Thassos, Greece
This past weekend I went to Thassos, Greece making it my 3rd trip to Greece in the last 2 months. It also means I have now traveled to Greece by plane, train and automobile. This, however, would be my first trip to a Greece Island. Note that I will add pictures sometime this weekend.
The trip was the official summer excursion for the Sofia Hash House Harriers. The final total of people who went was nine, but we came in different groups at different times. One car left Friday morning, another car left Friday afternoon and the third group came by plane from Romania. I was in the car that left Friday afternoon with Tom (the driver), myself, Joel and Mirena. Te plan was to meet Tom in Boyana (a neighborhood on the outskirts of Sofia in the direction of Greece) at 4pm. Joel and Mirena would catch a cab in the center, pick me up on the way out and we would all meet Tom in Boyana. Well, at around 2pm a freak thunderstorm swept through Sofia and taxis all of a sudden became very hard to come by. It took Joel and Mirena about 45 minutes to catch a cab making us 45 minutes late meeting Tom. Poor Tom works halfway to the Greek border, so he drove up from work to pick us up then basically back down towards Greece again. Anyway, we all eventually made it to Boyana and were on our way around 5pm.
In hindsight, we made several key mistakes in our trip to Thassos.
1. Nobody bothered to look at the ferry schedule until we got to the Greek border. A quick glance showed the last ferry to Thassos leaving at 9:30pm. A quick glance at my watch at the border showed 8pm. An estimate of travel time to Keramoti (where the ferry left from) was over 2 hours. Uh-oh. We made it through the border in a record 21 minutes so (we thought) there was still a slight change to make the last ferry.
2. We didn’t bring a map. All I had was some emailed directions listing a highway (E90), the names of two towns where ferries left from (Keramoti and Kavala), and a larger town (Chrissopouli) which was located near Keramoti. I saw signs for none of these towns until we were almost to Thessaloniki. Thessaloniki is southwest from the border and we wanted to go southeast.
3. I was in charge of navigating. Usually I’m good, but for some reason Greece messes with my navigation skills. The fact that I was navigating without a map didn’t help either.
Once we got to Thessaloniki we saw the highway E90 and signs giving us the direction we needed to go. As soon as we saw the first sign showing the (still long) distance to Kavala we knew we would miss the ferry. 250 km after we crossed the Greek border we were entering Kavala. As we entered Kavala we saw a sign saying the Bulgarian border was only 80 km away. Needless to say I caught some flak for that. In my defense, we found out on our return trip that the border crossing on this sign was a different border crossing than the one we wanted.
On our way to Kavala we got a call from the two people who were flying in from Romania to meet us. They had flown into Thessaloniki, rented a car and drove to Kavala and realized they missed the last ferry. So we had a ferry schedule but never bothered to look at it, they didn’t have a ferry schedule at all. Obviously there was a lot of advance preparation that went into this trip.
On Friday night there were 6 people on the “Thassos trip” in Kavala and only 3 in Thassos. Since we all missed the ferry we booked a cheap hotel in Kavala. Cheap is the key word here. Not inexpensive – cheap. The couple from Romania (one was American, the other British – they used to live in Sofia) arrived ahead of us, booked the room and headed out to get something to eat. Probably around 45 minutes later made it to the hotel and there was not a single hotel employee in sight. We waited a couple minutes and still no one arrived. I got bored and started roaming around checking out some of the open rooms (it appeared some of the unoccupied rooms were left open to air them out). Some of them had a bathroom, some didn’t. Tom started rifling through the reservation book. There was no bell to ring. There were some keys on the reservation desk so I picked one up and opened its associated room. Well, there were bags already in there so it wasn’t ours. At this point and old woman storms out of a room asking what we’re doing. Apparently she was the proprietor which was good because I was about to just claim one of the open rooms. The keys on the reception which I was using to open random doors were, in fact, not ours. She pulled out some keys for us and showed us to our rooms while sucking on a half burnt cigarette. As she entered our room, the inch of ash hanging off her cigarette finally gave out and plopped in the middle of our floor. The room had a very basic bathroom and two beds. Tom and I would share a room. As we were unpacking Tom decided to mention he’s quite a snorer. Super.
I soon realized that the room had an air conditioner near the ceiling, but no way to control it. I headed back to the reception desk and asked if there was a remote for the air conditioner. The old lady gave me some crap about how cool it was tonight and we didn’t need the air conditioner – yea, cool maybe for the equator. It was still pretty warm out and the hotel room was even warmer. About the same time Joel realized the same thing I did and came looking for a remote. She let out a, “You want one too!” comment. Eventually I had my remote and headed back to the room. After we dumped our stuff we all went out to meet up with Christa and Simon (the couple who came in from Romania), have a few beers and some food, and watch the World Cup.
When we got back to the hotel around midnight I thought Tom’s snoring would be detrimental to my sleep, but in fact it was pretty low on the list of things that annoyed me that night. The total list of things that annoyed me were:
1. The air conditioner was friggin’ loud. I mean, this thing sounded like it was trying to haul a mile-long train of coal cars. I’m surprised it didn’t vibrate itself right off the wall.
2. The air conditioner didn’t actually blow cold air – regardless of what temperature I set it at. It did (at least) blow room temperature air … for a while.
3. After a while, the “air conditioner” (I’ll use quotes from now on) would stop blowing any air whatsoever. Note, however, even though the “air conditioner” was not blowing any air, the noise or vibrations it made never changed. I found this out at about 3am when I woke up drenched in sweat and thirsty as hell.
4. There were no glasses or cups in the room. Here I was, about ready to die of dehydration because of the non-functioning air-conditioner, and there were no glasses to put water in. I had to use the old-fashioned “clasp my hands into a cup” to finally drink something. Since the “air conditioner” was not functioning I just turned it off and opened the window which led to the next problem.
5. We faced a street that had no shortage noisy traffic going by at all hours of the night. I’m pretty sure there was a F1 race happening outside our window around 3am. I was only able to keep the window open for a short while before I could take it no more. I closed the door and tried the “air conditioner” again. Thankfully it started blowing air again (still not cold air, mind you). I laid down to go back to sleep when I found out another problem….
6. …the “air conditioner” would only blow air for about 30 minutes. Thus, every 30 minutes I would have to turn off the air conditioner then turn it on again to get another 30 minutes of air circulation.
7. The bed and pillow might as well have been made of concrete.
8. Oh, and Tom snored, but I barely heard it.
We were up bright and early (or all night, depending) to catch the 8am ferry to Thassos. As far as Greece Islands go, Thassos is one of the largest. To drive around the island is about 100 km. The center is mostly mountains with the highest peak being 1045 m (3428 ft). When we got to Thassos we had another adventure trying to find our hotel. Thassos Town is made up of a large number of narrow, one-way streets. We had a map that had printed only four streets, no street names, and looked like it had been drawn by a puppy. Here was my chance to fail again as navigator. Now keep in mind Thassos Town is small. You could probably walk the whole thing in 15 minutes. It took us 45 minutes of driving around to get to our hotel. At a couple points we could see it, but we couldn’t actually figure out how to get there with our car.
We finally made it to the hotel, changed into swim trunks and got back in the car to head to the beach. We were staying in Thassos Town which had a small crappy beach, but had good selections of restaurants, pubs, a ferry back to the mainland and other amenities you would expect in a small tourist town. Thus, we had to drive to the beaches, which didn’t have such amenities. There are two main beaches in Thassos – Golden Sands and Paradise Beach. We stopped first at Golden Sands and decided to head on to Paradise Beach. There was really no rationale for this other than we would see a bit more of the island and Paradise Beach was said to be the better of the two beaches. In my opinion they were probably about the same, but Paradise Beach was very nice. The only problem was we had to walk down a steep road to get down to the beach. We spend the afternoon napping, swimming and making trips to the restaurant for more food and beer. It was a good day.
We headed back to the hotel, relaxed for a bit (I watched the World Cup game, others went shopping) and got ready for dinner. The girl working at the hotel in Thassos was from Seattle and she recommended a good restaurant where our waiter was from Baltimore (and a bit too happy and prompt to be working in the Balkans). No wonder we have to bring in foreigners from poorer countries to wait tables in the US, all the Americans are going to wait tables in those poorer countries – go figure. Dinner was good and Saturday night’s sleep was a vast improvement – the bed was comfortable (although the pillow was a bit large), the a/c worked perfectly and I was sleeping with a very quiet Thomas (as opposed to the snoring Tom).
Sunday morning we went on our Hash run. Ken marked the run through town using clumps of flour (the traditional Hash method of trail marking). He had been up since 6am (his roommate was now the snoring Tom), so he had plenty of time to mark the trail. Before setting out Ken said the run would be pretty short – only about 35 minutes. Well, it went at least an hour and most of it was running up and down hills. It was darn hot too. Anyway, the run was still interesting because it took us past a number of ancient Greek ruins, and up a hill to give us a look over some of Thassos. We got back to the hotel and immediately jumped in the pool (the hotel had a nice pool in the back).
I hung out in the pool until we packed up to leave around 1pm on Sunday. We took the correct way back to the border. This way would have shaved off a lot of the driving time, but we got lost in one of the towns on the way back and ended up going circles for a bit. I think we still made it back in less time than on the way down.
The borders, both going and coming are a pain in the ass. First, they usually only have one booth out of 5 open so you have to wait in a long single-file line. Next, all the customs booths are on the passenger side of the car so you have to stop before the booth, get out of your car (or have your passenger get out) and walk up to the booth to show your documents. Even if you did drive up to the window, it’s too high to actually do anything without getting out of the car. The Greeks and Bulgarians need to take some lessons from the US-Canada (and probably US-Mexico, I don’t remember) border crossings. You can stay in your nice air conditioned car (unless of course they make you get out to search your car for illegal aliens sown into the seat cushions). At the first customs booth you show passports for everyone in the car, a green card (international car insurance document) and some misc. other registration information which Tom says changes every time he drives to Greece (sometimes they want to see it, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they want to keep a photocopy, sometimes they don’t – you never know until you get there). After you get everything stamped and checked at the first booth, you have to go to a second booth (still on the passenger side of the car so you have to stop and get out) and show all the same stuff again. What’s the difference between the booths? No idea – other than it makes it take longer to get through the border. Of course the order of people showing documents at the booths doesn’t always match the order the cars in line behind the booth (it’s a bit of a free-for-all) so sometimes you have to wait for the car in front of you to get their act together with the passports because, despite you already getting everything stamped, you can’t move your car until they pull through. Also, once the Bulgarian customs agent finds out you’re American you have to have a long conversation with him/her about how hard it is to get visas to the US – that takes at least 5 minutes.
So, aside from a longer border crossing of close to an hour, we made it back to Bulgaria without any more incidents. Total time from Thassos Town to Sofia was about 7 hours.
