Dianna and I have had a great time here hanging out on the beautiful little island of Nisyros. Dianna had been here once before years ago, and camped for three weeks on a remote beach, Pahia Ammos, that requires a short fifteen minute hike to get to. She'd made it sound like a pretty nice place, without elaborating too much, so I was definitely curious to see it.
Last Saturday we took a brutally early 2:30 am ferry from Lipsi to the island of Kos, which is a much larger nearby island, where we had to go first in order to get here. We arrived around 7 in the morning, and then had just an hour or so to kill there before catching a much smaller boat over to Nisyros, arriving around 10 in the morning.
We'd thought of just getting a room first so that we could get some sleep after a grueling night on the ferry, then do the shopping and the hike to the beach, etc. the next day. But we decided we were too excited to get to the beach and set up camp, and not have anything to do the next day instead.
We rented a car, then headed into the small main town of Mandraki, where we had a delicious English breakfast (fried eggs, bacon, sausage and toast), for a change from the usual muesli. With that I realized that I'd actually eaten three different breakfasts, on three different islands all within a 12-hour period. We'd taken a nap the previous evening on Lipsi before catching the early morning ferry, then had gotten up at around midnight to catch the ferry, and I made omelettes. Then after arriving on Kos I had a bowl of Muesli; and breakfast for the third time on the island of Nisyros. I'm sure it must be a world record of some sort.
Anyway, after breakfast Dianna and I went shopping for food for several days, then drove to the trailhead, partway around the island at the end of the road. We packed up and did the short hike, which went up a hill a bit and then wrapped around a small point, from where we got the first view of Pahia Ammos beach. It was a spectacular sight, especially since I had no idea what to expect. It was a large crescent-moon-shaped black sand beach with big dunes behind it, and a small valley going inland, surrounded by weird sculpted rock cliffs. As we walked down the trail to the beach and then up onto the dunes, you could see back into the valley; and my first thought was that it looked exactly like the African savannah. It was basically dry grassland and sagebrush, spotted here and there with skinny little trees, with large rounded tops that had plenty of foliage on them for providing shade from the sun.
We searched around and found a great spot, that was still in the sand but had three or four trees all right next to each other, making a large shaded area. We set up camp, then I took a quick swim and promptly crawled into the tent for a much needed two-hour nap.
We spent five days altogether camped there, and only saw a few other people, that just came to the beach for the day. Apparently it's jam-packed with campers in the summer, but we had it entirely to ourselves. We kept the rental car for the whole time, though we didn't end up using it all that much. But it was handy for storing some of our things so that we didn't have to hike everything in. A couple of days out there we never went farther than to the beach, and then back to camp (roughly a two-minute walk). But we still kept pretty active, between lots of swimming around and yoga on the beach.
A couple of days ago we hiked out to the car and toured the island a bit, including checking out the active volcano that's at the center of the island. And by "checking it out" I mean walking right down to the bottom of the crater floor. There's no lava pouring out at this point, but there are steam vents that can be seen from the hiking trails, and you can hear assorted gurglings around you, plus it stinks like sulphur everywhere. It was a pretty impressive sight, especially for such a small island.
Today we hung out on the beach for most of the day, then packed up camp around four in the afternoon and hiked out to the car. We drove back to the main town, and rented a room for the night to get a much needed shower and a welcomed night's sleep on a mattress. Tomorrow we're planning to take another ferry, to the island of Santorini.
I first visited Santorini when I came to Europe in 1990, at the age of eighteen. I more or less ended up there by accident. I was traveling with a friend, and we'd bought a ferry ticket from the port at Athens to the first nearby island. But we didn't much like the look of it, so we decided to stay on the boat to the next one, and hope that they didn't check our tickets. At the next island, however, we decided it still didn't look like what we were searching for in an idyllic Greek island. We did this several more times, until we got to Santorini. It was the final destination of the ferry, so we got off there, and it turned out to be a gorgeous and indeed idyllic island. It's also one of the most touristy islands in Greece. So it will be both interesting to see it with a new pair of eyes, nineteen years later; and it's also the perfect time to be there, well outside of the tourist season when there should be hardly anyone else there.
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