Googlee Is Wrong
June 17-24, 2019
Mazz is a hard-working lady, and sometimes (most of the time) she needs a vacation. We had originally planned to go to Italy this week with our Italians, but when we called them to make sure the days were right for the flights we were about to buy, they informed us that they were actually going to host someone else in Rome that week. Fazed but undeterred, we got on the cheap airline websites and looked at which nice places we could visit for the least amount of money. Kefalonia, an island in the Ionian Sea off the western coast of Greece, had direct round trip flights for €75 a person. We bought the tickets without thinking twice.
The first time through that country, we went in shoulder season without a plan, hoping that the recommendations of the locals would guide us where we needed to go. It did, though we were barely able to scratch the surface of all of the places we were advised to visit. The Ionian islands, Kefalonia being the largest, was considered by many locals to be a “must-visit destination,” so we were happy to have the excuse see what it was like for ourselves. Though we toyed with the idea of leaving everything up to fate once again on this trip, a little reconnaissance revealed that even at the last minute we could still score some excellent Airbnbs that were booked out virtually every time except for when we were visiting. We also learned that this week was still in early shoulder season before the big tourist rush, so there wouldn’t be a reliable bus schedule until the week after we left. Renting a car would be a necessity, much to Kirb’s chagrin. Luckily, like everything else we were finding in Kefalonia, a car was very reasonably priced at €120 for the week.
We decided to traverse the island clockwise, staying first in the largest city, Argostoli. We’d found an apartment there with a rooftop deck and hammock that overlooked the city and water for €50 a night. That Monday was one of the most brutal travel days we’d ever endured, as both of our hangover gauges were redlining thanks to a wine festival at the Michelberger Hotel in Berlin the night before. Once we finally arrived to our idyllic deck, neither of us wanted or needed much more in life than to wander into town for gyros and then lay around until that particular day didn’t exist anymore.
With a fresh lease on life the following morning, we set off to explore the southwest corner of the island, stopping to check out the lighthouse of Saint Theodoroi before zig-zagging down dirt paths to find Kalamia Beach. Nestled into a cove with natural caves off the coastline, this would have been a splendid place to relax if there hadn’t been one random, improbably loud Russian man yelling the same phrases in broken English again and again to his niece and nephew. What’s worse, he was doing a Dracula impression, repeating, “Children…of the night!” every few minutes for a good hour or so. Once that awful guy left, the place was everything we could have hoped, with a bar on the beach slinging cold beers, warm water, and what would turn out to be the only soft sand we’d see for the entirety of the trip.
When our host had explained how to find the apartment, she told us that “Googlee” was wrong, and would lead us astray if we used the proper address on our phones (she spelled it this way multiple times, much to our delight). That evening after dinner, we followed Googlee to a market to try and buy a bottle of wine, only to find that it took us to a place that was very much not a market, but instead a house letting rooms. A woman named Natalie came out to see what we were up to in front of her establishment and we showed her the incorrect map, explaining that we were just looking for a place to buy some wine. She excused herself for a moment and went back inside, then reappeared with a bottle of local wine for us as a gift. Googlee may be wrong on Kefalonia, but the hospitality there is alright.
To reach our next destination of Asos, the road took us through mountains which were speckled with small villages and churches with scenic overlooks. It became clear how different Kefalonia was from the other Greek islands we had visited in the east – this island was lush and covered in green forests, while the others were uniformly barren and brown. We followed curving cliff-top roads and then descended sharply along narrow switchbacks from the town of Zola down to the water to a secluded restaurant simply called “the Fisherman’s Hut.” The waiter asked what we wanted and we asked what they had. “Fish. Greek Salad. Fried Potatoes.” We said OK and added some beers to the order, and were served a feast of freshly caught small fish and local veg, directly on the waterfront. On the way back up the tiny winding road, a random horse came to say hello.
Asos is built amphitheatrically around a cove on a peninsula, situated along a tiny strip of land and the hill that surrounds it. There’s one small parking lot at the end of town for all the visiting cars, a handful of flats for rent, and four restaurants by the water to choose from. It is without a doubt one of the most charming places we’ve ever been. Our apartment had a seaside view with a full panoramic balcony that we were able to secure only a week before our trip for €90 a night. Though the beach was rocky, the water was still and warm, and the colored buildings felt like a postcard come to life. Once we were finally able to secure some beach loungers, the rest of the day was spent happily enjoying the hot sun and cold, cheap beers from the corner market.
The northernmost town on the island, Fiskardo, is bustling and touristy, with every shop selling the same thing. None of those things are tank tops that anyone would ever want to wear (Kirb was really looking forward to a new tank top). To get away from the bustle, we made our way around town to the Nicolas Taverna, which looks down on the waterfront from the other side of the cape. Here, we ordered too much food - something that was becoming a common theme eating out - though we never actually meant to do so. This place made it easy to get all of our favorite Greek foods at once: fresh fried squids, giant beans, tzatziki, eggplant, stuffed wine leaves, and other tasty bites. We tried to relax for the rest of the afternoon at the nearby Emplisi Beach but were eventually chased away by an overabundance of wasps and horseflies. The guy slinging beers tried to emphasize that the wasps weren’t problematic by cupping one in his hands in front of us. Impressive, but wrong. Wasps are always a problem.
We found another of our favorite Greek dishes that night back in Asos: grilled squid stuffed with tomato and feta. We traipsed about the harbor and the surrounding streets as the sun went down, taking in the abandoned buildings that were still standing from the massive 1953 earthquake that essentially leveled the island. Now, the crumbing foundations have been completely taken over by greenery and trees. Packs of feral kitties roam the streets. Our panoramic balcony turned out to be a wonderful place to drink wine at sunset.
There are hiking trails that take you from the Asos parking lot up to the ruins of old castles (both Greek and Venetian) that sit atop the peninsula. We read a tip online that if you immediately go off the main trail and make your way up the steep hill, there is a dirt trail that brings you around the side of the peninsula to the base of the ruins. From here, you can do the hike as a nice loop and get picturesque views of the cove and the town below. Wild thyme was growing everywhere here, so we picked some and brought it along to season our eggs for the rest of the trip.
After the sheer beauty and charm of Asos, our final destination Sami felt like kind of a dump. That said, the apartment we rented was plush and freshly renovated, and we were only the third people to ever stay there. We were thrilled to find that the deck had a brand-new BBQ, something we can’t have in our apartment in Berlin. Though the town itself wasn’t anything special, one thing Sami did have going for it was a variety of specialty food shops, including a butcher just around the corner from our place that sold pre-marinated skewers, farm eggs, hand-made sausages, fresh herbed feta, and local wines. We loaded up on all that.
The charcoal we found at the chain grocery store wasn’t briquettes but huge slabs of black carbon that were too stiff to break apart with bare hands. It was windy, and Kirb struggled to get paper lit beneath them. He went back to the store and had someone explain to him which bottle was lighter fluid, then tried again. Though it was supposed to be 93-percent alcohol, it did not seem to be the slightest bit flammable, as it actively wet paper that was already on fire. Kirb went back to the store to buy fire-starters and tried again. This sort of worked, but the massive black clumps refused to stay ignited. After well over an hour and a half of trying to get the fire lit, it finally got hot enough to very slowly cook our food in small, compact batches. We shrugged and hoped it would work out better the next night, because as far as BBQs go, that one sucked and was a frustrating mess. That said, BBQing anything is still inherently fun, even if it takes 3 hours to warm up your dinner.
As one of the most iconic sightseeing attractions in Kefalonia, Melissani Cave can have big lines if you show up at the same time as the tourist busses. Though Googlee told us that the early afternoon window we were attempting to visit the attraction was “very busy,” it was wrong again, and we walked directly down onto one of the boats. Here, a crusty Greek man barked sentence fragments at us while he rowed around the small enclosed cave. The advantage to coming in the mid-afternoon is that the sun is positioned directly above the water, illuminating it to an other-worldly shade of blue. The whole thing lasted about 10-15 minutes, and when we got out of the boat there was a massive line stretching all the way up the tunnel to get in.
Anti Samos beach is considered one of, if not the most beautiful on the island. The vibe here is different though – there are multiple bars offering free loungers that stretch down the entire length of the rocky coastline, and each establishment is pumping a different kind of music. We made our way past the “thumping techno” bar and found a nice place to sit in the “chill beach vibes techno” section, which was fine. Thankfully, none of the bars on that beach had an “overly loud Russian guy doing a Dracula impression” section.
That night, Kirb remembered how to make a fire again (use the small pieces at the bottom of the bag as kindling, dummy) and the BBQ was a smashing success. Peppers stuffed with herbed feta, zucchini and mushrooms grilled with salt, pepper, and local oregano, alongside watermelon and freshly baked bread with crisp local wine. In the background, some sort of religious ceremony was reverberating through the town, with men chanting hymns and marching bands chiming in from time to time. The night before, there had been some sort of rock concert. We read books and played cards on the deck like old people because we can do whatever we want when we’re on vacation and aren’t beholden to investigating every strange sound we hear.
Because we like wine so much, Mazz booked us what ended up being a private wine tour for our final full day in town. We didn’t realize exactly how private the tour was going to be though, in the best possible way. It was just us and a British couple being led around in a van by a local winemaker whose family had owned and tended to the same vineyards for generations. After leading us through one of her olive groves and up the hill to see the growing grapes, she took us back to her house to show us the way her family had been making and storing wine and olive oil for as long as anyone can remember. Though the majority of their grapes are sent to a proper winery, they still make their own batch of wine at the house for their family to enjoy, as well as olive oil stored in giant carved stone receptacles that they sell in bulk to locals. Our guide Julia prepared us a snack of fresh feta, tomatoes, homemade olive oil, and dried oregano, with some of her family’s special tsaousi wine. The way the Greeks eat this snack is to mash up the tomato and feta into a paste with a fork, mix that together with olive oil and herbs, and then dip the bread into it. When you only buy cheap olive oil from the grocery store as we do, you forget how amazing the real thing tastes. This food was a dream, even for Kirb, who doesn’t particularly like raw tomato. We would both eat this every day and never complain.
Next, Julia took us to the local wine co-op where growers from around the region, including her family, combine their harvests into different types of wine. Though all of white wines here are made with robola grapes, you could distinctly tell the difference between wines made with harvests at different elevations or from select yields. We told Julia about the bottle of wine that had been given to us in Argostoli as a gift (the same bottle was also given as a welcoming gift by our host in Sami). She recognized it instantly; it was her uncle’s wine. For the final stop, Julia took us to a newer winery on the southern end of the island called Sarris, which had a tasting balcony overlooking the ocean and a particularly excellent rosé.
We asked Julia which spot in the area she liked best for eating out, and she told us that when Greeks go to restaurants they want meat. She recommended a place called Robolis Taverna in the small mountain town Poulata, 15 minutes from where we were staying. Again, Googlee was wrong, listing the place as “Rambolis” instead of its actual name, but we figured it out nonetheless, as there wasn’t a whole lot going on in Poulata. This restaurant was basically a patio in front of someone’s house, and once you ordered from the nice woman who didn’t speak any English, you could see the lone cook inside pull out an entire half of an animal from the meat locker and hack off the selected cut on his massive cutting block. Again, we accidentally ordered twice as much food as we needed and ate until we were immobile.
Our host Georgio owned the whole building we were staying in. Beneath us was an apartment where his mother lived, and the bottom floor was a café he manned that was always packed with surly-looking senior citizens. He invited us down for a coffee on our way out, and we were soon enthralled by his tales. He explained that there was no actual crime on the island of Kefalonia, but it is full of white-collar crime. It is illegal to smoke indoors and gamble, and so those rules are posted on the walls of his establishment, which is inhabited solely with old men chain smoking and gambling. He told us of a job he turned down in the middle of a mountain when he was 19 that would have paid $5000 a day; how Kefalonian priests drink and smoke and do whatever they want; about the bloody history between the Greeks, Italians, and Germans on the island during WWII. This guy was the perfect kind of character, and we wished we would have spent more time in his old man dive bar during our stay in Sami instead of just the very last bit.
With an evening flight back to Berlin, we had just enough time for one final excursion, so we drove our tiny rental car up and up and up to the top of Mount Ainos, a Greek National Park. Not sure exactly where we were going or what we were doing, we walked down a dirt road that seemed to be going to the peak, until all of a sudden it was going down instead. There were some trucks parked randomly on the side of the road, and a single guy sitting on some rocks near them. He told us that if you climbed this inconspicuous rock face, there was a trail that took you up to the top of the mountain. We made our way through the pine forest to the craggy peak to find that we were essentially standing inside of a cloud, with only glimpses of the sea and towns below. It was lovely nonetheless. As we made our way back to the car, we explained to several other hikers how to find their way to the peak. One woman, upon hearing of the unmarked rock face that signaled the trailhead, replied simply: “How very Greek.”