Rhodes, Greece

*We are gonna write who is writing which blog entry as some people are getting confused.

 

—Amy

 

We had a very early start after we landed in Greece after almost a day and a half at sea (because we couldn’t dock in Mykonos!). We had a tour booked for Rhodes and got up early to meet our tour group on the bus. We were taken along the Western Coast of Rhodes, which is a very beachy tourist town that seems to be very undiscovered by most of the non European population. We were also told that there were lots of accidents along the coastal road as lots of girls go swimming topless – Nick looked but couldn’t find any! Rhodes and Greece in general have quite crazy drivers that like to try and squeeze their big buses down the smallest alleyways and lanes. They also seem to lack any sort of Traffic lights/roundabouts/directional signs and just seem to let each other in and go by hand signals from other drivers.

 

So our tour started by heading up to Mt Philameros which was a mountain overlooking the entire island, and has been through all the ‘generations’ of Greece – The Greek God period (Pagans), The Christians/Monks, The Turkish occupation and now Greek Orthodox. This mountain had a church right on top of the highest points and this is Rhode’s own Acropolis. We found out that every Greek city had/has an Acropolis (not just Athens) and it means highest point of the hill/town. Rhodes acropolis is now a little Church with big gardens around, a magnificent view and a garden full of peacocks. This church shows all of the Greek generations, the stone monument dedicated to Athena, a Christian cross and extra rooms for the Monks to live in, the Turkish decorative influences and now the obvious Greek Orthodox touches (98% of people in Greece are Greek Orthodox!). We walked up a garden path and went inside this very small little church, which was very very dark and obviously of great significance to the people of Rhodes. We then went outside to find a whole heap of peacocks, which Nick and I tried to catch so we could make their feathers go up. Unfortunately all of our sneaking techniques didn’t work and we neither caught or even scared one, but had fun doing it. We went to the lookout that overlooked the sea and could see all the way across the sea to Turkey! It’s so crazy that different countries in Europe are all so close to each other when Australia is so far away from everything!

 

We then went to other side of the top of the hill and went up some very small rickety stairs to the top of a big concrete Christian cross which gave us 360 views of the island. Not too sure it was worth our time, as there were many stairs to get up, and not enough room to fit two people beside each other if you were going down and they were trying to come up. As you can only imagine, Americans are about 3 times the size of Nick and I and seem to whinge and whine twice as much. We got back on the bus and headed to the Old Rhodes town, another town that has walls all around it, and looks very medieval. We went into an old palace, which was built for several important Kings, and Queens over the years, but no one ever stayed in it! The palace itself was very impressive, with mosaic tiled drawings all over each rooms floor, some even looked like patchwork quilts had been layed on the floor but upon closer inspection they were all tiny mosaic tiles. The ceilings were very high and all had carved wood. Nick and I had a little giggle at a young Asian couple also on the tour who both had cameras, and took photos of absolutely everything they saw – even blank walls! We then walked down the “Famous street of the Knights” where knights from medieval times came to meet knights and all have a drink together. After that Nick and I decided to explore the old town, and amongst many tourist shops that sold things like T-shirts and bags, there were a couple of interesting shops and we even found a cute little sidewalk café in front of a fountain where we enjoyed some beverages and some Greek Tzatziki – yum! We also went for a walk into the new town to check it out, but it was fairly basic with new shops etc but only difference being it is a very seaside based town with lot of boats and yachts.

 

Upon our walk back to the boat we decided to hunt down some alcohol, as alcohol on the boat is super expensive, like $37 AUD for a bottle of champers that is from California – not even European! So we eventually found one and the bottle shop guy gave us a taste of the local Ouzo with rose water and it was actually fairly nice, even though it burned both of our chests! So we purchased some champers, some baileys and a little bottle of vodka and retreated to our room to have a lazy evening before we headed off to a quick trivia game on the boat, which we got 7 out of 20 – bad! We had a couple of drinks and decided to get dressed up for dinner and headed to the fancy dining and enjoyed some yummy roast lamb with veggies. We had a spa before bed and fell asleep to rest our tired feet.