Naxos

37° 04' 08"n
025° 21' 46"e

Naxos was not part of our planned itinerary. When we arrived we headed straight for the excursion offices -- the Dellos boats had been cancelled due to wind, and would have left an hour earlier anyway. Poop.

We made our way back to the pier where the touts lined up to hawk hotels. Not having a place to stay this time, we signed up with one of them. For $20 we got a studio apartment for 1 night and the proprietor drove us there. It wasn't on the beach or anything, but that was OK with us.

Since we only had one day, we headed for the motorbike rental shop right after lunch. Naxos is quite inhabitted and we had a blast riding around the island through all of the little towns and farms.

Our first real stop was at some ruins in the middle of nowhere. Dimitra's Archaic Temple was undergoing reconstruction and there were actually a couple of guys working on it. A short pair of parallel railroad tracks guided two small towers that supported a crane between them. Made you think how they assembled these shrines thousands of years ago if they didn't have these cranes.

Our next stop was going to be some caves, but the road was too rocky for the motorbike, so we turned around. We made our way northeast and ran out of gas just as we passed a gas station. As luck would have it, we were up hill from it, so we coasted back to the station and refueled. Strange how the bike wasn't full when we picked it up.

Back on our way to the north of the island we found an ancient monument whose name escapes us at the moment. Not much to it except for a pair of large statues that were still sitting where they were originally excavated. The statues were multi-thousands of years old and were of humans only about twice as big.

After the statues we found a marble quarry. It was interesting to see how cleaved the rock was. A pile of slag cascaded down the mountain towards the road. After we took some pictures we were anxious to leave -- it was getting quite cold and threatening rain. Besides, this was the third day in the week we spent on a motorbike and our butts were killing us.

On the long journey back to our hotel, we made a wrong turn. No matter, we easily found our way back to the main road. We decided to stop in Naxos town make a call to cancel one night of the hotel we had reserved in Athens. We wandered around a little bit before heading back. About 3 miles before we got to the motorbike shop our bike quit running again. There was no way it was the gas this time. We waited a while and it started again, then it died again. Somehow we made it back to the shop where we complained to an unconcerned rental agent.

The next day we caught the bus back to Naxos town and left our bags in an excursion shop. The first thing we saw was the marble gate of Apollo on the outcropping near the port. It was an easy, short path to get there, but the windy ocean waves sprayed gallons of water across the path at random intervals making it somewhat of a challenge to get there dry.

After we took our pictures of Apollo's Gate, we wandered the quaint streets for a while. We found a shop to buy cans of olives for our friends back home. We found lots of little shops that sold souveniers and art. At the top of the hill in the center of town we found a museum that we didn't feel like paying to go into and a big, yellow church.

After playing in the streets a while we sat down to eat lunch at an outdoor cafe. We made our way to the ferry dock and finally got some pictures of our ferry. We always seemed to board the exact same ferry every time.

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Mick@micktravels.com

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