The Pod Abroad: Monday 15 May Athens to Naxos

Up early (5am) this morning to catch the ferry. Packed up and headed down to the taxi stand - have to take two taxis every time we travel anywhere, although most taxi drivers would be happy to pack us in. Traffic here is fairly casual - no helmets on motorbikes!! and they zip in and out of busy traffic at full speed. Anyway, we set off for the port in our two cars, and Kia, Danae and I arrived safely, but no sign of the other three anywhere. After 15 mins or so I started to panic - what if they could not remember the name of the ferry, how could we ever find them again etc etc. It turned out they were waiting just around the corner from us, whewsh. Next challenge - change my printout showing that I had prepaid tickets into real life tickets. What a mission that turned out to be! The classic shuffle from one person to another, until a lovely lady from the booking agency adopted me, took me back to the ticket kiosk and shouted at the lady there until she called the official looking head honcho, who personally escorted us onto the ship. Almost got turned back by the final guy at the final door, who tried to send us back to get real tickets, but we refused to get off the boat so they finally relented and let us on, and the ship sailed 5 minutes later.

So we were happy to relax and enjoy the 5 hour cruise out of Piraeus port, and across Homer’s ‘wine dark Aegean’ to the lovely island of Naxos. We were picked up at the port by two lovely taxi drivers (the Greeks are on the whole a quite stunningly good-looking race - don’t get me started on the policemen in Athens, I am sure they are chosen for their youth and beauty), and whisked away to our classic Cyclades hotel, all whitewashed walls and blue shutters and the kids were delighted to see a most beautiful swimming pool (over 3 metres deep makes for great underwater activity). The christmas lilies are all in full bloom here, and the jasmine, and the warm nights are full of their scent. Life is good!