Naxos - sadly our last stop in the islands

The word of the day is personality! Everyone has one but so do the islands. Naxos is proof that islands and cities are like people, they each have their own personality.  

We arrived in mid-afternoon and because of the heat decided to take a taxi to our hotel.  The hotel was a five-minute walk but a 10-minute taxi ride due to the routing of traffic around the city and away from the port area.  Our plan for this island did not exist and it was just as well.  We had an early lunch that included the obligatory Greek salad as well as the sampler platter.  On the sampler platter were fava beans, two croquettes, spinach pie, cheese pie, sausage, meatballs, fried pepper, dolmas, zucchini balls, eggplant salad and marinated octopus.  We ate it all but have to say we were not big fans of the octopus texture.

We spent the rest of the day just walking around town and exploring the neighborhoods. A town of only 10,000 residents on an island of 25,000 inhabitants that grows substantially during tourist season (the summer months.)  We found theses two octopuses hanging on a wooden bar by the port.

On Wednesday we rented a car and drove up into the mountains. Naxos is not only the largest and tallest island in the Cyclades, it is also home to a great portion of the islands' agriculture.  They grow potatoes, lots of melons and some grains and obviously tomatoes, eggplant and cucumbers.  When we arrived, we saw trucks loaded with grain for shipping to the other islands.  

Terraced for agriculture

Olive tree groves

The mountains were beautiful.

A sleepy little town in the mountains.

Gigantic old olive trees.

Around every corner were views of the blue Aegean Sea.

Everywhere you turned there was a church on a mountain top.

In times past, the windmills were used to pump water for the olive orchards. They seem to be being replace by the wind turbines we say on one end of the island.

The second largest mountain on the island has been slowly disassembled by a marble quarry.  There is both white marble as well as gray veined marble.  Just the massiveness of the quarry was impressive.  We didn’t know it until later but they welcome visitors to the quarry.  They don’t have OSHA type laws that are designed for safety such as hard hats, steel-toed shoes, etc.  And apparently visitors can just walk around at great risks to themselves since if something went wrong, they have no recourse and couldn’t sue anyway.  So maybe it is better that we didn’t visit but it was so interesting from a distance.

The marble quarry.

Thursday brought a day of leisure with an afternoon spent at the beach which was one block from the hotel.  Really relaxing.  One of the locals told us ‘if you live in Naxos you have no private life’ since everyone knows everything about everyone else.  Reminds me of small towns we all know well.  But she also told us it is like one big extended family which is what those of us from small towns also know well.

Doner Kebeb cooking - we had chicken and pork doners for dinner.

A scene not often witnessed - Malcolm  relaxing at the beach.  Still in the shade.

These wooden bicycles were available for rental.  How often do we think of bicycles made of wood.  They actually looked very well handcrafted..

At dinner Susanne and I tried to summarize our island experiences vs. our Athens/Thessaloniki experience and it is just not comparable.  It’s’ like comparing Houston and Wharton.  The islands are relaxed and definitely on island time.  The cities were moving rapidly. Santorini is in the middle. And as we said earlier, each place has its own personality. If you ask us what was the one highlight of the Greece trip, we would both say it was that first dip into the Aegean Sea in Folegandros, and after that, we loved it all.

Now it is on to Turkey.  When we wrote this, we were on a large ferry, the Nissos Chiso and had a 6:30 pm flight out of Athens into Izmir, Turkey.  When we say large ferry, we mean over 1,700 passengers and over 400 cars.

Having developed a love for Greece, it was hard to leave.  We’ll see what tomorrow brings.