Day 125: Monday 21 July – A Long Way To The Supermarket, by Ken

At 08:00 I walked down to the beach to reserve two loungers. Surprisingly, nearly all had towels on them but only two of the loungers were occupied. It seemed the towels had been there all night. I managed to find two on the second row of the grid and left our towels there.

Immediately after breakfast we phoned Harry to find out how Ziggy’s visit to see Duncan Graham had gone. Duncan is a dermatology specialist and Ziggy’s paws had been irritating her since her supply of Nizoral ran out and couldn’t be replaced because the drug had been withdrawn from the market. Harry told us that Ziggy had a yeast infection in her paws and ears and had been prescribed a Nizoral substitute that should clear up the problem. She has to go back in a month for a check up. Ziggy also has cat fleas but Duncan doesn’t think they have come from Kobe or Chewy.

Mabel AT Camping Portoelea

We were running low on cash and needed some supplies from a supermarket. I drove us the 9km to Vourvouroú, a small town on the coast north of our camping ground. We drove the length of the town, it was a mix of hotels, holiday homes and tavernas. We found two small supermarkets and no ATM. It had been a long while since anyone had accepted a debit card and we didn’t bother checking out the supermarkets in what seems to be a cash only economy.

There was no option but to head south to Sarti which was 30km from Vourvouroú. That was annoying, but it was another stunning day, the road followed the coast all the way to Sarti giving us views of the Mount Athos with 2,000 metre peak of the mountain itself visible in the haze at the tip of the peninsula to our east.

Sarti

Sarti was a complete contrast to sleepy Vourvouroú, its narrow streets were bristling with tourist shops and eating places with some of the latter overflowing into streets, completely blocking them. We parked Smarty and set off in search of an ATM. We walked the length of the town’s main street without any luck. We discovered that Sarti is where Serbians take their summer holidays judging by the number of cars with Serbian plates. There were also quite a few from Hungary and one from Macedonia. It seemed that this part of northern Greece had become eastern Europe’s playground.

Sarti Street

It took quite a while before we found two ATMs side by side and withdrew enough Euros to tide us over until we need Turkish Lira later in the week. Jane was keen to have a poddle round some of the shops, I wasn’t, and we agreed to meet back at Smarty. I walked along a path at the back of the beach and was very impressed by the bars and restaurants with expensive looking fit-outs. The beach was wide with lots of umbrellas and loungers, it wasn’t particularly busy.

Jane In Poddling Mode

Baker and His Wares On The Beach At Sarti

Mount Athos From Sarti Beach

We took Smarty to a Carrefour supermarket we had spotted during our search for an ATM. It was the worst designed supermarket we had ever seen. The unsurfaced, potholed and dusty, car park was also the unloading space for trucks. There were no warehouse facilities and pallets were being wheeled in through the main doors and left by the checkouts. Inside was a revelation, the supermarket was on two floors and we had to take a lift down to get cheese, fruit and veg. Back upstairs there was just one checkout operating creating a long queue. A loud announcement asked for a car to be moved to enable a truck to reverse up to the doors and unload. There were a lot of men in the supermarket speaking an eastern European language, we assumed it was Serbian. They were having the same problem as us trying to interpret the Greek labels on goods. I hoped the large tub of Greek yoghurt I thought I had bought was indeed yoghurt, there was no way I could tell from the label. Last week in Sikia I had a similar experience being very relieved that the tub with a stick illustration of a man, possibly holding a shepherd’s crook, standing under a tree contained yoghurt.

Fishing Boat Moored North Of Sarti

We headed back to Zografou stopping to buy a jar of honey from a roadside stall. 

Honey Seller

We also stopped at a memorial I had spotted earlier. The large white monolith had two fighter jets on it. There was a plaque bearing what I thought were the names of three men and the date 1.2.1995. Later I used the camping ground's wi-fi to see if I could find more about the monument. There was nothing about an accident in 1995 but on August 26, 2010 two Hellenic Air Forces  F-16s collided in mid air during a training exercise. The aircraft on the memorial could be F-16s, but they are single seaters and, in any case, the dates don't match.

Memorial

By the time we got back to Mabel we had driven 70 kilometres and our trip to the supermarket had taken three hours.

After lunch of bread, cheese and salami we spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach. Our towels were no longer where we had left them having been dumped on an adjacent lounger. I reciprocated by removing a towel from one of the two loungers I had originally reserved and dumped it on the other. It was a bit much really to have expected loungers to have been kept for us all morning, but it appeared that’s what everyone else was doing.

I spent the afternoon reading. Jane followed suit but also went for a swim. At the end of the afternoon I sent an email to TomTom repeating my request for a refund of the AU$130 I had paid for the second Europe Camper map I had never been able to download and rejecting their offer of 1 year’s Free Live Services.

Back at Mabel we spent a very pleasant evening watching Bulgaria go by. Nearby a woman we had christened Mrs Packmore was very busy in what looked like an adjunct to a circus tent. Yesterday, whenever I saw her she was never still baying herself on chores. Today was the same, she moved around the tent obsessively sweeping the floor, before moving on to clean bowls, then she rearranged furniture before returning to do more sweeping. 

Mrs Packmore (Left)

Two young Bulgarian women, one carrying a baby, the other a small dog stopped and asked how we travelled with Smarty. We asked why everyone in the camping ground seemed to be Bulgarian, they explained the manager was Bulgarian and it only took a few hours to drive to the camping ground for most of them. It was much closer than the Black Sea which was dirty. Later an older woman asked about if one of us drives Mabel, the other Smarty. It was the same question the other women had asked, the three of them must have talked about it together. The woman asked where we were going next. We explained Turkey and then Bulgaria. That generated an intake of breath with the warning "Be careful, they lie to you there". We interpreted that as some Bulgarians are not trustworthy.

TheWomen That Asked How Smarty Gets About

Our dinner was the remainder of Jane's salmon and rice dish preceded by a baked Feta starter.