’ve been, it seems even more bizarre that I’d never visited. Greece is an absolute gem of a holiday destination.

My first impressions of Athens as we head to the suburb of Glyfada, is that it bears resemblance to the Middle East. Along the route, plenty of buildings have rebar sticking out of first floors, giving the buildings an air of being trapped in time. Almost complete, but something got in the way. There was more than a whiff of abandonment, which is exactly what a 25% reduction in a country’s economy would do to anywhere. The spectre of the global crash may be apparent on the roads into Athens but as we arrive in Glyfada, we enter a smart, well-heeled neighbourhood where buildings are complete and trees overhang anything they can. The air is fragranced heavily from bushes and flowers.

We head to Yi, a raw vegan restaurant for dinner, and it felt like an immense treat to be in a restaurant in late October with all the windows wide open and many customers eating on the terrace. I wasn’t terribly excited by the concept of actual raw food, but it turns out that you can pop food in the oven up to 118c and still be considered raw. A big starter of salad was bursting with flavours and my main was a Caponata with pasta. What intrigued me on the menu was not the yummy dishes but a long list of notes for the customer such as “the customer is not obliged to pay if not given legal proof” which is longhand for a receipt. They also had a paragraph telling us the lament of the frozen items and the joys of the fresh produce. There was even an advertisement for the complaints book, but there were no complaints for us and the book remained unsigned.

For an after dinner cocktail, we waddled over to Holy Spirit, in a part of town buzzing with activity even on a Sunday night. There, a DJ played the same song on a loop for what felt like many days and one of our party spent ages talking to him about how great his music was. I maintain that the DJ was just playing the same song, despite evidence to the contrary. Later, at the apartment, we get ready to sleep after watching an excellent video for Athens cats and dogs home, replete with sound effects of animals having a lovely time. Unfortunately, none of us really manage to sleep. Mine is the sort of slumber where I’m unsure if I ever lose consciousness and hear every sound made, even the sounds of air molecules bouncing languidly off one another.

The next morning, we buy a 5 day metro pass which will let us travel to everywhere we want to go in the city for €9, the same as one cocktail from Holy Spirit costs. At moments like this, I sense how much money I’ve wasted in the my life and weep. Our first culture his is the gorgeous Acropolis museum, which is a bargain €10 to enter and despite it being late October, it is still busy, which makes you wonder what it’s like in the middle of summer. The building is a huge upgrade on the concrete lean-to that came before and it exists so that there is one large space to show off all the Elgin Marbles. Now this museum exists, Britain’s argument for keeping the marbles seems threadbare. With the Brexit negotiations looming (or not, you just never know), it looks like the marbles will soon have a new home. And why not? We don’t have nearly as nice a location to store our loot; here, the marbles will be in viewing distance from the Parthenon and in their rightful place.

Once museum fatigue has set in, which happens no later than two hours from entry, we explored Plaka and head to Brettos bar for what is misleadingly called a sharpener. Brettos is Athens’ oldest bar, and it has been distilling and serving drinks since 1909. I had something red and plummy. It wasn’t cheap but it was delicious. However, the star of the show is undoubtedly the stunning interior of Brettos. Hundreds of brightly coloured bottles are stacked to the ceiling behind the bar, backlit for maximum effect. Barrels of liqueurs and ouzo are to the side of the room. It has the atmosphere of a place you’d rather not leave and was as beguiling inside as the weather was outside. But leave we must and Plaka, though very charming, is a busy place to be. There are photos on the internet of Plaka with empty streets; perhaps these were taken at a ridiculously early hour or they time travelled from the coronavirus era, but Plaka in late October was hectic.

Our next stop was in Anafiotika, a smaller neighbourhood of Plaka, where a far quieter landscape enchanted us. Though small, this neighbourhood feels like the Greece you see advertised – tiny whitewashed houses, twisting lanes, an abundance of nature and far-reaching views. It’s like Santorini with air pollution. It looks the way it is because in the 1800s King Otto I wanted to turn Athens into a modern city and cast his net for builders from across the country; many of them came from Anafi Island and so naturally built dwellings that looked like their own. The cubed whitewashed buildings with blue accents bring island architecture to the mainland and are reminiscent of the Greek flag.

Perched on Acropolis Hill, this is the kind of place Lonely Planet would call “unspoilt” which in today’s parlance means there are no Air BnBs or tourist shops. But sadly, it is very much spoilt. Anafiotika once covered a larger district but archaeological explorations destroyed all but 60 or so homes. However, what’s there today is still exceptionally gorgeous and a wonderful opposite to the crowded streets of Athens. In a city that doesn’t want for viewpoints, there are some stunning ones here and it’s far too easy to photograph everything, from the blooming bougainvillea to cats doing tightrope walks between buildings and the way the sun strikes the side of a building.

As tempting as it is to do that, we have tickets to visit the Acropolis and of course, it would feel incomplete to not go to where all eyes lead to in Athens. The Acropolis demands your attention and being up there gives a sense of scale to this remarkable complex, including the scale of the scaffolding of the Parthenon temple, which is said to be thousands of years old. The scaffolding was taken down briefly in 2010 but since then, they’ve been continuing the restoration work at a snail’s pace which means that the restoration work, including adding new marble to the temple, has taken longer to do than it took to build the temple in the first place. All sorts of nuisances have happened up on the Acropolis, from fires and looting, to wars and plucky Brits nicking bits of it and cowboy builders but it’s always a humbling experience to see a building constructed two and half thousand years ago, up close.

There’s really nothing to do up on the Acropolis but look at the ruins and scuttle around the crowds, but it’s deeply peaceful and a chance to just spend time soaking up the breath-taking views all around and contemplate life. From up high, you get an overview of Athens as a city. It seems to go on forever and the vantage point of the Acropolis, which is 490 feet above sea level, gives Athens a perspective that few cities have unless you’re up a skyscraper. You see the hills all around, the white blocks stretching out for miles and the sea.

I specified to my friend that what I really wanted every evening was a cocktail or glass of wine on a rooftop bar with a view and for our first edition of this we went to A for Athens. We hadn’t reserved and snatched the last available table with seconds to spare, giving us a superb view of the Acropolis and the city in front of it. Initially, I was a little miffed because the table we were at was by a window but magically, the window was retracted and all my dreams came true as we relaxed, chatted and let our minds empty of anything troubling. The wine we ordered was so good we ordered a second bottle as dusk became night and Athens was gloriously spread out in front of us.

TICKETS MONEY PASSPORT

TICKETS MONEY PASSPORT

greece

Island hopping in Greece

A food tour…of Athens

A trip to…Athens