Appollonas and Around

In our next tiny rental car, we headed north out of the port onto the coastal road that became almost immediately one of the twistiest, treacherous, deserted and most precariously perched roads I have ever ridden on (until we headed over the mountains in the other direction the next day!). It was also breathtakingly awesome scenery – high, high mountains rising on the right side, sheer drops to glistening sea coves on the left. Basically you can never get out of second gear (and if you don’t drive a stick shift, you will have a hard time finding a car to rent), there were occasional brief (three minute) stretches of third gear and once I even got into fourth for a minute. The last gas station is in Eggares, only 7 kilometers out of the city, and there are no others all the way to Appollonas – and none there either. After an infinite amount of climbing, we came around a curve and saw a gleaming white village with a beach, shining in the sunlight, in a valley at the bottom of two steep cliffs.

It was not hard to find the Hotel Adonis – one of the largest buildings in this tiny town, where absolutely nothing was really open yet for the season, although around the little harbor, the cafes and restaurants have their doors open and a few tables outside which are occupied by the same few men every day drinking espresso or citron out of cups and glasses as tiny as the town, which has only 100 year round residents, and swells to 400 during the high season of summer (there are only 5 children in the school). But Stamatis Andris, with whom I had had a lively email correspondence regarding reservations in the last few weeks, was at our hotel to meet us and provide the usual above-and-beyond Greek hospitality. We get lots and lots of attention, particularly because we are the first guests of the season and the only guests here! Our room has a balcony with French doors that open out onto a view of the sea and the sun streams in during the morning hours.

A lemon as big as your head

Because there is really nowhere else around here to eat or even buy food, we eat breakfast and dinner at the hotel each night and it is all fantastic home-cooked Greek dishes, prepared by Stamatis’s mother using all local foods, because that is what the people here have to eat. At this time of year there is a lot of goat/sheep cheese, homemade yogurt, pumpkin, potatoes, greens, some lettuce, fresh fish when they can catch it, eggs, and bread from a bakery in the next town that comes by van. There is also a variety of things made from the citron lemon (pronounce Kit-rone) which is a giant version of the regular lemon and has a much thicker skin, from juice to liquor to candy to seasonings. We drank the local wine until it ran out – now we are drinking wine from Crete. Stamatis even taught us some Greek dances on the porch one night.

A girl from the highest village east of the Mississippi visits
the highest village in the Cyclades

The first day we left our remote home base and drove south through the mountains, climbing higher and higher on intense switchbacks and roads that narrowed to one-lane bridges with donkeys, goats and sheep tethered (or not tethered) at surprise random intervals along the roadsides and up the slopes. Greece is all shades of green in the spring which most tourists don’t get to see – by summer it is dried and brown. There are flowers everywhere, wild and domestic, and when we reached, Koronidas (also known as Komiaki – every village has two names for some reason!),  the highest village in the Cyclades at 2900 feet, the flora very much resembled the White Mountains, with apple trees and lupines and maples, things one does not expect to see in the Greek islands. We continued slowly on through the wonder of the rural villages and the mountain peaks until we reached Apiranthos, a beautiful traditional village where all the streets are paved in marble and the hand-crafting tradition has been preserved. A few hundred years ago refugees from Crete settled in Apiranthos and have maintained and celebrated its heritage. Although there are many lovely places to eat and shop, there is nowhere to stay there – which speaks volumes. I bought some handmade sheep bells as souvenirs; there melodious clanking is a sound that will always remind me of these islands.

After hearing about the impending winds that were coming to the island, we decided we better take advantage of the perfect weather and calm seas to do a day at the beach and so Sunday we drove south (you can only drive south from here) to a place that is very crowded and popular in the summer and is of course deserted as hell this time of year. It was a relaxed and pleasant day. We returned to Apollonas and hiked up to the Kouros, which is a marble statue of a male god that was carved about 2000 years ago but never erected, probably because it cracked before it was finished, and has rested on its side on a hillside overlooking the sea and the village ever since. It is one of the few antiquities we have been able to find on Naxos and on Paros – the signage always starts off strong but then generally disappears completely making it impossible to locate ancient monuments, temples and statues.

We woke up on Monday to gusting winds and high seas – our calm peaceful view now resembled the coast of Maine, on a bad day. The local people were bundled up in down jackets ( but they actually are bundled up like that much of the time) but to us it really did not feel that cold just very blustery. But yes, I am wearing all my jackets and warmer clothes now, all the things I very nearly ditched permanently in the heat of Southeast Asia, never believing I would ever really need them again on this trip. I am wishing I had a cozy cashmere sweater or a thick wool turtleneck. Or maybe my hairy Uggs(my god, I haven’t thought of them until just this minute – maybe there is something from home that I miss…).

We drove off again, high into the mountains to visit the “villages” and it was a great day, reaching Filoti, at 2500 people, the largest mountain village and clearly the center for all the others. I think you could learn a lot about Naxos, especially the agriculture and food, by staying in Filoti.

There were local shops and cafes and actually a bit of a bustle of business that did not depend on tourists – and even one place that said “Rooms to Let”…maybe next time around…We wandered on down the road to Halki, where the Citron distillery is located and had a private tour of that ancient facility and watched them making this local liquor the same way they have for hundreds of years.

We have had the pleasure of drinking Citron several times on this trip – sometimes shopkeepers will give you a shot when they realize that you are actually going to buy something.  We have noticed this along the way, but particularly in Halki, where the word goes out that we are in town and stores seem to open up magically and if we look in a window of a closed shop and express interest, the shopkeeper next door will make a phone call and the store owner will appear within moments to unlock the door and show us around.

By the end of the day we had bought 2 baskets, 2 woven bags and a scarf at reasonable prices from local producers and admired many other products including ceramics, lace, jam, candles, cheeses, spices and much much more.

We tried to find Demeter’s Temple, one of the best ancient ruins on the island, and this was the only place where we ran into other adventurers staring with puzzled expressions at their maps and the cryptic signposts. Everyone was daunted by the strong winds and all, including us, gave up without seeing the site. We did run into a Dutch couple at a very old church in the mountains an hour later who had ridden bicycles to it the day before and said you could actually drive to it – apparently not from the approach we and the others had made. It is somewhat discouraging how hard it is to find so many of the good ruins, although I don’t care about them as much as Pat. I love the countryside and the scenery and the local culture more.

Our last visit of the day was Moni, another village perched high in the mountains with a spectacular view and lots of narrow marble paved streets that was closed up so tight on this windy, pre-season day that it seemed as though it was a ghost town that had not been occupied for years, with empty village squares and boarded-up stores. It would be interesting to see the contrast with summer months -  it would be probably be equally appalling and delightful here.

Returning to Appollonas, we were astounded to see how much the sea had risen and how high the waves had become. I am flying out Naxos on Wednesday so it is not a problem for me, but Pat was supposed to take the ferry to Santorini on Tuesday; the Blue Star ferry which generally runs no matter what the weather had been cancelled for Tuesday for a strike so she was planning to take a smaller ferry that goes to all the little islands along the way, which sounded kind of fun until this weather came up. Now we are not even sure that ferry will run, so she is going with the flow and hoping to still reach Athens by Wednesday night.

At present we are hotel-bound for the evening due to the high winds and will see what tomorrow brings. Mostly I am in shock that my travels are almost over – I feel like I could go on for another six months – that, of everything I have done in the ever-increasing years of my life, this is what I still do best.