Paros

24th & 25th June

Matt and Jodie must've felt pity for us because they changed their plans to take a later ferry to Mykonos so we got to spend most of the day with them. Making sure we didn't waste the day we were up by 10 and met up with them just down the road. Luckily they'd had a couple of days there before us and knew all the cheap spots, so we grabbed breakfast at a bakery and sat at the beach and ate our feta pies. Yum.

With a lot of catching up to do we walked to the small supermarket on the waterfront and picked up a few beers and headed down to the end of a dock and enjoyed the sun and the company. We all headed to a nice restaurant off the main street for a cheap, yet delicious lunch. I had the fresh calamari, while Dan tried the moussaka. Matt and Jodie also introduced me to the local dish "Saganaki", or grilled cheese. I ended up having lots more of this before we left Greece! By mid afternoon we decided that it was swim time and walked back up to the slightly sandy beach. We all went for a bit of a dip and splash before finishing off the beers and heading back up to our hotel for Matt and Jodie to shower and get organised for their ferry.

We said farewell around 4, and while I walked them down to the port, Dan fell asleep at the hotel. I didn't think I'd wake him as I knew how tired I was. I took the time to catch up on some more Internet time and photos until the sun started to spectacularly set over the water.

I woke Dan up and we headed down to the main street for some dinner. We sat on the waters edge and enjoyed a lovely meal. This time I tried the moussaka - it wasn't as nice as Dan's at lunch - and Dan had some pasta. It was quite nice, however it was slightly spoiled for us by the 50+, English, freshly formed couple who thought it was appropriate to feed each other with their fingers and make sexy noises while eating. Yuk.

I slept like a baby that night, and for a full 11 hours. It was nice to have a mattress and pillows.

Our second day we were up and organised quite early, and hit up the bakery for breakfast on our way out. The cheese pies are absolutely awesome. We headed around the corner to the Scooter and Motorbike hire shop, handed over only a small amount of cash and drove out on two 50cc Quad Bikes.

I took the red one, cause it should go faster, and Dan took a yellow one. We were given a pretty good lesson on how to ride them (Basically where the brakes are and how to turn it on) and we were on our way. The map we were given was pretty good, and the main roads did a pretty easy to follow loop of the island.

We headed north first, to a beach I'd read about on the Internet. It was absolutely amazing; the whitest sand, surrounded by mountains, and hardly any people. It's a bit off the main track, so it was good we had the quad bikes. We parked them and went down to the little cove and went for a swim. We stopped for about 45 minutes then it was back on the bikes.

We headed further up the road to a nice viewpoint out over the island and took some more snaps. We got back on the main road and continued to head north some more. We arrived a bit later at the very long golden beach of Santa Maria. We went for another dip here and lazed about for half an hour, but it was long enough for us both to get a little sunburnt. We headed back down to Naoussa, a larger town that we'd passed through and decided that it was a good place for lunch. We parked our bikes back up on the footpath and set off in search of a Souvalaki. We found a nice little place, handed over our 4 euros and headed down to the waterfront where we enjoyed our lunch. After we'd eaten we did a little stroll through the town and checked out the many seafood restaurants lining the waters edge. I liked looking at all the squids that were hanging over rails near the boats drying out in the sun. Dan wouldn't let me touch them.

After lunch we were back on the bikes and heading down the East coast of the island. We decided to make a turn and head up to a village perched high upon one of the central mountains of the island. Our poor little 50cc bikes struggled to make it up some of the hills, and we weren't going that fast, but we eventually made it. We stopped at another little village for a look around, and when we tried to get out on our bikes, my poor little bike didn't get enough of a run up and couldn't get all the way up the hill. Dan had to come and give me a push.

We kept heading south and made quite a few more stops along the way, mainly at beaches for a cool down swim. We spent the better part of the afternoon just zooming along the country roads.. As we were making our way back to Parikia, the town where we were staying, Dan noticed a strange noise coming from his bike, and also realised that his brakes weren't working. We crawled the 20km back to Parikia where we headed back to the shop and they changed Dan's bike over for him.

We spent the rest of the afternoon just cruising around the local area, and as the sun was setting we returned the bikes (We had rented them for 24 hours, but I couldn't see us getting up early to go for a ride so we decided to just give them back!)

On foot we went for more of a walk through the main streets in Parikia. We found lots of little alleyway shopping strips, mainly selling souvenirs and jewellery. We also found a nice looking Greek Orthodox Church which we went in and had a little look away. I really like it, even though it wasn't massive and filled with glittery things, it was just different to the thousands of Catholic churches we've seen.

After we were done we picked up a Souvalaki each from Zorba's and enjoyed them on the beach.

We were back at the hotel around 9, where we packed up our bags before heading off to sleep. We were up and organised the next morning before saying farewell to our host and it was straight off down to the port to jump on our ferry to our next island, Santorini.