Well, just like in real life (as opposed to in a new kind of life you are trying to start somewhere), lots happened this week but much of it would be very dull to read about. Lots more of the same in fact: working on getting Opua ready to sail. Lots more of the same does mean though that we have come several steps closer on our chachacha towards boat completion (I call it a chachacha now but until this week, with seemingly one step forward and two back it felt like a very reluctant line dance.)
Ralph has tirelessly shown up early every morning on the dockyard to encourage the works to continue, and this has been largely successful: engines have been serviced, cosmetics to the fibreglass are finished, one of the saildrive shafts was replaced, and various additions, replacements and adjustments have been made. We even have a tentative date for Opua to be launched back into the water! We very much hope everything comes together for this to happen – we can’t quite believe it is already April, and 5 weeks of dodgy dances are behind us.
So to relieve the tedium of boatwork reporting here is a bit of local colour!
With every passing day the island feels different. The roads all have spanking new white lines down the middle. The massive palm trees lining the roads have been stripped and the top two thirds of their trunks lopped off. Kos town itself feels like a different place now compared to a few weeks ago. It is so much more lively; there are more people out and about, and people are sitting out at the more numerous street cafes. The trees are all blooming and you get whiffs of orange or mandarine blossom as you walk around. There are even some tourists here and there. (Ralph and I realized as we noticed “the tourists” that we feel as though we belong in a different category.) Ten charter boat crews took over their holiday boats on Saturday. It feels so odd to share the marina facilities with other non-locals! Someone actually used my toilet the other day – the cheek of it!
At our temporary home the little half-stray dog Rosa races up the hill to greet us whenever we arrive whatever time of the day, and whether on foot or in the bus. She does a cute little dance for joy and rolls over to be tickled. Ralph often gives her a leftover bone or a bit of ham. Our landlady has also been providing food for us. One day, delicious homemade dolmades – vineleaves stuffed with rice, and on another occasion some fruit called “medlar”, which grows in the family garden. Unfortunately research indicated that to be eaten raw it would need to go through a special ripening process so, as is the way of things, the bag of fruit looked at me balefully for nearly a week waiting for special treatment before, in the end, I made a puree out of it.
As a treat at the end of the week we took the day away from the boatyard and went in search of the hot springs. Interestingly there was a complete red herring in Google maps – we were sent to a remote stretch at the top of the North East coast where no hot springs were anywhere to be found. We were happy to have been sent there though as it is a beautiful area with low marine shrubs and wild flowers forming the foreground to the stony beach and then the water stretches out towards the hills of Turkey in the distance. It was warm but very windy, and very beautiful.
Sure enough though at our second attempt, just where the road ends “just round the bend at the east of Kos” a steep and rutted path takes you down to a volcanic beach, at the end of which lolled a couple of pasty tourists (there I go again) in what appeared to be a muddy pond just at the water’s edge: we had found the hot springs! Ralph set to with a spade on a second, less murky-looking hollow to build up the edge nearest the sea, to protect us from cold sea spray. He also scooped out the basin so it was deeper to wallow in. And then wallow we did! The coarse black sand was wonderfully warm, and the hot sulphuric-smelling water left our skin feeling silky soft.
We probably looked very silly as we wallowed and if you hadn’t known better you might even have mistaken us for tourists.
Wishing you all nice weather and a wonderful Easter holiday as tourists, locals, or some other in-between category.
Translated to German with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) - with some tweaks
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