That time we took a boat to Greece

Last weekend we took a boat to Greece. A ferry, in fact. We left our house a little before 7am and got on the subway. That got us to the bus station where we asked half a dozen people in succession where to get the bus to Çesme. They'd each point us in roughly the same direction, where we'd head until we started feeling unsure again and asked someone else. I aspire to a level of Turkish where I can feel confident after one person's directions.

So we hop on the bus; it's about an hour to Çeşme, which is a peninsula in the Agean. From there we got on the 9am ferry, which was the "maller one but still sat hundreds of people. Our ferry took a little over half an hour; there's a bigger/faster/more expensive one that's 20 minutes. So, yes, you can take a ferry from Turkey to Greece in 20 minutes. (From Chios you can take another ferry to Athens that takes about 8 hours. Stay tuned; we may do this in June after school is out, in the style of last spring's SF -> Portland train trip. Slow but deeply tangible modes of transport so Earle can literally feel the distance between him and school...)

There's a line at immigration on other side, but once you pass through the doors, you're in beautiful downtown Chios town, where the waterfront is lined with restaurants and rental car spots. Here's the main town pictured from a dock across the harbor.




Day 1 was spent in town. We started with greek donuts at a tiny cafe. Greek donuts are smaller and crispier than, say, Krispy Kreme; a "serving" at one of these restaurants (which we shared) was 7 donuts, each about the width of a baseball, either dusted with cinnamon and sugar or topped with chocolate sauce.


We then wandered around town for a bit and had some local coffee. We learned that this part of Greece and our part of Turkey are very, very similar. For example: Earle ordered a "Greek coffee" off the menu; it was literally just Turkish coffee (though bigger). We saw the similarity of cuisine throughout (in fact, I recently had a Turkish-style donut here much the same as those pictures); of course the landscape is quite similar as well.



We had late lunch at a small restaurant with a set menu. I'm led to believe this was typical Chios cuisine; it being an island, lots of seafood. Also tomatoes, onions, feta, olive oil. That's a meat pie cut off at the top there, too. The power went out halfway through the meal but everyone carried on as though nothing had happened, except that one guy at another table turned music on from his phone and turned it up for all to hear.

Chios totally closes down in the afternoons. I'm not sure what the Greek word is for 'siesta', but that was what was happening from around 3pm to maybe 7pm or so. At that point we'd pretty much done the main town, so after wandering for a bit we went back to our hotel. We ventured out to talk to a rental car place about the next day, some sunset cocktails by the water (below), dinner, and called it a night.




The next day, we had more donuts for breakfast (chocolate this time) and another sweet pastry with cinnamon and sugar; that seems to be the default breakfast pastry flavor. Then we rented a car and started driving around town. You can see our whole course in the map above. It took us many hours to get anywhere Google Maps said was 45 minutes because we kept stopping to check out views. Chios is just an island of mountains, so every view is pretty great:

Here's Earle waving from a (deserted) church. Chios Town is on the coast on the left side.

It's easy to get distracted by the clouds and miss the tiny town pictured here.

Then we continued on to the Volcanic Beach in the southeast. This picture looks northeast back toward Chios Town.

Earle is really good at skipping stones, and the Volcanic Beach stones are perfect for skipping.

There were rocks, so I had to climb them.

THEN we continued on to the Mastic Museum, because why not? Mastic, which I knew nothing about before this trip, is tree resin that basically only grows in Chios. They've tried moving the trees elsewhere; it just doesn't work. Mastic is used in cooking and traditional medicine; it was also a popular chewing gum for awhile (this post's linguistic fun fact, since you know there's gotta be at least one: "mastic" comes from the same root as "masticate").

Earle inspects a mastic tree; September and October are harvest season.

You can see big and small droplets of mastic coming off this tree. It's quite a process to get it from here to usable condition, traditionally involving thousands of hours of labor in gathering, sifting and sorting, and cleaning.

The Mastic Museum somehow ended up with one of the most beautiful mountaintops in Chios. A truly stunning view.

Apparently we hadn't gotten enough of the views because when we continued on, we decided at every juncture to take what looked more like the "scenic route". We'd see if Google Maps had an alternate route option that took us up a mountain or by the water, and we took that. It started out well...

Going along the "scenic route". You can see the scenic route continuing as what appears to be a dirt road around this bend...

.....And indeed it was quite a dirt road. Actually, you can see where we ended up turning around, when this road goes right and becomes a very steep dirt road up this hill. I still have visions of what would have happened if we'd tried to take that turn and slid backwards into the water.

Here is how we feel about this dirt road.

These rocks were the only things preventing us from tumbling into the water. But such beautiful rocks!!

Anyway, eventually we got off what we'd named the "scenic route" and onto the one through the mountains. but as you can see from the pictures below, every route in Chios is the scenic route.

See? The mountain routes are just as scenic. Here you can see Turkey across the water in the distance. Also, goats.

This is where we were trying to get, anyway. Behind us is a "town" that is exactly 7 restaurants and, as far as I can tell, nothing else. Pretty picturesque.

So that was our Chios weekend! We took a boat back home at 6pm, used our very poor Turkish to eventually find a bus back to Izmir, and were home before 9. I'm looking forward to taking visitors here when this visa stuff gets sorted and we can have visitors.