On Rhodes

Obviously our impending departure from London evokes a lot of emotion, but I'm not really ready to put that to words yet, so here's a little about our trip to Greece.

My friend Cole does a lot of traveling for work so when we first got to London I made sure to keep in touch in case we could meet up somewhere in Europe for a vacation. We came up with Greece in July. His girlfriend, Catherine, who's also a friend from high school, happened to be in Switzerland for a couple weeks before so the timing was great. Her sister Maddie and her boyfriend Josh, who happen to live in London as well, were also keen to go so we had a crew big enough for a villa. Add Cole's friend Pryce, who was on a European vacation of his own, and the couch was full too, as it should be on any great trip.

No one was too fussy about where in Greece, and luckily it all looked pretty great so our options were wide open and we ended up with Rhodes, specifically the village of Lindos. Everyone else could only do 5 nights so Genevieve and I decided to spend the first couple nights in hotel in another town called Faliraki since we wanted a full 8 days in the sun.

I would never have chosen a hot destination in July since it seems a waste to leave where you're at in the only nice part of the year. Lucky for us the months leading up to the trip were easily the shittiest April-July I have ever seen. Without this trip (and our spontaneous Mallorca trip) to look forward to I would have lost it.

Faliraki is well known as a party town for European (mostly English) kids to go get loser pissed and hook up. We'd read this a bit, and a colorful story from our English friends confirmed this. Think The Inbetweeners Movie. There are a number of these places on the Med and I was curious to see one for myself.

The beach was beautiful, as they all seem to be, and the town was alright, but definitely a bit run down and dingy in the bright sunlight. Not many people were far from the beach or pool during the day. Our hotel was pretty cheap, but well reviewed and actually really nice. The pool was fantastic and the bar/restaurant beside it had great people and cheap beer. In 45 degree heat we didn't stray far. At night Faliraki is completely different, tons of people out and about and lots of bright lights of bars and clubs that change the atmosphere.

A great part of the weather in Greece is how much time you can spend outside, all the bars and restaurants were almost entirely under the stars. Our first night there lined up with a massive beach rave that everyone in town was talking about, and we watched ten coaches worth of people leave the strip for it. We were feeling a bit too old and wanted to enjoy the next day so we decided to take it easy, which ended up being drinking vodka and watching the lights from down the beach until 3am.

We rented a scooter and cruised over to a couple bays for some snorkeling the next day. Even the breeze on the scooter was hot. Trying to be thrifty we picked the Vespa over getting a quad (which you can drive on all the roads there) but after seeing all the amazing off road opportunity I immediately regretted that decision. Quads trump scooters every time. We ended up back at the pool relaxing and had a quieter night with dinner at a beach bar.

The next day Cole and them picked us up at the hotel and we headed down the coast to our villa just outside Lindos. The place was more than big enough for 7 with a beauty pool and an ocean view and it was pretty reasonably priced.

The town of Lindos was about a 15 minute walk and consisted of 2 beautiful bays with beaches, a picturesque village with narrow pedestrian streets lined with classic white Greek buildings and the ruins of a massive acropolis perched on a cliff overlooking the city and the ocean. It was just stunning.

For the most part we spent our time either at the pool, at a nearby beach or out on a little excursion. We checked out the top of the acropolis, and had several nights out in Lindos on one of many roof top restaurants.

Cole was determined to make some mojitos to go with the heat but couldn't find mint at any supermarket, eventually coming to the conclusion Rhodes had no mint. There was talk of getting into the mint importing business on Rhodes, an untapped market we thought. On our second to last day as we were lounging by the pool a stranger pulled up, walked into the yard and said something that sounded like 'Sorry, here for mint'. But with his accent it coulda been a lot of things. As we looked at each other confused he walked over to the far edge of the yard to a garden we had never really noticed but he was very familiar with. He started chopping mint out of this garden that was probably 100 sq feet of mint plants. Turns out he was a bartender at a bar in Lindos and our villa had the towns supply of mint for mojitos. We headed over that night for tasty mojitos with very fresh mint. Cole tried to make up for lost time by hammering out the mojitos over the last couple day but we definitely blew by not venturing 25 feet from the pool in our own yard.

On an ambitious day we took the car for a drive down to the southern tip of Rhodes, about an hour away. Most of the drive was along the water with great views and beaches. Catherine pointed out however, that as cool as the landscape was to see because it was so different to what we're used to, it was really dry and barren compared to the beauty of the wet coast. At the tip of the island was a peninsula where the wind of 2 seas crashed into each other and turned out to be a kite boarding mecca. It was really cool to see so many people having such an awesome time at what was probably somewhere they'd seen in magazines and videos and finally got to do themselves. Reminded me of being a skateboarder in Barcelona, I could kinda feel their excitement.

Great thing about a big group was on top of splitting costs on the villa and car, we could do something like rent a boat pretty cheap. We got a little fishing boat for a few hours at the next town over and went out to try to catch dinner. We picked up a stylish tourists bucket cap for the biggest fish to encourage some success. Our bait and hooks were none too enticing to the many decent sized fish we could see, and anything edible stayed in the water. Not to take away from Catherine's success of course! I'm claiming pity points for my comically smallest catch of the day.

Greece's economic troubles didn't affect our trip but there were signs of it all over the island, the most obvious being countless unfinished concrete frames of buildings. It's hard to imagine an economy changing so immediately that there could be literally thousands of buildings that just halted construction all at once, it was strange.

On our last day we drove the rental car across the island to the west coast on the way to Rhodes town and the airport. While it was a pretty good little ride we were packed to the tits with 7 people and all our luggage. As you should with any rental car we pushed it to it's absolute limit by taking it on some rough steep dirt roads through the hills to the other side. We passed through some really cool little villages that were quite different from the tourist towns of the coast. Rhodes town is the main city of the island with something like 80% of the population. At the heart of the city is an ancient walled town that has housed and been conquered by numerous empires over the centuries. There are dozens of criss crossing narrow streets with sections of tourist shops and restaurants on one strip and locals living in run down shanty houses around the corner. I can only imagine how sick of tourists they must be. Another highlight of Rhodes town, and all of the island actually, were the gangs of wild cats, they were gnarly, and really go to show how pathetic and spoiled house cats are. Garbage cats would eat yours alive.

I've been on trips where a week with the same 7 people causes tension, but considering not everyone knew each other well this one was good times start to finish, which was a real bonus. Unless everyone was just being polite about how sick of me they were, either way, thanks for the awesome Greek vacation!

-Justin