Such fun!

Wednesday 10 July 2013

The van hasn’t moved for 3 days and is parked up on a beach in Agiokampos. As the crow flies it’s about 40km north of Volos - gateway to the Pelion Peninsula - which is where we hope to be heading next. If we want to avoid the motorway though it will probably be at least treble that in road miles.

View from our 'lounge' window

Dr Katerina Davidamos (that’s me) has prescribed rest for Dave as his foot is getting no better and he’s starting to get grizzly now – he wants to be running around and climbing up things and he can’t. He went to see a ‘real’ doctor in a very English holiday resort on Monday, I didn’t actually see the guy just heard his deep cartoon style voice coming out of his lovely air conditioned office. Like a good patient Dave summarised the 2 month history – a stoutly built Romanian stood on his foot whilst he was trying to help them push a car out of a river ford it had got stuck in – and it’s hurt ever since. He didn’t actually examine his foot but asked a few questions including how old he was. At the end of the ‘consultation’ he politely suggested Dave ‘act his age’. This leaves us wondering exactly what a 55 year old male Brit on holiday is supposed to be doing. Getting drunk, having fights over football allegiances, picking up some nasty venereal diseases or suffering from blistering sunburn maybe? Wanting to keep fit and healthy is obviously beyond him now?

Trainers or flip flops - I know my footwear of choice!

There could be worse places to be confined. We are parked up a few hundred meters from where the road ends abruptly and a little harbour juts out into the sea. The steep shelving beach brings in crashing waves which have a huge expanse of open sea to the east to build up in.  Each day a few people arrive at the beach, plant brightly coloured umbrellas in the sand, swim and sunbathe. Then they pack up and go, leaving us alone with the stars.

We have had a great time like all the other kids here, big and little, being tossed around in the waves as they crash onto the shore.

I'm in there somewhere....

I have deemed he can cycle as it’s not putting weight on the part of his foot that hurts - I’m getting the hang of this new role I have, and a short cycle ride away is one shop and a row of bars and cafés so we won’t starve when the food/beer supplies on board run out.

Last night whilst we BBQ’d the remaining contents of the fridge we watched a huge electrical storm on the distant horizon. Playing around with the camera on a tripod with a fixed 50mm lens and some extremely long exposures we hope we captured a few stunning images.

‘Miranda’ the BBC comedy series is a bit of a Marmite thing – people either love it or hate it. We have to confess it is a guilty pleasure of ours and Penny, Miranda’s mother played by Patricia Hodge, has many catchphrases – one of which is "Such fun!"……. which really sums up our few days here!

 

Highway robbery

Tuesday 9 July 2013

We were wild-camping on a very quiet beach just north of the busy resort town of Paralia, heaving with oiled up bodies, bustling café’s and numerous redundant (in this heat) fur shops. A couple of Polish registered camper vans travelling together pulled in and parked up really close to our van. Having travelled thousands of miles out-of-season and used to being all alone we haven’t quite understood the need of some campervanners to be so closely corralled together. Safety in numbers maybe?

The driver of one of the vehicles approached us and asked, in very broken English, if it was OK to park up here. We’re always careful about not upsetting anyone when we park up and haven’t been moved on anywhere by the police yet,  so we smiled sweetly and nodded. His wife then appeared, anxious to find out if we were staying the night making ‘tilted head on pillow hands’ gesticulations. We nodded again. She was happy to hear this as she scanned the horizon and babbled a sentence in Polish which included the word ‘bandits’. We’re not sure how safe touring is in Poland but the only dodgy characters in this neck of the woods seem to be the crew on the Pirate Ship day-trips running from Paralia. 

Having said that we have been the victims of highway robbery here in Greece courtesy of the Aegean Motorway S.A. We aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere so have generally taken the slower, more scenic routes on our travels and have managed to completely avoid the toll motorways of France, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey. We intended doing so in Greece too. In Slovenia we made the decision to pay to save time and diesel, and in Hungary the compulsory vignette covers their motorway system and cost us €9 for 10 days.

Greece has adopted a very different approach to collecting obviously much needed revenue. Stealth motorways. On arrival at the border you have no option but to follow the motorway, it doesn’t go far and ends very abruptly but thankfully it was free. There are other toll-free motorways around but they conveniently don’t seem to make any distinction between these and the ones with tolls. All our maps show each of the motorways as one continuous stretch when in reality they stop and restart to catch out the unsuspecting. We have been driving along innocently on what we thought was a normal blue sign ‘A’ type road only for it to ‘turn’ into a green signed motorway with no means of escape before the toll booths. Caught out once we were peeved, caught out twice we resolved to be more careful, caught out a third time we were incensed!

Minor road running parallel to the motorway

What to do....???

The poor girl at the cash booth felt the full force of our wrath – as we had a real Victor Meldrew moment….”and another thing…..” we continued with our barrage of complaints. Lots of shoulder shrugging and eyebrow raising ensued. “ I shall call my boss” she then announced as a queue built up behind us but not before extracting another €5 for the measly 10km we had just travelled. A young man arrived with a well used complaint book and pen in hand – Dave explained our issues while I filled in the form. Our gripes were -

1. Campervans are charged the same price as a 70 seater bus. It’s calculated on height so a car towing a caravan is the standard price – around €2 per section - peanuts. Anything over 2.2m high is charged full whack - €5 in this case. There are another 8 sections on this particular motorway heading towards Athens which would set us back about €50 in total. 
2.  They conveniently have no maps or leaflets available explaining how it all works. We suspect the locals know how/where to avoid the toll booths leaving us muppets to fund the system.
3. There is no advance notice of the charges. 
4.  Most annoying is that there is no clear sign to say you are about to enter a paying section of the road.

   

From the triplicate book we were given the pink copy of the form, a flashback to life in the real world of work, and he kept the white and yellow copies. We drove off wondering what, if anything, they will do about our complaint.

Sunflowers

Monday 8 July 2013

I love sunflowers. Over the past two weeks we have driven past field upon field of these beautiful brightly coloured flowers. In the northern parts of Turkey they were planted in very uniform rows, in Greece they seem to have been planted in a much more haphazard way! 

In Turkey they are called ‘ayçiçek’ which translates to ‘moonflower’. I'm not sure why that is.

The 'supermoon' whilst we were in Turkey - can't see the similarity!

Good old Wikipedia has loads of information on these seemingly very complex flowers.Did you know, for example, that it is a common misconception that a sunflower head tracks the sun? In reality the head is fixed and faces east.

They may be facing east - but it's the wrong way for my photo

As well as the more common uses, in oil and seed production, sunflowers have been used to extract toxins, such as lead, arsenic and uranium, from polluted soils after the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. Clever old sunflowers.

Sunflowers, I've also read, have a really complex spiral pattern with specific floret orientation and 'golden angles'. They even have their own mathematical formula which is  r =c√ n,  θ = n x 137.5 ◦ (where θ is the angle, r is the radius or distance from the centre, n is the index number of the floret and c is a constant scaling factor). Typically they will have 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in another although in large sunflowers this could be 89 and 144. Who knew and who is counting?

But where do you start counting from?

All I know is that I kept making poor Dave stop so I could get some really close up shots and I now have a collection of about 50 photos in their own little folder in Picasa.

 

I love poppies too and we saw lots growing wild around the ANZAC war cemeteries in Turkey.

Another favourite of mine is the tulip – so perhaps we’ll have to detour back through Amsterdam!  

If you want to get ahead...get a hat

Thursday 4 July 2013

We’re in Halkidiki or that could be Chalkidiki, Chalcidice or Chalkidike. Like most places in Greece it seems to have at least 4 variations of its name. So far we have just about managed with our road map, which gives 2 variations on a towns name, and the Sat Nav and we’ve only got lost a few times. Anyway it’s all very nice and, along with loads of other campervaners, we’re ignoring the signs below and still managing to wild-camp in some fantastic places.

After leaving Alexandroupolis we pottered along the coast finding it hard not to keep stopping every hour or so as we stumble across yet another dreamy sandy cove. Turkey is a great country to travel around but the Greek beaches are just fantastic and the sea is so warm. It’s quiet too, although the tourists are here the coastline is so vast they are few and far between.

 

Halkidiki is the part of northern mainland Greece that looks like a cows udder, or if you prefer the brochure blurb of the Greek Tourist Board its ‘shaped like Poseidon’s trident, sticking out into the Aegean Sea’. The most easterly peninsula is mainly monks, monasteries and Mount Athos. Women are forbidden from visiting it – good, that means a photo of the 2033m high mountain from the middle peninsula will have to do.

There are plenty of ancient sites here in Greece but to be honest we’ve been mesmerised by the beautiful beaches and clear blue sea. We drove past this huge stone lion at Amphipolis, parts of it date to the 4th C BC, and today we are parked up on Toroni beach which has a Byzantine fortress. Unfortunately it is all locked up with a sign saying ‘Works in progress’ – not that there is anything obvious going on.

As well as driving and swimming we’ve also been doing a bit of retail therapy buying things we have been meaning to get for some time. In Dikili in Turkey we found the perfect ‘coffee table’ for our sundowners. Here in Greece we have bought a tray, a fly-swat, a fan that runs off a USB connection and a hat.

Had we known that this lady would be walking past us on the beach I might have waited before buying my hat – if only to pretend I wanted the one at the bottom in the hope that she would have to take them all off one by one – I count 20! Any advances on that?

Beach vendor rockin that multi-hat look....