We escaped Kos after a really tough day in a cafe keeping watch over the sunbathers renting umbrellas and lounge chairs and being served watermelons containing a caustic mixture of watermelon foo-foo drink, paper umbrellas and bendable straws. The final result culminated in one team of sun worshippers wearing the watermelon like a helmet on their heads. They, of course, ordered a third watermelon. That should be one head full of fruit in the morning for them.
We found Leros to be a island just coming around to the idea that tourism should surpass fishing. (On the way to the island, our cellphone, and every other on the boat, receieved an SMS message welcoming us to Turkey. A welcoming country, but we stuck with Greece.) It took us a bit to navigate the town, since there were no signs pointing us towards the town we wanted, the tourist information was closed for lunch, and we hestitated too long on deciding to rent a scooter and they closed for lunch. A taxi driver eventually appeared after we succumbed and settled in for a two hour lunch (good Dolmades! great fava beans in tomato sauce! fine greek salad! toasted homemade bread with oregano and a side of blue cheese butter! fresh cold watermelon! - a minor 15 Euros - all served with cold water! - Win!)
The town is still half fishing village. We walked by a guy delivering huge blocks of ice to a building. Vans and trucks were circling through the villages once a day announcing the arrival of fish on the loud speakers (sort of like one of those old Greek or Italian movies). Fishing boats were all painted in garish combinations of white based primary colors and look exactly like the toy boats you used to have in the bathtub when you were little. Men were sitting around playing backgammon, repairing nets or just plain jabbering on the short stools out on the streets.
And the other half is Greek tourism. Tiny bathing suits on the older men. Lots of kids with pails, doing the age-old dance of moving piles of sand and rocks around. Menus in two languages, but no pictures. Uplighting on the castle fortress on the hill. Yachts in the harbor, but no cruise ships. Rather the most pleasant tourism we’ve run into on the islands… good and low-key. We even heard an older group screaming ‘Opa!’ repeatedly in the late afternoon, and we assume Retsina or Ouzo was involved.
The mix ends up with the owner of the cafe heading out to check on his net in the water holding squid and cooling other perishables for the restaurant and finding out that the pint-sized Greek tourists had opened the net and the peices are floating all around along the edge of the beach. (He wasn’t very pleased.) It ends up with octopus drying on meat hooks in front of the cafes, and folks gutting fish two tables down from where you are having an afternoon lunch. It also ends up with a young local kid with a spear gun swimming among the handful of tourists paddling around in the water. (We couldn’t decide what he might catch, but steered clear enough to make sure it wasn’t us.) It has tourists on motor scooters toting umbrellas, followed by weather-worn locals doubled up on scooters in traditional fishing caps wearing blue and white checkered collared shirts. And it is punctuated by good grilled smells then overripe fish, combined with women and children scrubbing down the road in front of their stores.
The first meal on the island was great, the rest were the standard fare that makes you think the guy should have stuck with fishing and not started terrorizing others with his cooking. Sometimes a nose for fishing isn’t a nose for cooking.
Trying to get off the island was a challenge. Ferries not leaving until the middle of the week, flights full, a power outage when resorting to the Internet, the tourist information office still closed. It is a weird having that ‘you may be trapped here’ feeling when the oldest scooters on the planet, all without mufflers, are running you over in narrow streets that have no sidewalks with gale force winds running off the bay. When it all works out and you get off the island, there is a true moment of relief, joy and belief that the universe isn’t Completely out to get you.
