28 February
2025 – Western Lefkada
Miles
driven today = 18
Total Miles
to date = 1,409
We’ve
stayed in some pretty incredible places on our van travels over the years.
The clifftop lighthouses at Fisterra in Spain
and the Butt of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides spring immediately to mind but I
think today we might just have trumped them all.
We are sat
on the cliffs at Porto Katsiki, just a short distance from the most Southerly
point on Lefkada.
We can hear the waves
on the beach, the water is just impossibly blue and yesterday’s rain is just a
distant memory with almost wall to wall sunshine.
It was a
fairly leisurely start to the day.
We
sat in bed with our morning cuppa and watched the waves as a lone detectorist
scanned the sand for any any treasure uncovered by the storm.
We didn’t
really get to see much of the resort yesterday before the rain set in so we had
a quick explore before departing.
It’s
a tiny place really with just a few guest houses and tavernas, some of which are
in the process of being readied for the holiday season.
Our journey
today might have been less than 20 miles but it still took us at least an hour
to complete.
The roads are deemed to be
wide enough to have a white line down the middle but overhanging trees and
subsiding verges resulted in almost continuous chicanery and through some of
the villages we only scraped past oncoming traffic with an inch to spare
either side.
The last 4km was entirely
single track with vertiginous drop offs but thankfully we didn’t meet anything
coming the other way.
Once parked
up we made our way down to the beach.
Access is
via a crumbling staircase. The rock arch which supports it looks as though it
could collapse at any minute.
We had the
entire beach completely to ourselves.
Shoes and socks were quickly dispensed with.
There was
still quite a heavy surf resulting from yesterday’s storm.
But we
still managed a quick paddle.
You can
just about make out the van in its lofty clifftop perch.
Most
impressive of all, we didn’t see a single scrap of litter.
Back up the
rickety stairs.
At the end
of the carpark is another set of steps leading to a rocky headland but these
are now so badly eroded away that the path has been closed for safety reasons.
But you can
have a peak back along the coast to the North from there.
Here you
can make out Kefalonia, which is the next island in the Ionian chain and was
the setting for Louis de Bernieres’ book “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”, which
was subsequently made into a film starring Nicholas Cage.
I was
pretty chuffed with myself getting the van down here unscathed, only to find a gigantic
8+ metre A Class with a 4 metre trailer already parked here.
I have absolutely no idea how they got round some of the hairpin bends
but they are gone now along with everybody else other than one Italian van at
the far end of the car park.
It’s a bank
holiday weekend in Greece for “Clean Monday” so we think it may get a lot
busier here tomorrow and an earlier start may be in order to avoid meeting
traffic coming the other way as we clamber our way out of here and head for the
other side of the island.
Comments
Post a Comment