Halkidiki

At the Hanioti Village Hotel

Below the ancient city of  Thessaloniki in northern Greece, three fingers of  sun-baked land reach out into the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea. The most westerly peninsula is called Kassandra. And that's where Shirley and I have been this last week. It is also the reason why this blog has been frozen for the past seven days. I'm sorry.


I first visited Greece in the seventies and recall sunny, magical days and nights on faraway islands like Naxos,  Folegandros, Milos, Ios, Mykonos, Santorini and Delos. Old men rode donkeys to barren fields. Old women dressed in black and smiled from whitewashed doorways - "Kali mera!". At noon, the daylight was brutally sharp as the sun, an angry eye, seared down. This was the land of Jason and Venus, Hector and Lysander. I slept on beaches to the sound of the sea and woke at first light to plunge into that crystal clear saltwater. I could tell many tales of the Greece I discovered back then but this past week's Greece was a different one.

Sea and sky merge at Loutra

Shirley at Aghios Nicolaos

Near Old Skioni

To start with, we were staying in a hotel. The room had a shower and a terrace. Swallows had built mud nests under the eaves and their young were learning to fly. We had to cross a busy road to get to the track that leads down to Hanioti Beach. There, to the left, was a beach club with two hundred identical sunbeds and horn speakers blasting out tiresome music. So we headed to the right and found a quieter spot, paying five euros for the comfort of two sun beds and a beach umbrella.

The little resort was inundated with Serbs, Romanians and Macedonians who had driven there. The man at the car hire office told me that ten years ago 80% of their visitors were English and now 80% were Serbian and they didn't need to hire cars because they'd brought their own.

We toured the peninsula. I was looking for something of the old Greece that I had known and loved but it was somehow hidden away. Yet one day, when we were basking on a sandy western beach, I noticed an archaeological site in the adjacent field - mainly foundations and some tiles and marble pillars. It looked like the remains of a pre-Christian settlement but I haven't been able to find anything out about it - not even its name. 

Shirley under an olive tree on the western beach

The main point of the little holiday was to give Shirley some well-deserved sunshine R&R, lazing about by the sea and the pool and catching up with some reading. I think she read four novels and I read two - "So Much For That" by Lionel Shriver and "Senor Viva and the Coca Lord" by Louis de Bernieres. I also read "Blue-Eyed Son" by the British TV and radio presenter - Nicky Campbell - all about his adoption in 1961 and his quest to find his blood relations and thereby better understand himself.

One afternoon I swam out to a white buoy, two hundred metres off shore and rested there as one of those stupid and rather pointless jet skis surged by. Then I swam back with the sea floor far below me and watched the Serbian figures on the hot beach gradually growing closer. Greece 2012.

Hanioti Beach  at sunset