Up North

 Friday

So before setting out today, I popped into Gavrio and got some lunch and drinks, as I did not expect to find anything open on my way. North of Gavrio looks very different on the map,  there aren’t so many of those better roads, and to be honest there doesn’t seem to be many villages about. So the first place I saw seems to be called Fellos beach. It was completely deserted, but around it there was signs of a few buildings being erected. 


These were all huge affairs, probably for some rich person who will only use it a few weeks a year. On the beach, there were these little slate boat shelters, so if you had a dingy fishing boat, you could stash it in one of these. The road they had built for these villas, well it was not surfaced but it would easily added two extra lanes to the M25, totally overkill. In the summer months, the builders aren’t allowed to do building work, makes you wonder what they do do! I walked forward a little way along the coast and found another smaller beach. 

I then carried on further North. I saw a sign for a place called Amolchos, but I never found it and I gave up when the road was no better than flattened rubble. At this stage I could see wind turbines, only three were working and the others, well they looked fairly old. So maybe they want to build more. The waitress at my taverna last night had a saveandros.com t-shirt, but I did not really get any more details from her. On my way I saw this lonely church and mini graveyard.

The roads around here start as being  mostly surfaced but if you go far enough along them, they then become unsurfaced and not for a baby Skoda car which is doing very well,  well it was.. but the ground cover growing beside the road is trying to reclaim the road and doing a very good job of it. Having tried two roads and getting close to the coast, on the last, I stopped and then decided to walk and see how far I could get. Below me in a valley was what looks like fertile land with all sorts of things growing, farmers tending the ground, dogs barking, and the usual farmyard noises. On the mountains themselves I spotted a low growing shrub, no idea what is was but it was just coming into flower. There were so many of these, I imagine the mountain will be a sea of yellow soon. 

Eventually after looking at Google maps, it seemed I might have to do another couple of miles to reach the beach and I had already come a long way, so I turned round. On the way back I saw this lovely black and white goat kid, but it was too fast for me to get a decent photo. By this time it was getting very hazy, there was a sort of milkyness covering the mountain tops too and the breeze had picked up.  

On my way back to Gavrios I ended up having some kind of alarm on the car, so I took it back to the car hire place, it was a nail in the tyre, slow puncture. Back in a Southern direction tomorrow!


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