Anafi Island

I've been on the island of Anafi for about six days now. It's quite a beautiful and peaceful little island. There's only one village of a few hundred people here, although the island isn't extremely tiny, it still takes more than an hour to bike the length of it. But the one road only goes out to a monastery, which I biked to a couple of days ago. There are some videos of the monastery and other views of the island now on facebook.

So I've been camping on a small beach that's just a 10 minute walk from the port, and just a few minutes from a little restaurant called Margaritas, where they have free wireless access. I'm using the computer of someone else who is also camping on the beach.

Yesterday I went to take my bike out for a ride in the evening and discovered that the front tire was very low on air, not flat at least, but then I couldn't get the bicycle pump to work properly. So today (it's about noon right now) I'll have to get that worked out one way or another. Hopefully I'll get the pump working, otherwise there's a gas station not too far away where I can fill it up, and then see what happens over the next couple of days, whether it holds air or goes flat again. If it doesn't hold air then I'll have to make use of the one spare tube that I have. Other than this wrinkle, the bike has worked great though.

Other than biking around I've mostly been checking out the many great beaches on the island, none of which are too crowded during the day, but all of them seem to have at least a few people camping on them. I don't think that's the case everywhere on the Greek islands, however. On the more popular islands, for one you probably wouldn't feel as comfortable camping out because there would be too many random people around, and more chance of thieves, and also there might be police making sure people aren't camping. On the island of Naxos, where I plan to go next, I'll camp at a campground since it's a much more popular island. Each island is quite unique, just depends on the people and how crowded and/or friendly it is. And each one definitely has its own personality and different aspects to it.

The one village on Anafi, called Hora (which simply means capital city) is amazingly beautiful. All of the buildings are the classic white and blue, and it's perched on a ridge that looks out over the Mediterranean Sea. It's a very steep 20 minutes or so bike ride up there from the beach that I'm on. There's also a bus that covers the few miles of roads (it's about six miles from the village on one side to the monastery on the other, and I think there's another short road that I haven't explored yet). So I've made use of the bus a few times to go up to the village for dinner and shopping, etc. I've been hanging out with a small group of other folks who are also camped on the beach, an American woman who is about 40 from Minnesota, two Greek girls and an 18-year old from Germany.

Well I should probably publish this while I can because the internet here is pretty temperamental. I've managed to upload two videos to facebook so far, and am trying to upload a couple of others. I've also uploaded some new photos, which you can view by clicking on the subject line above. It's a link to facebook, but you should be able to view them even if you don't have a facebook account.

Take care all and I'll be in touch again pretty soon...