February Postcards from Symi

It is amazing what cats will find comfortable to sleep on.

Rural or urban?  On Symi the distinction is not clear and never more so than in the winter months. Any bit of grazing will have a sheep, goat or donkey grazing on it. These two were munching away in the lanes of Chorio.

Nature has planted her own garden in this old dry stone wall near the Chorio car park.

There must be a story to this. That is a plastic water tank.

A gentle reminder from the Symi Flower shop that it is Valentine's Day next week.

Wild lupins.  I photograph them in this field at the top of the Pedi valley every year.

When I was sailing we used to call this a mackerel sky as the clouds look a bit like fish scales.  It usually means that there are strong winds to come.  It is calm enough now but tomorrow could be windy again.  We seem to alternate between  dead calms, squalls and unforeseen gales precipitating shipping bans.

Looking down at the clock tower and Harani from my usual view point at the bend on the Kali Strata.  The white structure  in front of the clock tower is the Schengen customs and immigration border control point.  Visiting yachts, gulets and cruise ships have to clear in then before they can come ashore.

I spotted this office chair outside a house on the Kali Strata this morning.  The seat is covered in ginger fur.

Could this be the culprit?  He didn't hang around to answer any questions.

It was still enough to sit with the balcony doors open at the Symi Visitor Accommodation office this morning, to the astonishment of the cats who use the balcony railing as a bridge from one roof to the next.

Dodecanese Seaways gliding into Yialos at 9.30 this morning.  They won't be running the Symi route on Saturday as they will be catching up with the Halki Tilos route which had to be cancelled on Thursday due to strong winds.

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June Postcards from Symi

Half past 8 on a Friday morning and you can already see that it is hot out there.

There are more boats in, mostly Turkish-owned as Symi is a popular cruising ground for Turks based in Datca, Bodrum, Marmaris and Bozburun.

Symi's strict architectural code means no awnings on balconies on the Kali Strata. There's no rule against ice cream parasols though as that is temporary shade.  And, of course, the colour goes nicely with the balcony rails.

The Blue Star speeding past the entrance to Pedi, en route to Rhodes, just after 8 this morning.

A bougainvillea on a smallholder's cottage in the Pedi valley provides a bright pop of colour.

There are lots more sailing yachts in Pedi these days.  On the right hand side of the bay you can see the path to St Nicholas beach quite clearly. There is a similar path to Agia Marina on the other side but as that tracks inland it is not so obvious.

The view from my desk at the Symi Visitor Accommodation office on Wednesday.

Looking across Yialos from outside the National Bank of Greece. You can just make out the ruins of the old windmills silhouetted against the skyline.  In the days of the Ottomans, Symiots had farms on the surrounding coastline of Asia Minor and brought their grain harvest over to the central hub, Symi, to grind it into flour.  Now there is a border in between and the last functioning windmill fell into disuse in the 1950s.

The view from one of my favourite 'keyholes' on the Kali Strata.

The ferry office for Blue Star ferries and Dodecanese Seaways. Symi Tours also organises tours and bus trips and is also the local agent for booking flights.

I have always loved the shopfront at Merakles taverna in Yialos.  

A modern Greek tragedy at the bottom of the Kali Strata.

An eruption of Plumbago. The locals call it Blue Jasmine but unlike its namesake it has no fragrance.  

A quiet snooze spot in Chorio.

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Symi Is Open for Business!

The leather shop and some of the other tourist shops along the Mouragio side of the harbour are now open.

The view from the Symi Visitor balcony is still mainly fishing boats. I took this photograph early in the week when the Dodecanese Seaways catamaran did a day trip from Rhodes. The Panagia Skiadeni did her first day trip yesterday.

Work on the new harbour has stopped for the Easter weekend so that the crew can spend the holiday with their families.  Look at how green the hillside is.

The wild lupins have joined the poppies and corona daisies in the terraces.

Muscari - the wild grape hyacinth.

Muscari growing from the base of an old stone wall in Lieni.

More of the tavernas and cafes are opening up, ready for visitors coming over from Rhodes.

An abundance of clover.  No wonder Symi Easter lamb is so succulent.

Maria has been busy, cutting wild oregano to dry in the shade and sell to passers by on the Kali Strata.

The Turkish gulets are back.

Lemonitissa church looming over Yialos.  This is one of the main churches in Chorio for the Easter celebrations at midnight on Saturday night.

The beach tavernas are not open yet and it will be while a month before the water taxis come into operation but that's no excuse not to buy designer beach wear.

New stock, waiting to be unpacked.  

Suddenly Symi is a lot more awake.  The day boats have started from Rhodes and there are a lot more people about, mostly Greek rather than foreigners.  More businesses are opening up and there is a buzz of activity around the harbour.  At this point it is still very low key as there are few tourists actually staying on the island and the main focus is people coming over from Rhodes for the day and people visiting their families for the Easter holidays.

At this point there is no much open in the evening as everyone is in church.  The most solemn services take place tonight and tomorrow, Good Friday, when the epitaphs are paraded through the parishes with a lot of loud bangs and firecrackers to deter Satan and other evil spirits. At midnight on Saturday night there will be an altogether different kind of loud bangs as the Resurrection is celebrated with fireworks and dynamite.

The grocery shops are overflowing with fresh produce for the Easter feast and the smell of baking wafts through the lanes of Chorio.  Every year brings more chocolate bunnies and eggs but Easter is still very much a non-commercial event in the islands.  The emphasis is on home-baked biscuits of all kinds and dyed boiled eggs to share with friends and family.

After a couple of days of drizzly weather it looks as though the Easter weekend itself will be mainly fine and dry with the possibility of thundershowers on Monday.  Temperatures are around 20 at midday, falling to around 14 at night.

Our office is closed for the long weekend so I shall be back on Tuesday with more photographs of Symi in April to share with you.

Kalo Pasca everybody!

Regards,
Adriana

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Island Hopping in the Winter - Part Two - Kalymnos

The waterfront in Kalymnos has many fine late 19th century buildings.  Like Symi it had an economic boom from the 1890s to the 1920s and many fortunes were made in the sponge industry.

The Alpha Bank is an amazing example of dressed stone work.  Our cameras really could  not do it justice.

An Italianate church on the waterfront  in Kalymnos harbour.

One of us is very energetic and went for a morning run up the kalderimi behind our hotel to the top of the ridge of hills that divides Kalymnos harbour and chora from the parallel valley and bay of Vathy.

Kalymnos has far more examples of these old footpaths than Symi and they are, by and large, seemingly in better condition.

Kalymnos has a population of around 18 000 inhabitants so is significantly larger than Symi.  

The Villa Melina,, a restored mansion that has been converted into a boutique hotel, was where we stayed for the night.  It is open all year round and the owners live on the premises.

Tourism on the island  is away from the main town, in small complexes of studios, apartments and low rise hotels along the coastal road. Rock climbing is one of the activities  on offer to tourists.

The view from the side balcony of our hotel room.  The archaeologia is not as  much  in evidence in Kalymnos as it is in Rhodes so there is a combination of old mansions and 1960s concrete all over the town.

Waiting for Dodecanese Seaways to whisk us away to Rhodes via Kos, Nissyros, Tilos and Halki.

We weren't the only ones waiting for the boat.  These men are from various fishing boats, waiting to load polystyrene boxes of fresh chilled fish onto the catamaran to send to Rhodes.

It is has been a wet and stormy week on Symi and the weather is not expected to clear until late on Sunday afternoon. All the rain we didn't have last winter seems to have fallen this week and we logged 60 mm in our rainwater gauge over 3 days.  We were very lucky with the weather for our mini-break, even if the photos are a bit grey as it was overcast.

We didn't have as much daylight in Kalymnos as we arrived there at half past 3 in the afternoon and then left again at midday the following day.  Once again we arranged to be met by the car hire on the quay and had pre-booked our accommodation to save time.  We arrived at the tail end of the Clean Monday festivities so there was quite a lot of traffic as we drove around the island, mainly of groups of people standing in the road, flying kites.  We drove through fields of cabbages and orchards of citrus trees. It seems that the hawkers we see at the back of Yialos are actually from Kalymnos, not Tilos as legend has it.

Although Kalymnos has a much bigger population than Symi, eating out options in the winter seemed to be just as limited as they are here and the only place we found open on the waterfront that was doing food was a pizzeria. Nicholas had an excellent rigatoni marinara and I had a small Garibaldi pizza which turned out to be big enough for 4 people.  We took half of it with us to eat cold on the ferry to Rhodes the next day!

Kalymnos port has an old fashioned 1960s vibe reminiscent of the Piraeus of Melina Mercouri's 'Never on Sunday'.  The side streets are full of small independent shops and we didn't see any of the big franchises and designer names that are characteristic of Rhodes.  Everyone seemed to be pottering along quite comfortably and we weren't aware of any 'for sale' or ' to let ' signs which have become part of the landscape on Symi and Rhodes in recent years. Perhaps the fact that the island has a diverse economy which includes sustainable fishing and agriculture makes it less dependent on tourism and they don't seem to have any huge high rise all inclusive holiday complexes to worry about.

We spent the morning before the ferry in the new archaeological museum near our hotel.  They would not allow photographs so I can't share that experience with you but it was one of the best museums we have been to - and we 'do' museums a lot!  Well laid out, well curated and well illuminated, it was a pleasure to visit.  There have been several significant archaeological finds, both on land and pulled out of the sea by fishermen, in recent years so there was plenty to look at including a group of well-preserved marble kouroi (young men) and a huge larger-than-life size bronze statue of Hera. A reminder that not everything in Greece has been discovered yet and many treasures still lie on the seabed or buried under terraces and old churches.

Well, we were very lucky with the weather for our trip.  If it has been like this week, it would have been dismal indeed. This is a risk one has to take when travelling in Greece at this time of the year.

Have a good weekend.  I'll be back to writing about Symi on Monday!

Regards,
Adriana

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