A Winter Trip

In the quiet days of winter, I love to travel to other islands. Although it’s beautiful here at home on Tilos, for a couple of months now I’ve been looking forward to going somewhere new and seeing something different. Since family and friends all left in early December, Lisa’s been bored, wondering where everyone is. So once I’d finished some pressing work, I was all set to go to Leros and do some exploring.

But Leros had other ideas. Suddenly in the post-Christmas week all the boat connections were difficult, and meant arriving late at night in a place with no affordable dog-friendly accommodation to be found online. I may have a reputation for being intrepid but even I didn’t fancy that. At last I found a lovely place – but the owner said he’d made a mistake and it wasn’t available at all. Fed up of checking Airbnb and Booking.com, I decided not to go to Leros.

Still, I fancied going somewhere. Symi was much easier, just a two-hour (or less) ferry ride away. Accommodation is usually expensive but I found something that looked decent and booked it, and suddenly was very excited about going back to Symi on my own in winter, when the weather forecast looked promising – yet it wouldn’t be too hot for walking up into the hills. I’d passed Symi often on the ferry to Rhodes over the previous months, and looked longingly at those empty hillsides.

The sun felt pretty hot as we boarded the SAOS Stavros on Tuesday lunchtime. As usual with that ferry, it felt like a private taxi with hardly anyone on the boat, and was idyllic with the view of blue sky, blue sea, blue islands, sunlight gleaming on the water, until the crew started washing the deck and we had to move around trying to find a warm dry place to sit or stand.

The SAOS takes a bit longer than the Blue Star, but it docks at the old place by the clock tower, not the ugly modern one on the other side of the harbour. It should have been a short stroll to the room – except of course, Lisa had to sniff every bit of street furniture very carefully for information about other dogs. It seemed a lot of dogs had been peeing on the artificial Christmas trees.

The room, right overlooking the harbour, was both beautiful and hilariously odd; the bathroom was reached up steep wooden steps and to get to the sink you had to duck under a wall that reached down from the ceiling to about shoulder height; I had no doubt that I’d be walking straight into it one night half-asleep.

Starving because I hadn’t had lunch, I nipped into a nearby supermarket and found all sorts of foreign delicacies: you know you’re in Symi when you can buy smoked salmon and real Roquefort… Then with a very fast turnaround we set off wandering, to make the most of the couple of hours of daylight left.

With the Kali Strata to our backs, we crossed the ‘Gefiraki’, the little stone bridge next to the old customs house, towards some of the grand public buildings, then Lisa decided we should head straight up some near-vertical steps, which twisted around houses and then emerged at a plateau with paths running between smallholdings. I found our way back to the cemetery, from where I knew the way across to Nimborio Bay, passing the big old stones of Drakounta and an ancient wine press, and following the stone track down to the water.

After Lisa had a swim, we walked around the bay to the beach at the end; I'd been this far a couple of times, and once in the heat of summer with a friend had taken the path up the hillside via the old churches and underground caverns, then over the hill and down to Toli.

I hadn’t really expected to get anywhere new on this first afternoon, but thought I’d at least look for the start of a path, following directions given on the local map by Kritikos Sarantis. The path turned out to be well marked by blue paint, leading up the side of the hill, the hillsides beyond lit up bronze. It was getting late, but I knew we could walk back along the road in the dark. Lisa didn't know that and was panicking a bit.

One thing that would be confirmed on this trip, as we found on our trip to Nisyros, is that often the paths marked on the ground aren't shown on every map. As I check the Skai/Terrain map now, which I bought on the last day when the other map was falling apart, this path isn't on it. In a way, that's part of the adventure - you never know what you'll find.

The stone path led tantalisingly up and up until at last we reached Agios Nikolaos tou Stenou on the ridge just as the light started to turn paler. Over the other side, old terraces led down to a bay. 

We just got back down to Nimborio for dusk, the water still, the air warm, people fishing from boats and throwing lines from the shore, all so silent except for the call of a bird.

We took the road back, turned inland towards Harani and the dry dock, and suddenly there was a harrowing, persistent noise, which spooked Lisa. It got louder, so much so that I laughed when I saw the Karnagio café open – you’d have had to be deaf to enjoy it. It turned out to be just a couple of guys hammering and power-sanding the rusty old hull of a boat.

Beyond the clock tower in the main harbour, things were more peaceful, and all the lovely churches lit up. I stopped in at a shiny new supermarket to buy dog food, but it was eye-wateringly expensive, perhaps not surprisingly given that it’s opposite where the shiny yachts moor. I continued around to the end of the harbour and to the old supermarket hidden down a narrow alley, where the price of dog food was more reasonable and the friendly owner, whose sense of humour I’d appreciate over the coming days, wished me ‘Bon appetit!’

Having fed Lisa and unpacked a little, I decided to celebrate an excellent arrival, and although there were several cafes open, I pushed my luck by seeing if I could sit at the old men’s café without causing a stir. It was beautiful, old-school, no plastic walls or heating, no cushions or cocktails, just wooden chairs and iron-and-marble tables and a simple counter inside. Although I got a strange look from the patrons when I approached, the owner was happy to serve me a glass of wine in a sort of schooner, and I wrote up notes in peace, overhearing someone inside giving a long ouzo-fuelled diatribe punctuated by assenting murmurs from the other table.

It was a nice start to what was going to be a magical little trip.