The White Route: Curiosity finds the Path... Or Alonissos Travelogue Part 12

From the coast at Tsoukalia, an asphalt road winds inland up a gentle incline to connect after 30 minutes walking to the area around Mega Nero. A little whiles before this point, at about 20 minutes from the coast, a dirt track heads off through the pines to the north in the direction of the little cliff top chapel of Agioi Anargyroi. It is a pleasant, if storyless little jaunt, taking in ever more satisfying glimpses of the sea through the pines until one arrives after another 20 minutes or so to the chapel itself.


As you can see, it is a singularly picturesque spot - although one, admittedly, which is endlessly repeated throughout the Aegean - and must be even more breathtaking in the softer colours of a summer evening when the sun dips down low on the facing horizon.

It is also a blessed spot in that it is situated in the general locale of some secluded little coves, offering the, by this time rather exhausted walker, an opportunty to cool their feet in the Aegean. To reach this area, known as Tourkoneri, one need only descend via a pleasant shady track through the pines which after ten minutes, will bring you to the grounds of a single house situated in an enviable poistion overlooking a sheltered bay.


You can just glimpse this house in the top left hand corner of the above photograph. However, one cannot see this little cove, where I swam naked for half an hour or so in complete isolation, from the path leading down from Agioi Anargyroi. In fact, on arriving at the coast by this path, one is met by a dirt road which, if followed, would take one back up inland eventually to meet up with a bigger dirt road running parallel to the main road through an area know as Rahes. This would be my route home; but before then, I fancied exploring the hidden inlets and coves on this part of the coast... but how?

The answer came, as usual, after a brief period of curiosity.

Leaving the house, I walked along the dirt road past the baking bodies jostling for a little more room on the tiny cove which was Tourkoneri proper, and up and a little inland on the dirt road. Sensing that this was the same road marked on the map and that it would soon take me back in the direction of home, I sought a little shade under a pine tree growing at the edge of the road to get my bearings once more. Looking up from my map at one point, I saw that I was actually sitting on the top tier of a stepped olive grove which wound around a little cove in an elegant arch, hugging the horse-shoelike contour of the land. Not only this, but there, a couple of tiers down below me and only just discernable, was a path which followed the countour of the olive grove first inland then back out again on the finger of the opposite peninsula. Once again, a little disinterested curiosity had shown me the way forward.

Getting up and following this path, I was led to a gate beyond which the path forked, with one route heading up onto a cliff-top path and another heading down the peninsula in the direction of the bay. Taking this latter path, I found myself after 5 minutes at the secret cove snapped in the photograph above and, confident that I would have the place to myself for a good while, stripped off for a highly refreshing and much needed skinny dip.

Refreshed and ready for yet more walking, I took to the cliff top path in good time to admire the view of a tourist kaiki gliding into the bay below me, the passengers of which would have got an extra little thrill if they had arrived five minutes earlier. From here, the path descended once more to the coast for the remainder of the walk, all the way to Megali Ammos beach in fact, alternately looping around little coves and out onto the rocky fingers of interposed peninsulas.

All in all, it was a beautiful and none-too-demanding stretch to top off what had been a long day's walking. So long in fact that when I got to Megali Ammos, I realised that this was as good a place as any to call it a day and head back to Patitiri on the wide road through Rahes...

... A route that I would revisit the next day on my way to Steni Vala.

The White Route: Sherds, Sherds and More Sherds OR Alonissos Travelogue Part 11

Over the years, I have steadily added my own touch to the standard Greek holiday activities of swimming, trekking and eating. First there was fishing, a fleeting fad brought to an abrupt end when Maria arrived on the scene with her swift judgement that no man of hers should come within down-wind smelling distance of fish, nevermind 'murder' them. Next, there was an equally fleeting love affair with geology which for the most part saw me needlessly burdening myself with interesting looking rocks in the course of a holiday's walking only to chuck them all away at Eleftheros Venizelos airport flummuxing thus the odd itinerant geologist. And of course there has always been a healthy interest in cafes, with many an evening spent combing cycladic alleyways in search of the perfect view to accompany a sundowner... or two.

But none of these myriad ways to eat up time when not actually trekking or swimming can come close to the thrill of amateur archaeology. I always had at least passing interest in exploring the rich variety of ancient sites to be found on the islands, but it was not until I met Maria that my wall climbing and earth raking took on a more serious air. With 13 years spent studying the ancient artefacts of the Aegean, as well as practical experience of excavations, she was well placed to point me in the right direction.

Not that there was any great secret about it: all she did was make a casual remark while climbing up a low hill on the site of a Mycenaen Acropolis near Naoussa, Paros in the Autumn of 2004

"This place is full of pottery", she remarked.
"Really!? Where!?", I responded whirling round and raking the panorama less it should fly off like some startled bird
"Under your feet silly", she added tramping on ahead.

I looked down. She was right; the entire site was strewn with fragments of rust coloured sherds. What seems so painfully normal and obvious 3 years later - that even the most scrupulously excavated ancient site will contain traces of pottery - seemed like a revelation back then. I bent down to take a closer look, picking up an interesting sherd and rolling it around in my hands, only to toss it aside when a brighter or bigger one caught my eye.

Simply put, this discovery was a revelation, and even more so when I found fragments of fine-wear vessels whose light black brush strokes made even Maria excited.

Since then, I have always kept a keen eye out for finds, especially while exploring the more remoter sites, and thus have unearthed such finds as fragments of bronze, cup marks and even obsidian flakes in addition to scores of interestingly painted sherds.

But I had never seen anything like the amount of sherds scattered around the unexcavated site of the classical era pottery factory at Tsoukalia. Not only was the beach thick with ostrika, many of the chunks were sufficiently large enough to incorporate whole handles and lips. Here are just a few of chunks that I found lying around.

However, despite this wealth of finds, I found the location of Tsoukalia to be a little disappointing. Although initially impressive, on closer inspection the vast array of pottery appeared to be composed almost entirely of coarse wear, with few indications as to which period, ancient or not, they might date from. Also, the beach too was a little uninviting as the prevailing northerly winds had raised the waves and chased a fair amount of rubbish into the bay.

So it was that having clambered about in the sherds for while, exchanging first one then another for a brighter, bigger chunk, I decided to hit the road again, this time bound for the picturesque chapel of Agoi Anargiroi.

The White Route: A to E via Q, Z, and X... OR Alonissos Travelogue part 10

Looking back on my ten days of walking on Alonissos, I am on the whole proud of my little adventures: not only did I cover a hell of a lot of terrain, I did so with the minimum amount of getting lost. Equipped with an accurate map, two independent descriptions of each route and most of all, the patience to study the lay of the land and the position of the sun with some degree of accuracy, I almost always made my way from A to E via the logical progression B then C then D.

The spectacular exception to my otherwise impeccable sense of direction came during the next stage of the white route from Mega Nero to Tsoukalia. On paper this stretch appears impossible to cock-up, not least of all because a sign-posted asphalt road separates the two locations by all of a 30 minute walk. However, on leaving Mega Nero, little did I know that I was about to embark upon an unplanned excursion up a mountain.

In my defence, I was subject to mitigating circumstances: I had set out on this route backwards.

Flashback to the early morning of that day. Andrew sits outside his tent, drinking coffee and studying the map...

... So where do I want to go today?.. Tsoukalia, yes... Oh and here's the walk to Tsoukalia in the guide book, excellent... but wait a minute... this route goes first north to Megali Ammos before taking in Tsoukalia on the way back... I'd much prefer to go the opposite way... I wonder if it is possible to follow the directions from the end of the walk and work back to the beginning and still be able to follow the route?... let's try... [...] ... seems easy enough, all I have to remember is that left is right and right is left... got it. Piece of cake!

And it was... right up until the point when I was directed to walk up a gorge.

I think you may be one step ahead of me here... but let me pull you back a little to walk a ways with me in ignorance so that I can tell you how it all happened.

Like I said, an asphalt road links Mego Nero and Tsoukalia, but the route described in the guide neatly avoids this completely by following a dirt track beginning some metres before the turn off to Tsoukalia, and leading one on a path through a charmingly sheltered patch of pine forest. In fact, this path penetrates so deeply into this patch of woodland that after fifteen minutes or so, the road disappears from sight altogether. It was at this point that I understood that I had to turn right; that is, had I been doing the route in the direction that the authors intended, I would have been directed to turn left at this same point having just emerged from the direction in which I was now about to set out...

...Got it? Not so easy after all, eh?

Anyways, what threw me here was not the cat's cradle of figuring out left from right, this was relatively simple; rather it was the more prosaic yet infinitely more frustrating situation of being confronted with 2 possible rights. Indeed a path did slope down away from me to the right, but on closer inspection, this forked after 10 meters or so leaving me with no indication just which of these two rights I should take.

The intrepid walker will often be faced with this very dilemma, though it should be the aim of all guide books to eliminate the agony of such 'russian roulette' moments. In practice one must call upon all one's resources to make an informed choice: the lay of the land, the position of the sun, moss growing of the northern side of tree-trunks (and other such 'boys' own' fun). However, in those cirumstances where doubt persists, there is no other solution than to choose a path, set out, and seek to confirm or reject your groundless hypothesis by checking the lay of the land against the description of the route.

Choosing the left fork, I wandered down a wide path flanked on one side by pines and on another by an olive grove before arriving at a little track which left the wider path to the left and led me into a shallow gorge. As all this checked out against the description of the route, adjusted, naturally, to compensate for my backwards direction, I felt confident that I was now within a brief walk a Tsoukalia.

Safe in the knowledge that I was well and truly on track, I paused for while in the little gorge to enjoy the silence. Just where I had entered, a handful of olive trees stood in a flat patch of long grass, sheltered from the elements and presumably well watered by what would have been a seasonal stream. Although I must have been a short walk from the road leading down to Tsoukalia, I might as well have been in the middle of nowhere; so quiet it was. Paradoxically perhaps, the sense of peace was made more intense by two hawks which at that moment were circling above me, plaintively screeching and every so often swooping close enough for me to hear their wings cutting through the air.

Perhaps it was the fact that I was caught up in the atmosphere of this little place; perhaps it was the sense that the difficult part was behind me. Whatever it was, when I got up and looked at the map to figure out in which direction I should walk to get to Tsoukalia beach, I did not walk down the gorge as common sense would dictate, but up it. What had momentarily escaped my attention was that when you read route directions backwards, not only should left be read as right, but following a similar topsy-turvy logic, up the gorge should actually be rendered as down it.

Think about it...

So with a spring in my step, a song in my heart and two harbingers of doom screeching and swooping above my head, I set out to ascend the gorge.

Two minutes later I hit a dead end: a dense thicket of thorns blocked the conventional ascent up the bed of the gorge. No worry, I thought as I took to a narrow and precipitous goat track ascending sharply up the right face of the gorge. Within a further twenty metres or so, this petered out, as so often is the case with goat tracks, leaving me to rely solely upon my sense of direction to see me through to Tsoukalia (which, as you will no doubt realise, was situated at an ever increasing distance behind me.)

Things went from bad to worse. The terrain became first steep and rocky, forcing me up ever higher onto the mountain and away from the gorge, then, when I had hit a sufficiently high enough altitude as to impress upon me most forcefully that I was definitely not headed for the coast, I found myself in the midst of a dense thicket of hollyoaks. The sun was pretty high at this point, and I was running desperately low on water too. And to top it all, the hawks were still relentlessly pursuing their quarry high above me. But despite all these set-backs, I remained cheerful: there are precious few opportunities to feel like a hero in this day in age... especially if you are the English teacher in a small provincial German town.

Eventually I broke out of the cover of the hollyoaks to see a little church crowning the ridge at the head of the gorge, which I could now see as a dark gash into the landscape way below me. Checking this against the map, I realised it must be the panagia sto boyno and knowing it to be loacated in the direction of a natural spring, struck out for the little church. After a few moments I came to some residential houses and a dirt road, and with half an hour I was drinking cool clear water in the shade of the little church.

Having quenched my thirst, I took stock of my situation. I still couldn't figure out what had gone wrong down in the gorge, but that mattered less than trying to salvage the walk. A glimpse at the guide revealed the answer: if I were to retrace my steps back along the dirt road, away from the church in the direction of the houses that I had seen, would come to the end of the road and a large property surrounded by olive groves. Arriving at the gate of the yard of this property, I should follow the perimeter wall in search of the familiar red splodges of paint upon boulders that seem to act as way markers throughout the Aegean.

Sure enough, as soon as I left the gate of the house and entered the olive grove, I found a string of way markers which eventually started to lead me back down the mountain. After a short while I entered pine forest again and the path began to get steeper and steeper... and every so often as I glimpsed the sky between the pines I could see the pair of hawks circling, swooping and screeching.

It was a beautiful walk, as usual accompanied by a symphony of sights, sounds, and smells: again the air moving through the trees, again the heady resinous scent of the pines; but this time the kind light of the forest floor and everything punctuated by the mournful screeching of the hawks, whom I was now considering less as harbingers of doom and more as companions on this little adventure.

After a while, I reached the edge of the forest and as is so often the case in dear green Alonissos, the beginning of an olive grove. Here, the ground became ridiculously steep, necessitating my gingerly proceeding crab like, inch by inch down a rugged track. But this was to be the last obstacle. Soon the landscape gave way to gentle tiers of olive groves affording a view of the last leg of the asphalt road down to Tsoukalia.

On hitting the road I heard the sea, which soon revealed itself... as did several hundred thousand pottery sherds.
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