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| Monday morning Yialos. There are far fewer gulets than usual. These boats come over to Symi from Turkey as part of a cruising itinerary and the passengers are usually foreign tourists so if fewer tourists are visiting Turkey this year, the knock on effect is that there are fewer gulets visiting Symi and the other border islands. |
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| 8 a.m. and not a lot happening. I think the bright orange looks better on the fishing boat than it does on the building behind. |
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| Early morning coffee at Pachos, waiting for the day to start. Symi Visitor Accommodation is in the diminutive buildiing set back between Pachos and the shop with the sky blue sign. Our entrance is in the lane around the corner, between Pachos and Enigma boutique. |
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| Looking up at Lemonitissa church on the Kastro from opposite Symi Visitor Accommodation. For some reason my little Nikon really battles to make sense of this view and I don't think I have ever really managed to capture just how perpendicular that hillside view is without winding up with leaning lamp posts like the one you see to the right! |
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| It is not just the gulets that are conspicuous by their absence. We are seeing very few really big motor yachts and sailing yachts these days and in comparison to years gone by, Symi harbour is quite restrained this season. The rich must have another playground this summer. |
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| Mind you, some of the local boats haven't seen the water in years. |
This is the quietest July on Symi that anyone can remember. It is as though Symi has slipped back to the 1980s and the early days of tourism to the island. Rhodes is fairly busy as the big resort hotels have benefited from the package holiday companies placing people there who would otherwise have been in Turkish resorts so we are getting a lot of Russian day trippers but in the evenings, when they have departed, there are very few people around apart from Symi's regular visitors that come year after year and the foreign property owners.
This morning as I was walking down to work a slightly battered white van pulled up along side me and one of the Yialos supermarket proprietors offered me a lift down to Yialos. It was a very fragrant ride as he had just come down from gathering herbs on the mountain to sell in the shop and the back of the van was full of bundles of rigani, the Greek mountain oregano. The smell reminded me of the very first time I came to Symi back in 1993. We were anchored in Panormitis bay at the south-western end of the island and decided to walk across to send a fax to South Africa to let our families know where we were. It was July, just as it is now, hot and dusty and the hillsides were aromatic the wonderful smell of hot sage, oregano and thyme bushes. The plants themselves had dried to dust and appeared dead but the smell was fantastic. Come the first rains in October and overnight these tough scrubby little bushes start shooting tiny green leaves again, a botanical symbol of Greek resilience.
Have a good week.
Regards,
Adriana
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