In which Sid and Doris ride over the hills to Mytilini, buy ferry tickets and check into a hotel for a few hours before the ferry leaves
Leaving early meant getting in Quaker Granola for breakfast in our room as no cafe is open before 9.00am. According to the nutritional info on the packet we had 3.5 portions each, that’s cycling for you, as although we are only going 55 kilometres to Mytilini there is 794 metres of climb to get through.
The day begins with saying good bye to our host while appearing to be novices at this bikes thing. [I don’t think he noticed me drop my bike, fall over it, knock the chain off and be totally unable to put it all back together – D.] Out via the road to the perched church, but that is the only bit of walking with bicycles today.
These are good honest hills. We do get one village lemonade stop and after that we are by the side of the road in the pine forest with the nut bar. It may be a new version of ‘with the lead piping in the library’. After a few days of holiday this all feels pretty good, Sid maybe slightly helped by our having sent 1 kg of Danube guidebooks home.
We go past the flamingo lakes and the birds have stayed a long way off. But we did see a swimmer’s inflatable aid in the shape of a flamingo. We were also blessed with many wayside shrines, some more loved than others. In a spirit of holiday cycling we followed a sign to monastery, then it turned steep #thanksanna. Maybe on a motor bike holiday.
Vehicle of the day a rather tired four door Alfa Giulia. A Honda Civic EK 9 TYpe R, or this tricycle and trailer combo: with traditional sesame cooking. Aviation item, this model on stilts, really the best we could find.
Mytilini is a bit chaotic and our mapping leads us to a dock we shan’t be using. Soon we find the true port with travel agents and restaurants. We order what seems to be a normal lunch, are brought the wedding feast for 24 and manage to eat nearly all of it. On the far side of the otherwise-mostly-empty dock is a bunch of sailing boats rafted up to each other. We occupy a few idle moments wondering why they would choose to do that before coming to the obvious conclusion: Greeks just love double-parking.
Now only four hours to kill sitting in our paddy pants and sweat.
Wily Sid says “How about we book into a hotel, shower, change, do our washing, set up Blog Centre and drink beer?’ We are up, up and away in a trice and soon Doris has frightened the receptionist at the Hotel Sappho [yes, seriously, and a male receptionist] into giving us a room. So we are sitting on the balcony from where we will be able to see our boat come in. (A few minutes later: It is coming in now, we can see it). We also watch it on AIS via Miftah Bat’s aerial reconnaissance and with some behind-the-scenes help from VesselFinder.com as according to many travel commentators Greek ferries are notoriously late.
As we sat inhaling lunch we remarked that the town quay was strangely empty. Part of it is now taken up by HMS Valiant, from UK Border Force. There are a lot of Greek patrol boats here too. The refugee camp at Moria is just behind the town with pretty much no evidence of them in town.
The overnight boat to Piraeus is on the Friday/Saturday schedule which will not put us off until 08.30, most luxurious. Lying on our beds this afternoon we used the “Optimise for Walking” routefinder to investigate creative routes from Piraeus to Corinth and so to Patras. We have found a further two secret Gosport type ferries to give us a short cut across Salamina. My, this is wily and probably used by hundreds of Athenians every day.
So, we can see the boat and we already have Navigators’ Twitch (an unreasoning desire to go to the holding control before the MTC even though there really is no need) so will pack up and go do Greek queuing. The boat is huge so no need for the Neddies to get salty on deck.
PS It arrived at 19:40, boarding started at before 20:00 and indeed before the cabin staff had finished re-preparing the cabins, we were in our own cabin at 20:30 and we were leaving the quayside at 21:00 on the minute. So much for unpunctual Greek ferries.