Day 28: Driving around Kythnos

Trip

Greece 2022

Location

Kythnos 🇬🇷

Date

September 23, 2022

Kythnos, like most of the islands we’ve visited, has a large cat population. They are particularly trusting on Kythnos however. They’ll, of course, swarm a table that gives food like we’ve seen yesterday, with six cats next to us at the same time. But, they’ll also happily jump on you and lie down for a rest and a purring session with some petting. The healthcare options are however not as good as other islands like Sifnos and Astypalaia. We saw injuries, including loss of eyes, some ear mites and mange. They all seem fairly well fed however.

We’re leaving the island a little before 19:00 so we worked at maximizing our day. Got up a little earlier than usual and enjoyed a surprisingly good set of pastry and coffee at Annezio Bakery. We grabbed our ferry tickets and our car from Antonis Rent A Car Moto. Honestly, had we not choosen to rent a car we would not have gotten to visit many things on the island and we would have never found where to get our ferry tickets. Who would go to the car rental place to get on a boat? The Greeks I suppose.

We drove to Dryopida to visit the Katafiki cave. That’s where the language barrier really hit us. Contrary to the other islands, we ran into people who don’t speak English and signs that are only in Greek. Just finding the caves was an exercise in educated guesswork as all the inside streets are not on Google Maps. We had to ambulate toward where we the map said it was and stumble upon a sign when we got close. The guardian that is supposed to give you a fifteen minutes lecture before you can explore the cave just waved us through and never said a word.

We headed to the capital of the island, Chora. If you search Kythnos on Google Maps there’s a good chance you’ll land on a small town on an island. It’s actually Chora on the island of Kythnos. Making things so much easier for visitors. The town itself serves tourists a bit more but speaking Greek is still mostly necessary. We did find trail markings and a trails map with English on it so there’s that I guess. They might have been tired of having to fetch lost tourists because Google Translate didn’t do a good job.

We had plan to go and walk to one of the beautiful beaches of the island but it got overcast and cold and I didn’t feel like walking for half an hour for a gray sea with gray land under a gray sky… also it was fracking cold.

We elected to go back to our room, drink the bottle of wine we had left and relax while waiting for the ferry. We stopped for an early dinner at Το Μαγκαλι (no english version of the name available) and had the best Souvlaki meat we’ve had. It only had the meat and fries but it was really good pork. It’s been our luck to find some of the best places during the last moments on the islands. Kythnos followed that pattern.

Our ferry was an hour late but I had the chance to wait part of that time with a warm cat purring on my lap so it wasn’t so bad. Might be a good model for ferries and airlines to have cats in the waiting area to help the travellers pass the time while they wait. Sure is hard to go complain to anyone with a purring cat on your lap.

Despite the cat and the very good food, we weren’t unhappy to leave the cold of Kythnos behind. I believe it was just bad timing and would have been a worthwhile place to visit longer had we spoken Greek and had better weather.