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Trip Start May 09, 2010 Previous
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  Naoussa, Cyclades, Greece
Thursday, August 5, 2010

We spent 7 restful nights in Aliki going to the beach daily and swimming at least 4 times a day which has done me the world of good.  Every swim seems to loosen me up a bit more,  After a couple of days in Aliki though, we had explored most of the area and the local beaches so we decided to hire a very noisy, very underpowered quad bike and took off to explore the other beaches and towns on the island.  Sasha did a great job of driving us around and putting up with the locals who had no patience behind this slow contraption of ours and overtook us on hairy bends and double white lines.  

We found some lovely places and decided that, rather than stay the whole time at the one hotel, it would be more fun to move hotels for the last few nights and spend some time in the more lively (and more expensive) town of Naoussa at the opposite end of the island.  Much to our surprise, the first hotel we enquired at said they had a room available for later in the week from 31st to the 4th so we booked it.  

After we gave back the quad bike we took the local bus and headed up to the village of Lefkes which was the original place of settlement of the greek people on the island and therefore the oldest.  We didn't dare go there with our underpowered bike - it would never have managed the hills.  Lefkes was a place of little winding streets built into the hillside.  We wandered around, had lunch in a restaurant with a panoramic view down to the sea and then Sasha took off to walk the ancient Olympian path for an hour or so.

The next day we moved to Naoussa which was fun, with gorgeous little whitewashed streets where you inevitably got lost in the maze.  Lots of exclusive boutiques and restaurants right on the water frequented by people who seemed to only emerge at about 8.00pm for the night life. 

On our last day we booked a trip on Captain Ben, a boat exploring the bays of the next door island called Antiparos.  We had a gorgeous day, the weather was superb and there was plenty of shade on the boat as well as sunny spots.  We pulled into 5 different spots for swims including swimming in a cave and under a rocky arch.  It was exactly 2 months to the day that I had broken my leg and my wrist and here I was on a boat climbing down and up the ladder for a swim.  I was pretty pleased with that progress.

The next day we took the ferry back to Piraeus and spent one more night in Athens before leaving Greece. We found a hotel in the Plaka area, the old part of Athens near the Acropolis. The hotel wasn't very nice at all and we probably should have gone back to our first hotel.  The room was smelly and cramped and the manager was very surly.  But we were able to walk to the Plaka and Sasha visited the Acropolis.  We also caught up with Angelica one more time before leaving Greece.  
 
Greece is freally suffering from the recession and the major unemployment problem that they have. Although to us it seemed very busy, all the hotels said that they were having a very bad season.  However we felt that they were not really helping themselves in the tourist stakes. They weren't very friendly, nobody initiated any conversations with us and they weren't very cheap.  Althoguh we had had a fantastic time in Greece we felt it was now time to move on. We had decided to fly to Palermo to see how the mafia were dealing with the recession.

(Sorry about my pictures - they are rather spotty as some dirt has got caught behind the lens and I need to get someone to open it up and clean it.)

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Golden Beach	Kolimbithres Beach	Kolimbithres beach	Lefkes old settlement in the hills
Lefkes old settlement in the hills	Lefkes cactus	Naoussa street	Naoussa
Naoussa	Naoussa	Naoussa - catch of the day drying in the sun	Naoussa
Naoussa	Naoussa encroaching sea	Tempting view	Captain Ben boat around Antiparos
Sasha on Captain Ben Boat	Lunch preparation on Captain Ben Boat	Captain Ben Boat	Captain Ben Boat - we got up close
Captain Ben Boat	Captain Ben Boat	Cat of the Day   Comments!

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