Day 5: quick jump to Spetses

Trip

Greece+Cyprus 2025

Location

Spetses 🇬🇷

Date

September 17, 2025

We started the day by packing our bags and leaving our rental. We had chosen to grab a quick bite at 📍EU Bakery. It’s right on the port, well rated and will allow us to pass the one hour wait time for our ferry to Spetse, Flyingcat 4. To our surprise, port traffic made for great entertainment. Hydra’s port is small and sees a number of small speed boats there to get you to different points of the island, and even more more sailboats trying to find mooring spots (there aren’t any). Seeing the same boats enter and leave led us to believe that other than the one port security person (or policeman doing boat traffic?), there could be no port authority to guide port usage. Seems far fetched but that’s the only rationale we could come up with to explain all those poorly driven catamarans acting as cars looking for parking near the store’s entrance.

Our ferry to Spetses was slightly late coming in. It qualifies as an on time ferry with barely a 10-minute delay. We’re clearly off season as the boat had barely any people in it. While we had assigned seats, the crew didn’t want to bother with telling us where to go so they applied the “seat anywhere” policy. The sea was calm making the transit smooth and comfortable.

Spetses has a larger city on it than Hydra. More people live here. Larger city comes with the need for personal transport other than walking or taking a boat. So here there are some cars but mostly scooters and 4-wheel VTTs. Our first whiff of the exhaust fumes of poorly maintained vehicules did remind us how wonderful being on an island without motorized vehiclea was. Realizing I had stepped in donkey poo as I walked on the boat and smelled like vomit for an hour and a half before we found the source and then having to scrub feces from my sandals did make me reconsider my position.

Checking in to our Airbnb as a little harder than expected. While we had a “precise” pin on the map, one has to account for GPS imprecision and the lack of addresses on the island. There is not a single door number to be found and even if some signage exists near the port, not a single road seems to have a name either. The other thing is your GPS pin is likely within 10 meters of where you want it to be and the same is true for the blue dot that repeints where you are on the map. Add those together with thightly packed housing and you’re never sure if the gate in front of you is the right gate or if you’re about to get on somebody else’s property. A couple of messages back and forth with out host and we found the right spot.

Bags dropped, we made good hobbits of ourselves and headed downhill to the promisingly named📍Tiramisu Sweet & Coffee for second breakfast. Sadly the place was all promise when it came to coffee. They didn't ruin the yogurt, honey and fruits, but based on the coffee, most likely because you can’t really mess up cut up fruit and yogourt in a bowl.

Not having planned anything for the day we went day drinking. We walked to one end of town and followed the shore until we got to the other end of town. We learned on that walk that Spetses’s Care for Animals existed. They trap, neuter, vaccinate, deworm and release cats on the island. They also operate cat hotels (small cat houses) and cat restaurants (feeding bowls) at multiple locations in the city. Probably the reason why we’re seeing so many healthy cats!

On our walk we found two places to sit down and drink wine. One was not worth mentioning and the other was 📍Klimis Cafe where we plan on trying breakfast tomorrow. It’s hard to judge a restaurant only by how they deliver wine and sparkling water (says the guy who will not mention the first place because they failed a even that), so we’ve elected to reserve judgment on Klimis until tomorrow.

After a quick stop at the groceries, we headed home. The house we’re renting might be in the middle of nowhere, but the terrace is, however, perfect. Good view, quiet and comfortable, all that we need.

We’re keeping with our tip to reserve the first night in a town and negotiate reservations in the harder to reserve places (mostly because they ask you to call or just show up to ask for a reservation) on the first day. We stopped by 📍To Pachni to reserve for tomorrow and walked to our dinner at📍 Patralis, a restaurant owned by a fisherman according to the menu. We opted for fish obviously.

Tomorrow we’re heading out for a 13km hike. Something similar to what we’ve done in Hydra but, hopefully, with less prickly bushes to fall into and no boring portion. 🤞