Saturday 10 June 2017

Kalymnos

On Monday 5th June we got ready to move off on Tuesday, ready to meet Lin's brother John in Pothia, Kalymnos. We did our stocking up shopping and went to visit Ghalia at lunchtime. She was not in Pikpa because there were no lunches to do as it was Ramadan, so we went to see her in the villa, where she had been having a sleep. She showed us the nine kittens that two of their cats had just had, six of them newborn. Ghalia was not in the best of spirits. The doctors had been able to do nothing about her bad leg, which hurt, and her anti-depressants make her very sleepy. We then went and had a beer and a sandwich at Poppy's.
We had invited Al and Kitty to dinner on the boat, but they messaged us to see that they had just rescued a new-born kitten, which had to be hand-fed every two hours,

so could we go over to them instead. We walked over to Platanos and up the steep steps to their hotel, taking with us the pork dish that we had been going to cook for them. Kitty had made an Imam and we had a lovely evening sitting on their terrace

before getting a taxi back to the marina.
On Tuesday 6th June we set off to motor (no wind) down to Palionisos on Kalymnos. At the top of Kalymnos we noticed a string of little buoys, holding up a net or fishing lines, that ran down the coast for a mile and a half. We had seen the same, or a similar, string of buoys last year and Frank later told us that they had been there for years. We arrived at Palionisos about 11 and Pothitos came out in his little motor boat to thread the line through the buoy for us - he said he had seen us coming and recognised the boat. We went up to his taverna Kalidonis for a beer and Atherina at lunchtime and swam

and did odd jobs in the afternoon before going back to the taverna for dinner. Pothitos had had a good winter, with plenty of construction work to bring some money in, and the children, Georgios and Raphaela were well, but still at school, so they stayed at home in Chora and did not come over to the taverna,
Frank and Lin arrived on Wednesday with their friends Trevor and Vera. They had arranged to have dinner at Taverna Ilias, on the other side of the bay, and go on their buoys, so we went for lunch at Pothitos's and told him that we would not be eating with him that night as we were going with our friends to Ilias. 'No problem', he said, 'the important thing is that people come to Palionisos. It doesn't matter where they eat'. After lunch we harvested some origano from Pothitos's garden and some mountain tea from the path down to the church. We followed the path past the church, but it ended in someone's front yard, so we scrambled across a rocky field to the road and walked back to the beach.
We went for a drink with Frank and Lin and had dinner at Ilias. They were very welcoming and the food was quite good, but certainly not as good as at Pothitos's.
Heavy rain and strong winds were forecast for Thursday afternoon, and there was a bit of rain overnight, so we decided to leave early for Pothia.
In Pothia we went on to the new quay alongside a boatload of Russians, who were having trouble with their anchor as their windlass was not working. They took more than an hour to get themselves onto the quay. We later learned that the same boatload of Russians had pulled up Simon and Christiana's anchor earlier, forcing them to leave early.
We got an electrician to come and fix our electric winch. It turned out that the earth connection inside the motor had failed, which he fixed very quickly for 80 euros. We did not do much as it was raining on and off, with a thunderstorm threatening, though it never came, We had tuna pasta aboard for dinner.
We went to bed early and set the alarm for midnight, when we got up to watch the election special. Like everyone else, we could not believe the exit poll, having been resigned to despair. We stayed up till 5am watching the results come in before collapsing into bed.
On Friday we took the bus to Chora and walked up to the castle, which is a dramatic medieval castle which used to have a population of 1000.

It was a steep climb up to the door,

which was closed, but only with a piece of wire tied on, which we managed to undo. Inside there had been a lot of restoration, funded by 1 million euros of EU money, including building a visitor centre, but none of it was operating. The climb to the top of the castle was just as high as the climb to the gate, with fantastic views up to Profitis Ilias and down to Pothia.





Apart from a lot of broken down walls of old houses there was a number of 15-16th century little churches,



one of which had the remains of old frescoes in it.

We then had a hot walk back to Pothia, through the affluent suburbs of Chora and Pothia, built no doubt by US and Australian Kalymniots. We got back in time for a beer at Stuka. We spent the afternoon listening to the election special on Radio 4 and Simon tightened up the fanbelt, which had started to slip. In the evening we had dinner at Stuka with Keith, a lone British sailor we had met before at Arkhangelos.
On Saturday morning we did some shopping. We had used 5Gb of our internet allowance watching the election programme so Simon went off to buy a 30E voucher to recharge our Wind mobile internet, but it would not load. He took it back to the shop but they could neither sort it out nor refund it so we will have to go to the Wind shop in Leros to sort it out

We eventually set off to walk along the coast to Vlikhadia, the first leg of the Kalymnos trail.




Although the walk was only classified as moderate, it got increasingly tricky walking along a rough path halfway up a cliff.

Lin decided that she did not want to go on, so we went down to a tiny beach

and had a swim

before walking back to Pothia for lunch.

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