Kalo Ampeli

July 4th - Hora and Livadi 

Near the top of Hora is a garage where they do repairs on vehicles and boats engines. It’s like an old fashioned garage that is becoming rare in the UK, as we get more of the car manufacturer garages, all corporate, where you could eat your dinner off the floor and so on. Outside this garage is a collection of mechanical times which doesn’t seem to change, surely some of these will be useful one day. If I go past, I say “efharisto” as I do to most people I meet, I usually get a cheerful response. The inside of the garage with its pit is not squeaky clean and it’s not tidy with more things littered about. I wonder how he gets on with cars often needing specialist kit to diagnose problems. A lot of the car hire companies including Mr Blue Bird seem to have their own on site garages. I imagine that for the islanders, if you got stuck in the middle of the night, you could call this garage up, and he would rescue you. If I walk past the garage at night, it has an illuminated light with the garage name, nothing flashy, except it has a fault so it constantly flashes off and on. Like things in Greece, it will be fixed tomorrow, maybe.

So I have tried a few other places to hire a car and I should have booked in advance it seems. So I have to get inventive and conjure up another walk for today . This one is going to be linear, it’s still windy, which will keep me cool, this time I am going to go to a church and then a beach, I have not seen before. I will leave Livadi on the same road I went on yesterday, which goes west, follows the coast for a while and then eventually goes up and around towards the heliport that I saw the other day. If you use an online map to look at Serifos you will see there are not many roads at all! I won’t be going all that way. I will leave the road at the parking for the beach, called Kalo Ampeli, before I get to the beach I should see a church which I hope to see is called Sotirus, I hope that translation is correct. 

So, I took the bus to Livadi, had my lunch, a bit early and noted that the waves in the harbour were quite active, and by where the ferries come in, the  spray was being washed up onto the concrete apron, like it was when I arrived here. I went back up the road that I took the other day, heading west. There was this lovely arch and foliage around it on the way.

I passed the point that I turned off before but carried on, and here on the road started to head uphill again. Around Greece I am sure we are all used to seeing unfinished buildings but inhabited, supposedly to avoid tax on them . Here there are various buildings, not inhabited, very old and now mostly piles of rocks, empty concrete ones that will take longer to decay, and ones that don’t seem anywhere close to being finished or falling apart yet. I may have mentioned before major building work is suspended in the holiday season, so maybe that is what is going on. I then passed these guys digging up the road with a Kango type drill, it wasn’t an official piece of roadworks, no roadworks signs, it seemed they were diagnosing a problem with two random pipes running across the road!( put in by them I imagine)  When I came back they had not made much progress, but had revealed more of those pipes and now there were four of them looking on. I saw some grapes growing in a garden, the soil looked quite good, the grapes also. I went through a place named Rammos, but to be honest you would have missed it, if you blinked while in a car. As I got near Kalo Ampeli some amazing mountains appeared.

After I turned off by the sign for the beach I got collared by two guys on a small motorbike. Did I know the way to the beach? They had gone gone further the road and they were unsure where to go. So together we sorted it out, we could see the beach, but we had to go down this path to the church and then the beach. Together we negotiated the path, halfway to the church there was this forest of canes to fight through, I could see some running water too. We then got to the church, that is Sotirus if the translation is correct.

My friends who were Greek and from Athens, had carried on and after having a good look at the church I followed the path. I met some Swedish holidaymakers, they were taking photos of the church. I had a chat, they had just got to the island. They had not heard of Hora, I said they ought to go! They were off to a Sifnos later, staying in Kamares, so I recommended the Cameron restaurant ! But I said they had to book. Now I knew the beach had a strange sort of inlet on one side, so I had a look at that first. The sea has the lovely Mediterranean emerald colour in the inlet and despite my efforts I could not really capture a really good photo of it. On that side by the inlet, there were all sorts of strange rock formations with shapes shaped by the wind and sea after the rock had solidified.

I then  looked at the beach, which is lovely. Can you spot the heart on the beach? I could see a Zante Ferry head into into port.

I then retraced my steps, I was glad I had the water with me. The first bit of my return journey I had to go uphill.. on the way back I realised by the cane forest there was another enclosed barren area with goats and chickens, these did not so keen to see me. Once I started back on the main road, I met another group of people, this time in a car, did I know where Kalo Ampeli was? So I helped them. The wind was sand blasting me with dust off the road, at least not in my face. Ahead of me there was a tribe of people walking along the road, as I was, I caught up with them when they stopped , they were  a group of young teenagers, no obvious adult looking after them. Eventually I got back to Livadi, as I had finished my water, I bought a drink and an ice cream. I got my ferry ticket for Wednesday, and managed to book a car for tomorrow so I can go to Mega Livadi after all. The final act of helping lost tourists was to confirm to two American girls, that the bus we were standing by, would go to Hora, this bus had the designation in the Greek alphabet!