It’s a Small World

Our next harbor was on Chalki, but when you pronounce it the c is silent. A friendly boat-full of Poles were docked beside us. It’s always fun to chatter with the other folks in port. Most are European, with a very few other Americans. Chalki was different than anything else we had seen. The houses didn’t have flat roofs and they were a wide variety of colors. And the water! My word, I thought we had seen gorgeous water already, but this was next level. No questions asked, I was going straight to the beach. And so it was decided that the guys would hike up a hill to a castle of sort and we’d have a girls party at the beach. We loaded up with snacks, snorkel gear and baby stuff and headed off down the rocky streets and paths to the beach. It was a pretty tiny area, and we weren’t the only ones inspired to go, but we got ourselves a little patch of rocky sand and spread out. This is Europe all right. A changing room would have been a total waste of good lumber there. You change where you are, and chatter away the whole time. Vaguely unnerving, but also quite hilarious for us New World girls. For better or worse, we had to have been almost the only people under 60 there.

Avril and I hit the water with our snorkels and proceeded to swim and explore. There wasn’t anything so spectacular, but seeing the sea floor is always interesting. There were sea urchins with the longest needles I’d ever seen, a needle nose fish, a flounder, an eel, and then lots of little boring fish, bless their hearts. Kindi took a 2 hr nap, Avril harvested a huge bag of sea salt, and I messed around in the rocks. A Croatian TV company came roaring up in between and filmed a snorkeling couple. Filming always looks a teeny dippy.

We sauntered back to the boat in time to cook supper and have a lazy evening. Some walked around town, others, like yours truly, was just kinda a bum.

After a good night’s rest for 70% of us, we once again cast off, this time headed to Alimia. Our Polish friends waved us off, and shouted things like, “we will meet again!” They were very startled at our cobbled together crew and wondered how it could ever work, with some being strangers. We assured them it did, in fact, we were flourishing.

Alimia is a small uninhabited island that was occupied by Italian Troops during WW2. It was a German Submarine Base as well, and there are still some tumbledown barracks on the island. In one of the barracks there are some amazing pictures/graffiti on the walls. That guy was a very talented artist! There were some of the Bavarian countryside, some comic style ones with soldiers hugging mermaids, toasting with mugs of beer and stuff.

Alimia has a shipwreck that we snorkeled around, a castle to climb up to and an ancient church with lots of icons and a little burning lantern. I snorkeled for an hour or so, then explored some of the barracks. Fascinating stuff, and sorta creepy when your only company is sea urchins or scruffy little goats with curly horns. I got myself all nervous imagining that I’d see an octopus swimming below me out in the water. Seems horrible gross somehow. I hate octopuses.

Salty and happy, we’re now on our way to Rhodes, where we plan to spend the next two nights. We just passed over another shipwreck, well, not quite over but way too close for comfort. Heath circled it a few times so we could get a good look. Obviously we’re entering civilization, cause the boat traffic has really picked up and in the distance we can see an enormous cruise ship. No thanks! Give me our little boat any day over that!

As a point of interest, we saw a few clouds in the sky today. That’s pretty much a first!