Day 11: Travelling to Astypalaia

Trip

Greece 2022

Location

Astypalaia 🇬🇷

Date

September 6, 2022

Our hotel room in Rhodes, really an apartment rented by a hotel, came with all the comforts. A little worn out with tiles cracking and a water-damaged bathroom, but comfortable, spacious, and with a great washer. It was located within a ten-minute walk from the gates to the old town, the bus station and a taxi station. This morning we were really thankful for the latter.

The hotel staff are unable to book an airport transfer, no matter how hard they try. When we arrived, they were offering airport transportation from the airport to the hotel. By the time the driver showed up to pick us up, we had given up, taken a cab, and were checking in at the hotel. Still, believing in an honest mistake, we had them organize our transport back to the airport. Yesterday, we double-checked the arrangements and corrected the time. This morning, at 6:45, the arranged pickup time, there was no car and no driver. We checked at the hotel entrance, a couple of buildings away, and nobody was there. We don’t want to be late, Uber isn’t available on the Island, the taxi app is only available to European App Store accounts, and, even if I were sure how to dial an international call to the local cab company dispatch, I strongly doubt my capability to give a Greek address to a cab dispatcher. I can hear myself describing Greek letters, of which I don’t know the name.

We walked the 10 minutes to the taxi stand, jumped in a cab and headed to the airport. Luckily, we built a buffer into our schedule and arrived exactly an hour ahead of the 8:30 takeoff. We received a call from a Greek number at around 7:30 in the morning, informing us that the hotel had not corrected their mistake when ordering the car.

We got through security in a breeze and had time to grab a panini and coffee for breakfast before boarding our Island hopper flight. The planned route is to take off from Rhodes, stop in Kos, Kalymnos and Leros, terminating in Astypalaia. What happened, however, is slightly different. We took off from Rhodes, landed in Kos, and headed to Kalymnos, but got diverted before we could even line up for landing due to strong winds. The same happened on our approach to Leros. You can imagine that we got worried about getting diverted from our destination, too. In a stroke of planning genius from the Astypalaia…ians? The airport and its runway are nestled between hills, which shield the aircraft from the strong Northwest winds, enabling us to land smoothly. Other than being baby skin smooth, that landing was also a first for Karine and me. We landed a full hour and fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. I was half expecting the airline to charge me for the privilege. It would be fair to ask for compensation for a delayed flight in Europe, wouldn't it?

In Astypalea, there’s, technically, a bus service. More on that later. We again relied on our hotel to arrange transport from the airport to our hotel. Arriving so early, we weren’t sure how our host would manage things, but we were surprised by a prompt reply to our SMS and a short 20-minute wait for him to grab a car and come pick us up.

Astypalaia is working on being more sustainable. One of its initiatives for the small island is to invest in shared electric cars and an online service for short-term rental of these cars (mainly VW ID.3). Additionally, there is an unknown number of drivers who operate slightly bigger cars (ID.4) that operate as a bus service. After installing the app and creating an account with a surprising amount of personal information, you can order a pickup and drop off from about 30 stops around the island. One of those stops is the Airport, and we could have managed a pickup that way had we known ahead of time.

The first thing that struck us was how we’ll have to adjust to the weather. We come from sunny, calm and 32°C and are now in 25°C sunny and high winds (50km/h). As we explored the city, we concluded that our return to Quebec would be challenging due to the expected high of 15 °C. Nevertheless, we soldier on and explore Chora, the central city of the butterfly island, named for its shape, not because of its being visited by the colourful insects.

We went uphill to the Venetian castle. It is described as the most beautiful of its kind on the island. The site not being very much restored, we found it in equal parts beautiful views of the island and debris on the ground. We explored the site for about half an hour, taking pictures of the vestiges of the once-inhabited structure. The lack of context led us to believe that there must not be many more Venetian castles left in the islands for it to be the most beautiful, and that, like Split in Croatia, the castle was carved out of many habitations until it became structurally unsound and evacuated.

The island’s schedule is a little off from ours. As we’re off season, regardless of what Google Maps will tell you, everything closes around 14:00 and reopens around 17:00. The market, the gyros restaurants (note the plural) Karine has been desperately trying to visit will open for her first Gyros of the trip, most places where you can drink all Close for the afternoon. Open cafes have their kitchen closed, so limited food options there too. Having eaten early in the morning and grabbed something to tide us over while waiting for our room to be ready around 11:00, we were ready for lunch around 14:30. However, it wasn’t to happen. We ended up walking around a bit and heading down the hill to our room to chill after a quick snack at a cafe.

We managed to find gyros to squash Karine’s craving, but only around 16:00 at a place that claimed to be open since 14:30, yet didn’t have a single customer and was restocking their fridge. The cook had to spend fifteen minutes getting our gyro order from scratch. Το Στέκι του καλοφαγα will keep a place in our hearts for making delicious Gyros for the two tourists who were in the wrong timezone.

We stopped back at Dapia for wine (we had snacks there when we arrived). We were served the darkest rosé we had ever served. We’re still half convinced it was a red wine served cold. We had very few rosés in Greece, and the explanation of Greek wine we received in Rhodes made more sense. Greek rosé is either expensive or not that good. We were paying a fairly low price for two glasses of wine, and it solidified our conviction that white wine in Greece can be good and not too sweet, but rosé is a gamble not worth taking.

We had dinner at the excellent Akti Restaurant. They recommended a great white wine and made us fish balls in fish cream, warm goat cheese with its sweet jam and grouper carpaccio as starters. Mains was one of the best seafood risottos we’ve ever had, paired with grilled squid done to perfection. While we were already drawn to the somewhat secluded island, the meal reinforced our conviction that we had made a perfect choice to come here.

As tomorrow calls for some stronger winds, we plan for a thirteen-kilometre hike to a beach and to do some laundry. We’ll likely take a beach day the day after.