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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Sleepy Symi

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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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It's All Happening on Symi

The view from the Symi Visitor Accommodation balcony this morning. The Blue Star was very late - it is supposed to come through at 7.30 a.m. on a Friday and this photograph was taken at 9.25 a.m.  The knock on effect is that she will be late doing the Kastellorizon trip today and so will be similarly 2 hours late leaving Rhodes this evening.  

Symi is very steep and rocky so there isn't much earth for gardens in the conventional sense.  Instead locals create gardens wherever they can with assorted pots and containers which also have the advantage of being portable so they can be moved into shadier locations as the summer heats up.

One of the two butchers in the harbour.  You will note that this is the second bicycle you have seen in recent posts.  Symi is too steep for bicycles in the usual run of things and it would take a determined mountain biker to commute from Chorio to Yialos and back again on a daily basis but they are quite popular for getting around the harbour.

Wednesday morning and a burst water main on the Kali Strata.  Visitors to Symi will notice a maze of black plastic pipes leading up and down steps and lanes.  They are quite vulnerable as they are above the ground but it is not permitted to dig up Symi's historic Kali Strata so above ground they remain. This is the system for transferring water from the various tanks and reservoirs to the households of Symi.  Each house has a cistern or tank of some sort for the domestic water supply as the mains is not on continuously.   Symi is a famously dry island with no natural water beyond the winter rains so what water there is comes either from a rather erratic desalination plant on the Pedi road or by water ship from Rhodes.

The big excitement of the week was the fire at the Customs House in Yialos late on Wednesday night which gutted the buildiing.  Those of you who follow us on Facebook will have seen the dramatic photographs of the flames.  Symi does not have a fire brigade and in the absence of pressurised mains, we also don't have sprinkler systems that kick in automatically when there is a fire. By the time the fire was spotted it was well out of control, despite the efforts of municipal workers and the coastguard.  There is, however, a lot of talk about how a building that is surrounded by the sea on three sides could be destroyed in this way.

The steel shutters survived and would have contained the fire to some extent and the 60 cm thick stone walls appear undamaged, as is the sign! The flags are also in good shape, just a little sooty.

It seems that the fire started with this Smart car, parked in the courtyard of the Customs House.  The fire spread to the motorbike next to it and then through the adjoining window.  Unfortunately that room is the duty free store, full of bottles of duty free alcohol and perfume so there was plenty to feed the flames and the roof caught very quickly. That is the fish market on the left.  The wood of the market is charred but the copper sheathing on the roof has held and protected the fish market to some extent and the local fishermen were selling their catch as usual this morning. That looks like a coffee pot of some sort tucked in the corner on the right.  One of those Symi enigmas. 

It is a gusty day on Symi and we have had occasional sprinklings of red rain.  This is the last remnants of the wet weather system that was over Iberia earlier in the week and it is likely to remain unsettled and showery on Symi for the weekend.  Temperatures are in the mid to high twenties so it certainly isn't cold.

There is a lot of activity on the island now and just about everyone who is going to open this year has done so. Regular visitors may miss Mylopetra as apparently that has closed for good and the owners have retired. Some shops have closed, some have reinvented themselves, others are completely new ventures but generally speaking everyone I have spoken to is quite optimistic that although we have had a late start once again, it should be a good year.  Greece is a very safe country and islands like Symi are far from the political protests in the capital.  Even the recent 4 day general strike had little impact on Symi.  If you are looking for a peaceful holiday destination where you can just relax and do nothing much in particular, soaking up sunshine and Greek island life, Symi is the perfect destination.  One of the joys of not having an airport is that mass tourism has passed Symi by and as the architecture is protected the beauty of the island remains unspoiled.  Symi demands a little effort from those who visit her. She isn't that easy to get to and you may have to climb more stairs than you are used to, but Symi's regular visitors will tell you that it is always worth the effort!

Have a good weekend.

Regards,
Adriana

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