Butterfly valley

Somehow this section failed to post in the Rhodes section and as it was one of the remarkable days and sights, I do not want to miss it. On the isle of Rhodes is a deep valley a little more than a mile in length, all on a steep hillside. The valley is heavily forested, but because there are a lot o f visitors, there is a path & stairs for the humans. From June to September annually, there are millions of butterflies laying eggs on the damp side of trees and rocks. There are some flying around too, but mostly they are egg laying. When their wings are closed, they have the shape of a stealth bomber, and when their wings are open, half of each wing is a bright orange. On the tree close-up, you can see one with its wings partially open. There is a nice creek running the length of the valley & butterflies always seem to like being near fresh water. It was a perfect late summer day probably 78 F. and the Greek forests are truly beautiful & this valley is odd and twisted & unique and the whole experience was unique as I understood that this is the only place in Greece that this event happens.

Dog pictures from Greece

This is a p.s. to my Greek travel post below. One night we were walking up to a town square an there were two dogs napping. One looked interesting and I said to it "You are great. I am going to shoot photos of you." Incredibly, you would have said "This is the Greek version of Greek dogs got talent, because the previously idle dog began to roll and make faces and some sounds. It was really a stellar performance that stopped everybody nearby. Dang, the photos posted backward so you have to look at the bottom one first and then left and up. Thanks.

On another occasion, we were at Oia, Santorini suppposed to be watching a sunset, when this lonely mutt came along looking for attention. There were 100's of people there and nobody paid it the slightest attention. I went down the steps to it and petted the steel wool coat and the dog was most appreciative. Then I photographed the dog with the sunset and I think the dog was the best past of the whole thing.

I neglected to say in my intro - below - that our route in Greece was Athens > Crete > Santorini > Paros > Santorini > Rhodes > Symi > Kos > Athens > Delphi > Athens.

Arrive in Greece & land in Crete

The last time I was in Greece was April, 1967. By coincidence, I happened to be in Athens on the 21st which was the day of the coup d'etat that deposed King Constantine and replaced him with the hated colonels fro 11 years. I was young, and not especially assertive and in the process of learning how to travel, and some Greeks cheated me every opportunity. As a result I carried a distrust of Greeks until this trip, when it was completely overcome by their kindness and integrity - not to mention prices and fares (they wrote fairs) posted everywhere. The City of Athens was much more a middle eastern town then as their main trading region was the east. Now, after having joined the EU and spent themselves into massive debt, it is a much more western city. The subway is larger, prettier & more advanced than Toronto's. The trams are sleek & busses are frequent. The prime midtown areas and around Parliament are kept up well, but the rest of the city is so defaced by graffitti that I have never seen a city that bad. Much of the city is grim. Just outside of the center of the city, I saw about 20 men and women who seemingly all had just received a delivery of heroin, shooting up under an abandoned movie marquee - just off the sidewalk. The day I arrived from Kos, there was a six hour transit strike. There was on ongoing truckers strike which had already run two weeks and was expected to continue much longer. Large trucks were parked along freeway shoulders & filled truckign gas stations. There was a sense of crisis in the city. A vast amount of Greeks there - and here - firmly believe that the debt was only created by theft of billions by their politicians. But as you pass through the country and see that at least 80% of it is mountains & the few crops are olives, cotton and grapes, and even they say they have nearly no manufacturing, you wonder what part of Ding Dong world Greeks live in. Fishing is trivial as fish stocks are nearly non-existent. There has been a proposal to follow the Spanish example and create a small (a few miles square) zone of no fishing permit some recovery of the stocks. But this proposal was met with ferocious opposition & it has been predicted that in 40 years all the fish worldwide will be gone from the oceans, but Greece will have absolute zero fish within a decade.

My sister joined me for this trip and we arrived at Athens airport at the same time and flew straight on to Crete. This is a good idea as the airport is a long & expensive distance from Athens if have to come and go late at night or early a.m. Otherwise the train is cheap, fast and comfy. We flew into (C)Hania, the main town on the west side of Crete. Each island has its own special characteristics as do so many of the towns. Hania is a pleasant town with many tourists, but because no large cruise ships visit there, it is less crowded than other destinations. We rented a car and drove the west side of the island. It was sunny, hot and pretty. One beautiful beach after another, bluest of seas, almost infinite olive groves and the high mountains down the middle of the isle.

We drove to the Samaria Gorge. This is a v. deep gorge settled deep - real deep - down between high mountains. The usual method is to take a bus out there in the early a.m., you hike 6-8 hours thru the Gorge and the bus meets you again at the other end late in the day. We didn't really feel up to such a long hike and spending an entire day on one event. So we drove out to the Gorge and looked down into it. The drive was unforgettable; winding, slow mountain roads, endless hairpin turns and many tiny villages. The Gorge was most impressive and it must be a great hike.

After some further travel on the west side, we took a bus east to Heraklion aka Iraklio. This was a much bigger city with a large port which is famous for being the way to Knossos. This was a palace of 1,300 rooms dating from 1500 BC. Naturally, with the earthquakes so common in Greece, not much is left. But the ruins and venue are beautiful . Although Iraklio is a pleasant city to walk and dine in, there is not much reason to stay longer, so we caught a fast ferry to Santorini.

Santorini, Greece III

.....A fine group of potential mayoral candidates for Toronto, every one at least as intelligent and competent as the group already in the race.

The ship shown is the "Noor." I am rarely stopped dead in my tracks by toys of the rich, but we 1st saw this vessel in Port at Paros. It is as beautiful as motor powered yachts ever get. You really must do this - go to Google and search "Noor" yacht. The 1st item that comes up is the yacht you see in this photo. You will not believe that you could incorporate such a bedroom and bath on a ship of this size. It says it is a ship built in Turkey. It appears as tho they built it on spec and so far there is no buyer for it. I later saw a white version in Rhodes where I also saw the Noor again.

The rest of the island of Santorini is quite interesting. I did a couple of bus trips to investigate and found that there are some small towns that have retained their greekness and few tourists ever go there. The ones that leave Fira all go to beach towns which are also nice to visit.

Santorini, Greece

.....Before leaving, I thought we would pay a high premium to stay on Santorini even tho the main season was winding down. But when we rode the city bus up from the docks to the station, there was the usual assault of the mosquitos - men and women aggressivley wanting us to stay at their accomodations. One older man had a nice brochure and claimed only to want 30 Euros to stay at his place (way too low - about 36 U.S. or 39 Cdn.), and I initially turned him down because I did not want to stay in such a low end place. But he was insistent that it was grand and he even had CNN. We had to walk up the hill toward the town centre anyway, so I agreed to have a look. Oddly, it was somehow sandwiched in under the side of a church and under its bell tower, and faced the ocean but not on the crater side. You can see it in the photo with the brightly coloured chairs and table. He was right - it was so beautiful and simple and Greek. He was a kind man who looked after us as real guests and was true to his word on every score. We had a balcony looking out over the sea with two chairs and a table and two nice beds and hot water and a refrigerator not to even mention a tv which we preferred to ignore as much as possible. Subsequently I met so many people who had paid 7 to 10 times as much as we did. They were all in disbelief that we could have gotten such a nice place for so little.

Santorini, Greece

.... .....I never understood the unique topographical situation of Fira (the major town) and Santorini until I arrived ther. Those giant walls you see have a white strip on the top which is Fira - the town. The 700' wall below it, and behind the red high speed ferry is the interior all of a giant collapsed volcano. If you loo behind the parked cruise ship, you will see the dome of the imploded giant - which is still steaming from a vent. You can stand in Fira and look out at the ocean and see the ring of small islands that formed the cone and became islands after the implosions and when the edges of the ring broke in places.

There is an interesting problem in this harbour. A ferry capable of carrying 1,500 passengers and many cars and trucks, sank in the harbour several years ago. All of the passengers and crew were safe. But the insurance co., the operator, the harbour authority and the government have all refused to salvage the wreck and prevent further environmental damage. At some points that harbour is more than 1,000 ft. deep, but the ferry is said to be at 750 ft.

You can immediately see that upon arrival, the passengers from the many ships docking here must somehow ascend the great hill. If you look closely behind the red jet boat, you may be able to see a series of long z z z's. That is the massive climb and decline for the big busses that takes people up from the new port. The turns are so sharp that two vehicles cannot meet successfully on a turn. But there is also a funicular, the cars of which carry six passengers each up or down for a stiff fee. But at the old port, you could walk up some nearly eternal steps, or just hire one of the mules to take you up - for about $7.00. The mules are big as horses and in remarkably good shape, although as miserable as mules love to be. When the mules come to work in the a.m. and go home at night, they have to cut through the main part of Fira where the greatest foot traffic is and all the open restaurants are (of course, abundantly dropping manure all the way). At the point where they have to start their descent, the muleteers have to re-rope them in single file and the mules wait crowded together, intemperately and looking sour & threatening and somehow they do remind us of the candidates for Mayor in Toronto at the present time. Do they ever! But they are a good show and I loved to see them coming each day.. I will post a photo of them standing in line down at the load/unload point as well.

Fira is initially frustrating because there really is one street for traffic which is jammed all the time, and many streets for pedestrians only which are also jammed because they are intended for "shopping." There are sometimes 11 cruise ships with an avg of 2,000 at least dropping off tourists for the day. The congestion is massive. Worse, there have always been renters of motorbikes, but now they are joined by fleets of 4 wheeled ATVs driven by young people who just want to be on anything that has a motor and is noisy. It is quite tiresome. But it is also so beautiful that you cannot run away and miss it.

Paros, Greece

Paros is a small and quiet isle. Althought many ferries use it as a hub, no large cruise liners come in dropping off thousands of people for the day. The main town has an old town which is responsible for most of the famous photos of Greece outside of Santorini. Each step, every corner is photogenic in the old town. We were there mid-September and apparently the tourist season had ended and many stores were closing and the sidewalks were empty of people. It is so beautiful that you just want to sit in a cafe and try to absorb it for later use. I am amused by the cicada bug as it is mentioned in so many novels. Paros had a great supply of them buzzing furiously all the time and everywhere (well, they go to bed right at sunset and shut up then much like crows in India). Oddly, Rhodes was cicado-less and I missed their buzzing. We did take two busses out for exploration into the mountains and small towns, but there was not much to keep us there for long. We had decided that Mykonos would be crowded like Santorini and that we would rather spend that time in Rhodes. But to get to Rhodes from Paros, we had to jet boat back to Santorini and pick up the giant overnight ferry.

Rhodes, Kos, Symi Islands continued

One of the nicest aspects of the Greek isles is being able to headquarter on one island and take inexpensive ferry, day trips to near isles. We went to Symi which is near the Turkish coast. It is a small island that used to live on sponge diving. But synthetic sponges caused many of the inhabitants to leave the island. So many in fact, that the pretty houses in the main town are vacant and kept painted nicely to look good for visitors. Even though it is almost nothing more than a tourist destination, it has nice restaurants and is a nice way to spend a whole day for less than $30 (Cdn).

I went on to Kos alone as my sister had to return to her work. I took a high speed ferry there in about two hours. It is also right at the coast of Turkey. Every island in Greece is somehow different. Most are predominantly rock covered, but Kos has actual green grass and mountains covered with pine trees. The town of Kos is a jewel. I found a pleasant and small hotel and visited the ruins. The main ruins of a fortress (Turkey is THE neighbour after all) are right in the middle of the town and are also some of the most beautiful and compelling ruins I saw on this trip. This is also the home of hippocrates, the father of medicine and much is made of where he taught. There is a tree said to be the replacement for the actual one he planted 2,000 years ago, which itself is said to be 900 years old and is about 36 feet in diameter. It is so old and fragile and overweight that they have built a most surprising metal support system to hold up the branches. My usual method of visiting an island is to go to the bus station and ride some busses out of town and back to see where I want to go for a longer time. But I had not expected Kos to be so compelling and I did not have the time to do that. The airport is a 45 minute ride inland and that was uninteresting, but I think that the other end of the island at Kefalos is beautiful and I wish I had time to go there.

In the photos, the white buildings behind the yellow umbrellas is Turkey as seen from Kos. The buildings are all Symi.

Rhodes, Kos, Symi Islands

We sailed on an overnight ferry from Santorini to Rhodes. It was immense & carried a lot of cars and trucks. It was inconvenient that it left at midnight. We had come in on a Jet boat from Paros at 5 p.m. to catch this large ferry and were confused about what to do for so many long hours. While trying to leave our luggage at the left luggage places at the docks, an older man offered to take us to his hotel on the south point of Santorini and about 15 minutes from the docks, rent us a room for 20 Euros & he would return us to the dock at 11 p.m. Our costs for busses etc would have been more than that and this seemed a nice alternative, so we went with him. He had a large, shabby and seemingly highly unsuccessful motel sort of place on a really noisy highway. But it was ok for a few hours and we walked into town and spent some time there. Once on the ship, we were dead tired & slept at once. The cabin was pretty and clean, but incredibly tiny.

We arrived then in Rhodes at 7 a.m., found a really nice and new hotel for a reasonable sum, and spent the day walking the old and new towns - both of which are truly pleasant. The historical part is quite overwhelming and fascinating. The following morning we rented a car and set out on a circle tour of the whole island following exactly a route set down in my Michelin guide - something I have never tried before. It was a great idea as it kept us on a good route and well informed.

The 1st major stop was Mount Filerimos. This is a monastery on a high peak covering a lot of space and really beautiful. From it, you can see Rhodes city (the white stuff at the top of one picture of the ocean and land above) far away. The whole place was wonderful, but there was one funny thing I enjoyed a lot. There were a lot of peacocks there and I came upon one family unit of dad, mom and their pre-teen kid. The kid managed - barley - to get up into a tree of lovely purple blossoms and was eating them like Homer Simpson at a buffet. The adults were irritated that they could not reach the blossoms. Dad started to jump up and grab leaves, branch or blossoms as he could which also upset the kid who had trouble balancing when dad was jerking it around. If you look closely one photo, you will see dad's straightened legs right off the ground while the kid's feather are ruffled as it tries to balance. It was such a precious sight.

The next stop was "Valley of the butterflies." You drive part way up a mountain and come upon a parking lot, pay your admission and begin to climb stairs and a mostly steeply inclined pathway which probably goes on half a kilometer. It is the most Alice in Wonderland valley with a stream flowing down the middle between steep valley walls with such beautiful trees everywhere. I have never seen such a valley anywhere else. In the middle of it are millions of odd looking butterflies laying eggs on the damp side of trees and rocks. When their wings are closed, they are the shape of a stealth bomber & have odd markings so odd that you might initally not realize you are looking at a butterfly. I doubt that they will seem visible in this format, but what you will see are the attachments on the trees. Take my word for it, they are butterflies. Some fly around and when their wings are open, they have a v. bright orange part of their wings. They only appear in this location and only July, August and September. It is one of the prettiest sights I have seen and a highlight of the trip.

Greece is now, and in my own time, always has been a destination of the young. It is essentially a series of islands with thousands of great beaches and a lot of antiquities. Rhodes seemed to have a somewhat older and more affluent (I have nothing at all bad to say about the young people we saw and met - they were all great), but it is still a great place for beach lovers. The island itself has a great deal of natural beauty and is easy to drive around without hurry in one long day - although we took two. It does not seemed overwhelmed by cruise ships as is the case in Santorini and Mykonos.

Oracle of Rhodes

The bus ride from Athens to Delphi (which Greeks said as "Delfee") was just over three hours. The first hour is dreary commercial, industrial & bad planning landscape. Then the high mountains are all around & as we approached Mt. Parnassus - the highest mount in Greece at 8,500 ft.) there were mostly mountains & little agriculture except for some large groves of olive trees occasionally. One can easily see why Greece is poor; agriculture has never been highly profitable on a national scale and their cotton (which was being harvested as I was there), grapes and olives are no different. But the tiny alpine town that serves the Delphi site is perched on the side of a mountain as tho we were in No. Italy or Austria. It is really a beautiful 1.5 street town with a great view. Much to my amazement, I found a small hotel for 30 Euros ($42-48 depending on U.S. or Cdn. currency). It has French doors leading to a little balcony with a grand and sweeping view of the mountains & valley. I was amazed to discover that the water I saw at the end of the valley and end of a massive forest of olive trees, was the ocean. Not only that, but behind the highest mountains in my photo here, there are two other high ridges of mountains the furtherest of which is actually the Peloponnesus. The street of the little town is so narrow that these huge Mercedes & Volvo busses can barely squeeze through, and if another vehicle comes opposite them, somebody will back up a long way - and it is never the busses. All thru Greece you will see many cars (oten rental cars) with missing side mirrors and long scratches down the side of the vehicle. This happens when they park on a sidewalk, or curve & busses & trucks can neither pass nor find the driver, so they scrape on by. There is a provision for this in the insurance - that if it is your fault, you must pay up to some limit like 300E or 500 etc.

The site of Delphi is one of the most thrilling in all of Greece's many ruins. I suppose the altitude is about 4,500 ft and you must walk up stairs another 600 or so feet to see the whole site, and you are constantly looking over one of the world's great valleys and display of mountains. One can imagine creating a site there for worship or authority & the excitement and anticipation of the adherents walking thru the great forests & climbing from sea level to reach the great place. We might find it a little disappointment as the Oracle was said to usually be a woman over 50 years sitting on a tripod - so you went thru all that exercise to see Mom - who predicted things.
The museum there is a treasure. I loved its contents more than any other I saw this trip.