If you have been wondering why my blog hasn’t been updated for a few weeks, the answer is (unsurprisingly) that I have been on my annual holiday to Greece.
This year, I visited Kalymnos (Κάλυμνος), one of the islands in the Dodecanese (Δωδεκάνησα) group in the South Agean. The name “Dodecanese” is made up of 2 words: “Dodeka” being Greek for 12, and “Nisi” being Greek for island. The name therefore translates into English as “The Twelve Islands”. Funnily enough, there are 12 major islands in the Dodecanese! In total there are 126 islands, 26 of which are inhabited, in the Dodecanese Prefecture.
Kalymnos is one of those islands which does not have an international airport. Although it does have a “national” airport – internal flights only – our preferred modes of transport involved flying to Kos (Κώς) and getting a boat from Mastihari (Μαστιχάρι) to Pothia (Πόθια): the island capital.
The weather on Kalymnos this year was good – there were a few days when local weather forecasters were predicting temperatures between 38°c and 42°c, and I didn’t see a cloud for 2 whole weeks!
We (I went with my family) had some good meals out: we ate out every night. One in particular that I liked included a: “young goat in red -tomato- sauce” which I had at «Τα Λινάρια» (“The Linaria”) taverna, located at the far end of Linaria’s beach. Goat is a local speciality on the Kalymnos, with a dish called “Mououri” being especially popular at Easter time. Kalymnians often replace the traditional Easter lamb dish with a meal of stuffed goat (Mououri).
Another meal I particularly enjoyed was cooked by Norma who was he owner of our accomodation for the holiday: Norma’s Village Studios & Apartments. Seeing that Norma was able to cook Greek dishes (providing enough notice was given) we ordered a kleftiko (κλέφτικο) one night.
The traditional kleftiko is actually a Cypriot dish – it is lamb baked in tin foil in the oven with vegetables (peppers, carrots, potatoes etc). We had ours to act as a sort of Sunday roast, seeing as with the cooking facilities nearly all Greek apartments have are very basic (and its stupid to go to Greece if all you want is English food)!
The journey back was rather long – since the ferry times didn’t match up with our flight times we were picked up by Olympic Holidays at 11:15am, in order to get the 12:00 boat to Mastihari, Kos (Μαστιχάρι, Κώς). When in Mastihari, we had a 3 hour wait for our transfer to the airport – during that time we went to the beach and had lunch at «Η Καλή Καρδιά» (“The Good Heart”) taverna. We were picked up at 4pm and taken to the airport (10 minutes)… I’ll talk about what happened then later in the week – it wasn’t as simple as check-in and go, unfortunatley!
I’ll be writing more about my visit to Kalymnos over the next couple of weeks – and posting videos and photos. I will also be (eventually) publishing the website statistics for July… but please be patient as I have a lot to catch up on!
The photo I have used to cover this blog post is one taken of me in front of the sunset (the sky does go very red, often after the sun itself has gone which looks rather spectacular), looking out from Kantouni (Καντούνι). “The Linaria” taverna can be found by the rocks at the top of the photo, next to where the boats are.
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