I think that I have missed the last few years of holiday posts. They are no doubt getting undoubtely getting increasingly in-appropriate as this blog completes it’s transition to an open lab-book. Still, I am stuck in an airport post-ICBO, so why not?

I have, to my knowledge, only been to Greece for work before, so I was not entirely sure what we were going to get, beyond the climate and food, which I figured was likely to be pretty similar to Turkey where we were two year before (actually, we could see the Turkish coast we had swam from). In this, I was correct. It’s reasonably hot. The ground is dry although there is no shortage of water (although, I didn’t know that Rhodes has almost no natural running water). The first week there was a very pleasant wind blowing, although I believe that this is unusual; it had gone by the second week.

Pefkos it a pretty small town and it is entirely tourist-driven; the accommodation is largely populated by the UK package tour operators, and it is rather “English breakfast”, but not offensively so. Our hotel backed onto the beach and, unlike Turkey, Greek beaches are not private owned; long may this last, although I have no doubt that somewhere right-wing economics are busy coming up with explanations as to why this is really a bad thing.

Rhodes itself is very beautiful, although we saw it largely by tour bus; while this avoids argument as to who is going to get stuck with the driving, the lack of control and the joyless, breathless, pillar-to-post excursion experience brings hassles of its own. Still, unlikely Turkey, the attempts to sell junk (Onyx in Turkey, Olive oil in Rhodes) to tourists was much less relentless. Likewise, the prices were reasonable, stated up-front on the menu and stuck to. Best things to see, if you are interested, were Rhodes town itself, and the butterfly valley, although this is not a major discovery. If you go to Rhodes, people will give you opinions on the 10 options pretty quick.

I believe that as a tourist town Pefkos is unusual on Rhodes in actually having Resturants at all, as most of the other towns have full-board hotels and there is no market. This seemed like a good thing, as hotel catering is rarely reliable. However, the resturant food was rather disappointing from a veggie perspective. While the Greeks seem curiously smug about their cuisine as they have discovered both the grill and the oven, their main dishes I find lack variety or composition, so I was not expecting much there. But, their mezze are great and even if they are largely replicated identically between resturants, so I expected to eat well.

The problem was that the mezze were too big; by the time you’d bought, say, some hummous, with a bit of bread, you already had half the food that you were ever going to eat. If I wanted to sample the variety they had on offer in one meal, I’d have to buy 5 dishes, then throw most of each away. I tried asking about this, but Greece (or tourist Greece) is not like Italy; the menu is a description of what you can choose from, not a starting point for negotiation. I didn’t starve, but it could have been so much better.

The best meal I got was from a buffet at the hotel, where I could pick what I wanted; oh, the irony. This at their themed “Greek night” — a pretty obscure theme for a Greek hotel, on a Greek island, in Greece, but they attacked it with gusto: they seemed genuinely disappointed that I didn’t drink the Ouzo (“it’s a spirit, with aniseed”, they explained); then, the Greek dancers, to the sounds of a bousouki player, and attempts to get us to join the knees up, after which the band switched between the top 10 bousouki standards, interspersed with the top 10 chart hits (Taylor Swift sounds better on bousouki than in the original though, perhaps, that is less surprising than it seems on first thoughts). It was all rather fun, even if haunted by the shade of Monty Python.

The backdrop to the holiday was the economic crisis; the Greeks voted no in the middle. It seemed a brave attempt to resist the bullying and hectoring; reform is needed, indeed, but it is in the international businesses who think that tax is for the little people, and with the self-appointed guardians of the economy who treat social justice and welfare as a luxury to be disposed of, as soon as the opportunity arises. Perhaps it seems unlikely, given that their leaders have already capitulated, but I hope that the Greek people can hold on to as many of these things as they can. Maybe, the Greeks can help lead the world back toward democracy and away from the current hegemony; they have a history in doing this, after all.

If they can keep their free beaches which they were kind enough to share with us on our holiday, and which I hope they will share with us again in future, that would be nice as well.